Yesterday on this blog — in the posting “Merest note” — I whined about, among other things, the incredibly tedious task of getting books organized in my new digs. Hana Filip’s comment on Facebook about my dismay evoked a complex moment of nostalgia for me:
— HF: I find it hard organizing, discarding all kinds of documents, books, letters from the past. Occasionally, there are wonderful surprises because I remember lovely things that I should have remembered, but forgot, but mostly it makes me nostalgic and sad.
— AZ > HF: I have a few small guides, in German, to Alpine flowers, used by my father over a hundred years ago, when he visited his Swiss cousins as a young man and, yes, being an athlete, did some small-scale mountain climbing, but, being a floriculturist too, also collected (in a beautiful wooden flower press) exquisite alpine flowers, which he saved for the children he was going to have some day; they turned out to be me, just me, and I did add American wildflowers to the treasures in the press. And then we all — my parents and me — moved, repeatedly, all over the US, and most of our stuff vanished along the way, but I saved those guidebooks, including a Swiss one with gorgeous color plates. Which are now inestimable sources of delight but also symbols of great loss. As you say, nostalgia.
Heimweh. From NOAD on nostalgia:
ORIGIN late 18th cent. (in the sense ‘acute homesickness’): modern Latin (translating German Heimweh ‘homesickness’), from Greek nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain’
Nostalgia comes in many tonalities. Famously, there’s nostalgie de la boue; from Wikipedia:
nostalgie de la boue (English: ‘nostalgia for mud’) is a French phrase meaning the attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation, found at times both in individuals and in cultural movements.
Note the disapproving cast of the definition, suggesting wickedness, maltreatment, and filth. But the label could simply be taken to cover an interest in and celebration of profane (delicate, edgy, etc.) topics: sex and sexuality (sexual body parts, sexual acts, identities associated with sex); excretion (and bodily effluvia in general); religious mysteries; and devalued or disparaged behaviors or identities. In which case, I am a nostalgiste de la boue of some reputation, and proud of it.
But my nostalgic note above is of an opposite tonality, what we might think of as nostalgie du ciel ‘nostalgia for the sky’, an attraction to elevated culture, practices, and artistry, especially of times gone by. So, notably double-edged.
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