Now you’re telling me
You’re not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
— Joan Baez, “Diamonds and Rust”
I
In the autumn of 2018, I received from an estranged family member in Vienna some documents once belonging to my great-grandmother, Anna, who had fled Austria in 1938 after the Anschluss. Sifting through what were mostly letters that Anna had written to her brother, Max, and old photographs, I was often on the verge of tears. It was not simply the tragedy of Anna’s displacement, of the loved ones never to be seen again, of abstracted trauma made palpable again. It was stranger than that. They were bittersweet tears.
I would turn over a photo of Max, who was already dead when Anna wrote most of those letters, though she didn’t know it. A headshot, taken at any old photography studio for use in a passport or some other official documentation. But the occasion of the photograph — the still air in the studio, the smell of the white tarp pulled down for a backdrop, the slight constriction of the lapels against the chest, crimping the necktie, the stress, perhaps, of needing this document urgently, of being under the bureaucratic thumb, of feeling one’s collar grow ever tighter with each passing day, of realizing history is happening to one, now — came flooding back to me. Flooding back.
Max, my great-great-uncle. Professional headshot likely for an identity document. (c. 1935)
An absurdity, but not an anomaly. This moment had nothing to do with me properly speaking. And intellectually I not only knew but counted on this fact. And yet my attempt at contemplating something as banal as a photograph was tinctured by this push backwards; that is, by nostalgia. I longed to return to that moment, to Max. But I had him there, in my hand, in a square of photographic paper nearly one hundred years old, as much and as close I had ever had him, or ever will. Return where? Return how?
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s narrator, expressing what it means in truth to live without the eternal recurrence of events, writes that “everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine.” He admits to feeling nostalgic while perusing old portraits of Hitler, at whose hands several of his family members perished, because the images returned him to his childhood. He was peering into the “profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.” But it is in this world that we live and breathe; and it is here that we ask the past to speak to us, here that we read what is called time by writing what is called history upon the traces of its passage. Kundera forgot to add that in this world, in addition to everything being permitted, nothing is understood. We see the crimp in an old tie, long ago obliterated, and weep for not having fixed it.
***
What is nostalgia? We know it when we feel it, that pang, that sweet-sadness — nostos algos, “homecoming sorrow.” It sounds antique but was coined in the 1680s by an Alsatian-Swiss medical student at the University of Basel to describe something felt by soldiers who had ventured far away from their homelands. He was naming a medical condition. It seems significant that the pain experienced was not for home itself, but for the act of returning home — the ritual of going back, perhaps a little changed, perhaps a lot, to the place where one began. Homecoming, though, is not just about going back: it’s about being received, being welcomed, by the people who stayed behind and the place that didn’t change at all (or if it did, then much less in comparison). If everyone and everything changed in equal proportion, there would be no pain. Or it would be very different.
This is not where the confusion lies. Johannes Hofer, the student who named our common malady, referred specifically to a spatial relation. “Nostalgia describes the melancholy that originates from the desire to return to one’s homeland,” he wrote in reference to the Swiss mercenaries who had been sent to Gaul. The return would have been quite literal — a prolonged displacement from Point B back to Point A. The soldier straps his boots and marches on to lands unknown. There, hungry, sleep-deprived, gangrenous, surrounded by rough strangers and far away from home, he yearns to go back. “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home,” Darl says in As I Lay Dying. That could have been anybody from any time in the human epoch. It could have been the “lord” in the “Wife’s Lament,” an Old English poem that is at least 1,000 years old. The titular wife, thinking mournfully of her husband who “departed from his people / over tossing waves,” imagines his nostalgia for their shared homeland:
I believe my lord sits
by a stony storm-beaten cliff,
that water-tossed my weary friend
sits in a desolate home. He must suffer
much in his mind, remembering too often
a happier place. Woe unto him
who languishing waits for a loved one.
Home is a place, nostalgia, the sad miles that separate a person from it.
Partly, but not entirely: what about time? What of beginnings and endings, rather than heres and theres. Spatial separation on its own is necessary but insufficient: waiting in line at the grocery store across town, I may want more than anything to be home; but I am not nostalgic for it.
Sonnet 30:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
We pile new wail onto old woe while conjuring the past and fingering the painful gulf which separates us from it — this is the algos. Aptly, C. K. Scott Montcrieff invoked Shakespeare when titling his translation of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. That novel is both the study and performance of nostalgia as a temporal phenomenon. The moments of “involuntary memory” which punctuate the narrative — the fragrant madeleine, the wobbly cobblestone — all index lost sensations and spaces. And, with perfect delicacy, the novel heaps its own narrative with an additional layer of nostalgia when, in the last volume, we come to understand that the tale we have been reading is the product of its own final moments, when the narrator discovers his vocation as a novelist. The reader becomes nostalgic for a time before he understood all this — for the early moments on the subway or in cafés or in the dim intervals before sleep when he was first brought into this fictive world of which he is now a veteran. “Three years, many pauses, copies lost on planes, Liverpool, Stockholm, New York, Berlin, Philadelphia, Edinburgh, Paris (where I saw his bed),” the critic David Hering wrote of finishing Proust’s masterwork. “You don’t read it, you live it.” You live the sorrow of time lost, and the effort to find it again.
Is the home to which we return a place or a time? The answer is neither. “Home” is a red herring. Nostos is a mistaken coinage. Hoffer needed a Greek term for an already extant German one, Heimweh, in order to legitimize it as a medical concept within the academy. As Hoffer knew, the francophone Swiss mercenaries already had a term for Heimweh in their own language: mal du pays. People still say this. And in English, of course, we have our own rendering. Hoffer meant “homesickness,” which the English speaker knows to be different from nostalgia. Homesickness, the desire to be back where one is safe and comfortable. As a child in summer camp, tossing and turning on my lumpy cot, I was often homesick for my house back in Montréal, but I was never nostalgic for it.
In truth Nostalgia has little to do with “home”; any connections are incidental. What matters in “homecoming” is the notion of return, or recurrence. A thing must happen, or must be imagined to happen, twice. And time must intervene: there can be no nostalgia in simultaneity. The intervention of time is important, because time produces the impasse that gives this pang its potency. Nostalgia asserts what we already know: nothing truly happens twice. First as tragedy then as farce. Is there a more nostalgic line in all of Western thought? Remembering, going back, retreading the same ground: each of these is a farce in the generic sense of the term — ridiculous, absurd, extravagant, improbable, nonsensical. Time’s arrow only points one way. And the entropy it produces cannot be reversed. Nostalgia is a limped defense mechanism against the ruthlessness of time’s passage.
Nostalgia is always tragic, always suffused with the helplessness attendant to exerting great, futile effort. You are always, in one way or another, returning to loss. Odysseus may regain his queen and his kingdom, but he has lost ten years to wandering, and another ten to war. And nostalgia’s strange tragedy is tinctured with the loss of innocence as well as time. Being in the world brings forth knowledge, and knowledge a certain kind of mental entropy. Sooner or later, one’s hand is forced, one knows too much, a break must be made. One cannot return to ignorance. One cannot unknow. One comes into the world complicit but ignorant. Nostalgia is longing for a time before we understand our own guilt, our own impurity. Adam and Eve ate of the tree because knowledge tempted them – it was the knowing that foredoomed the first man and woman to eat of its fruit and to wish, while chewing, that they had never reached for it.
Pandora’s box is being opened all the time, day-by-day, minute-by-minute, as we lie awake at night beneath once-foreign roofs with a sinking feeling in our stomachs feeling the sand as it runs and runs and runs through our fingers.
II
There’s the past, and then there’s the past we remember. They aren’t the same. Our ugly American Right is nostalgic for an America that never existed: Make America Great Again — the late-night talkshow hosts love to send their comedian-correspondents into the heartland to ask naive passersby when, exactly, America was last great. Before desegregation? Before women had the vote? Before emancipation? Some brazenly own their racism and their sexism on camera. But most stutter and squirm in the trap. The exercise gets a laugh from the self-satisfied among us, but it also misses the point. The slogan gestures towards an idea, a floating fantasy unmoored from any particular time and place — and irresistible for that reason. In the past, America was always great, because in the past things were always finer and purer. As a form of emotional currency, nostalgia is cheap. For an artist or for a politician, my tears and my indignation come at a pretty penny. But my longing for the good old days? You can have it for a song.
We’re at risk, now, of conceding that there are two strains of nostalgia: the kind that ties us to our “lived experiences,” and the kind that ties us to our illusions. But are they meaningfully different? Is there really a past as such, outside of our representation? I recall my childhood. I recall sitting on a stone bench at the top of Mount Washington, my bowl cut tossed across my forehead by the wind, cuddled in the soft cotton of a hand-me-down teal sweatshirt (my hands disappear above the cuffs), hugging my knees and smiling beside my two older brothers. Don’t I? Or do I recall the framed photograph that sits on a shelf in my parents’ living room? Is there any difference?
III
Nostalgia doesn’t just warp the past, it also shapes the future. “You can suffer nostalgia in the presence of the beloved if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more,” Milan Kundera wrote. Every such experience is doubled in this way: the sharp awareness that one cannot return implicitly warns that the present will soon be similarly lost.
And just as the past is never remembered perfectly, the present is not a thing we experience, not a concrete reality, but the idea of a reality that is constantly slipping away from us. W. G. Sebald understood this. Take the peregrinations of his narratological stand-in through Suffolk County, England, in The Rings of Saturn. The county, which flourished through prosperous incarnations as a fishery hub, a country getaway for industrialists, and a weapons research site is, by the end of the twentieth century, a husk. The coastline and the inland landscapes are dotted by rubble and ruin: medieval towers, crumbling manors, rusted railways, and the indecipherable ruin of centuries. The novel is a record of the narrator’s confrontation with this decay. Whether he stumbles upon an old tombstone or the conspicuous emptiness of a centuries-old town, Sebald experiences these features of the landscape as historical access. The path he follows is nostalgic by nature, consisting of a cascading series of digressions that collectively breathe the past of Suffolk county into the silent slumber of its present atrophy.
Like his intellectual forebears of the Romantic era, Sebald understood the ruin and the wreck to provide the perfect condensation of nostalgia’s parasitic relationship with time. In a way we project ourselves onto the old stones, willing them to whisper of the time before dilapidation, sensing in ourselves the same capacity for decay. We will be dust, too.
Sebald broods while roaming the corridors of Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk, and we rhyme with his melancholic musings. The manor is no longer what it was. As he wanders through the dilapidation of Somerleyton, which once struck the visitor “as an oriental palace in a fairy tale,” Sebald notes that “the glass-covered walks and the palm house, whose lofty dome used once to light up the nights, were burnt out in 1913 after a gas explosion and subsequently demolished.” He adds: “[One cannot] readily say which decade or century it is, for many ages are superimposed here and coexist.” Its lost grandeur, for Sebald, is sedimented irrevocably even in its present desolation. The story of Somerleyton is the story of the entire region of Suffolk. Proto-capitalism and industrial capitalism have done their violence to this country. The wild swings of boom and bust are recorded there.The whipping winds of contingency scar the land. Aren’t people like this, too?
Sebald tries to heave the novel out of an end-of-history gloom. If we were to rewrite The Rings of Saturn as a Romantic-era travelog, we might look at its curious ruins as merely the necessary civilizational decay that begets rebirth on History’s path to progress. Hegelian optimism might portend a dialectical renaissance from the ash of decay. Sebald has none of that — neither do we.
In the seventeenth century, nostalgia was something to be cured — for example, with opium, leeches, promenades in the mountains. Now it spices familiar films, pop songs, bestsellers, and the starter packs and moody montages that clutter social media. Poetry does the job best, though. We invented verse as a device for memory-keeping. When Homer sang to his assemblies, before the written word, he was opening the valve to a vast cultural repository. His audience listened and remembered with him. But what they remembered hadn’t happened to them, if it had happened at all. His songs, like so many that have followed it, offered the chimera of return to fantasy. When he sang to them of Odysseus straining to come home, the crowd imagined themselves. All our literature of memory, whether individual or cultural or national, is a technology against time. Our libraries are full of so many reckless attempts to stand in the same river twice. Wordsworth taught us how to feel this:
The days gone by
Come back upon me from the dawn almost
Of life; the hiding-places of my power
Seem open, I approach, and then they close;
I see by glimpses now, when age comes on
May scarcely see at all; and I would give
While yet we may, as far as words can give,
A substance and a life to what I feel:
I would enshrine the spirit of the past
For future restoration.