The Meaning of Nostalgia

[Article revised on 24 March 2020.]

Source: Wikicommons

Nostalgia is sentimentality for the past, typically for a particular period or place with positive associations, but sometimes also for the past in general, ‘the good old days of yore’.

At the end of André Brink’s novel, An Instant in the Wind, Adam says, ‘The land which happened inside us no one can take away from us again, not even ourselves.’ Nostalgia combines the sadness of loss with the joy or consolation that the loss is not complete, nor ever can be. Mortal though we are, whatever little life we have snared from the legions of death is forever ours.

‘Nostalgia’ is a portmanteau neologism coined in 1688 by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, from the Greek nóstos [homecoming] and álgos [pain, ache]. Nóstos is, of course, the overarching theme of Homer’s Odyssey, in which, in the aftermath of the Trojan War, Odysseus strives to return to Penelope and Telemachus and his native Ithaca.

In Virgil’s Æneid, Æneas, another survivor of the Trojan War and an ancestor of Romulus and Remus, gazes upon a Carthaginian mural depicting battles of the Trojan War. Mourning the loss of his Trojan kin, he cries out, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt: ‘These are the tears of things and mortal things touch the mind.’

And it’s not just the Greeks and the Trojans. In the Biblical Psalms, the Jewish people from their Babylonian captivity lament the loss of their homeland, in verses made famous by Boney M:

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down/ Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

Hofer coined ‘nostalgia’ to refer to the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries fighting in foreign lowlands. Military physicians attributed this homesickness, also known as Schweizerheimweh or mal du suisse, to ear and brain damage from the constant clanging of cowbells. Recognized symptoms included pining for Alpine landscapes, fainting, fever, and even, in extremis, death. In the Dictionnaire de musique, Jean-Jacques Rousseau claims that Swiss mercenaries were forbidden from singing their Swiss songs so as not to aggravate their nostalgia.

Today, nostalgia is no longer looked upon as a mental disorder, but as a natural, common, and even positive emotion, a vehicle for travelling beyond the suffocating confines of time and space. Bouts of nostalgia are often prompted by thoughts about the past; particular places and objects; feelings of loneliness, disconnectedness, or meaninglessness; and repeated sounds, smells, tastes, textures, and times of year.

When I was a child, my English sheepdog Oscar got runover by a tractor and had to be put to sleep. Apart from the memories, all I kept from him was a tuft of his fur. Like the toys and books of our childhood, or our childhood home or bedroom, this tuft of fur became a sort of time portal, which, for many years, helped me to reminisce about Oscar.

I say ‘help’ because nostalgia does have an unexpected number of adaptive functions. Our everyday is humdrum, often even absurd. Nostalgia can lend us much-needed context, perspective, and direction, reminding and reassuring us that our life (and that of others) is not as banal as it may seem, that it is rooted in a narrative, and that there have been, and will once again be, meaningful moments and experiences.

No surprise, then, that nostalgia is more pronounced in uncertain times and times of transition or change. According to one study, it is also more common on cold days or in cold rooms, and makes us feel warmer!

In that much, nostalgia serves a similar function to anticipation, which can be defined as enthusiasm and excitement for some expected or hoped-for positive event. The hauntings of times gone by, and the imaginings of times to come, strengthen us in lesser times.

It’s a strange thing: the memory of a scene from the distant past, haunted by people who have grown up or grown old or are no more, doing things that are no longer done in a world that no longer exists. And yet it all seems so vivid in our minds that we can still see the glint in their eyes or the twitch at the corner of their mouths. Sometimes we even say their names under our breath as if that could magically bring them back to us.

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Nostalgia is nothing if not paradoxical. In supplying us with substance and texture, it also reminds us of their lack and, in the reminding, moves us to compensation. Unfortunately, this compensation often takes the form of spending, and marketers exploit nostalgia to sell us everything from music and clothes to cars and houses.

It could be argued that nostalgia is a form of self-deception in that it invariably involves distortion and idealization of the past, not least because the bad or boring bits are erased from our memory, leaving only the peak experiences. The Romans had a tag for the phenomenon that psychologists have come to call ‘rosy retrospection’: memoria præteritorum bonorum, ‘the past is always well remembered’.

If overindulged, nostalgia can give rise to a utopia that never existed and never can exist, but that is pursued at all costs, sapping all life and joy and potential from the present. For many people, paradise is not so much a place to go to as the place (they think) they came from.

Nostalgia can be fruitfully compared with a number of similar or related concepts, including saudade, mono no aware, wabi-sabi, and Sehnsucht.

Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word for the love and longing for someone or something that has been lost and may never be regained. It is the desolate incompleteness or wistful dreaminess that can be felt even in the presence of its object, when that presence is threatened or incomplete—as, for example, in the famous final scene of Cinema Paradiso. The rise of saudade coincided with the decline of Portugal and the yen for its imperial heyday, a yen so strong as to have been written into the national anthem: Levantai hoje de novo o esplendor de Portugal [‘Let us once again lift up the splendour of Portugal’].

An epitome of mono no aware is the annual blossoming of cherry trees. The literal translation, from Japanese, of mono no aware is ‘the pathos of things’. Coined in the eighteenth century by Motoori Norinaga for his literary criticism of the Tale of Genjii, it refers to a heightened consciousness of the transience of things coupled with an acute appreciation of their ephemeral beauty and a gentle sadness or wistfulness at their passing—and, by extension, at the realization, reminder, or truth that all things must pass. Although beauty itself is eternal in its recurrence, its particular manifestations are unique insofar as they, and we the observer, cannot be preserved or replicated.

Related to mono no aware is wabi-sabi, an æsthetic of impermanence and imperfection rooted in Zen Buddhism. Wabi-sabi calls upon the acceptance and espousal of transience and inadequacy to foster a sense of serene melancholy and spiritual longing, and, with it, liberation from the material and mundane distractions of everyday life. Hagi pots with their pockmarked surfaces, cracked glaze, and signature chip are an embodiment of wabi-sabi. With age, the pots take on deeper tones and become even more fragile and unique. Objects in our everyday lives that can be wabi-sabi include stone buildings, wooden floorboards, leather goods, books, and clothes.

Sehnsucht is German for ‘longing’ or ‘craving’. It is dissatisfaction with an imperfect reality paired with the yearning for an ideal that comes to seem more real than the reality itself, as in the final lines of Walt Whitman’s Song of the Universal:

Is it a dream?/ Nay, but the lack of it the dream/ And, failing it, life’s lore and wealth a dream/ And all the world a dream.

CS Lewis called Sehnsucht ‘the inconsolable longing in the heart for we know not what’. In the Pilgrim’s Regress, he describes the feeling as: ‘that unnameable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of the The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.’

Lewis redefines this feeling as ‘joy’, which he understands as ‘an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction’. The paradox of ‘joy’ arises from the self-defeating nature of human desire, which might be thought of as nothing more than a desire for desire, a longing for longing.

In The Weight of Glory, Lewis illustrates this from the age-old quest for beauty:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.

Neel Burton is author of Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions and other books.