I know a lot of people whose faces light up every time they feel nostalgic. Others get goosebumps all over their bodies and tears of joy come to their eyes. They miss it – whatever it is they are thinking about. They want to get back to that time when they were just little kids running around in school with their friends, or that time their mom aimed her slipper at them and ended up missing or hitting something valuable. I always hear “I want to go back”. Nostalgia is homesickness. These people feel like they left a piece of themselves in the past and would like to go back to it and enjoy these moments one more time.
But, here are some interesting facts.
Medically, the word “nostalgia” refers to an unwanted disease. In New Latin, the suffix –algia means “pain”. A suffix used a lot to describe many clinical diseases. The person who came up with the word is Johannes Hofer, a Swiss physician who was studying mercenary soldiers. He used the prefix nost– that means “homecoming” to define the pain and sadness a soldier feels in the battlefield, the aching desire to go back home. He used the term to talk about a disorder of the brain, a fever, a hallucination.
To me, Nostalgia is a song by the Japanese band MONO. I’ll save you the 12-minutes instrumental piece and tell you how it makes me feel. This song, like all the times I feel nostalgic, makes me feel sad, scared, sick to my stomach, and wanting to run away from that feeling. I never looked back at something and felt like I want to relive it again, neither do I feel relieved that it’s over. I’m somewhere between; I’m nauseous of the battlefield but too scared to go home. I’m overwhelmed by the gore details of the present but unwilling to escape to the “simplicity” of the past.
It’s not a nice feeling, it was never intended to be a warm feeling. I won’t stop you from looking back at the past and feeling this urge to jump back to the past and live in the moment, it’s great that you feel that way. I guess all I want to say is, I wish I felt the same as you.
I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage.
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919
