Last update: December 14, 2015
“The beauty of the past lies in the fact that no one really understands an emotion when they experience it. This expands later, and that is why we do not have complete emotions with respect to the present, but only with respect to the past. "
-Virginia Woolf-
Nostalgia is a feeling in the balance between sadness and fullness. Sadness for what we no longer have. Fullness in reliving the memory of what has been. The word comes from the Greek and has a meaning that comes close to "pain for returning home".
Nostalgia is the pain of being absent
Although the word "nostalgia" is in common use today, it was actually invented in 1688 by Dr. Johannes Hofer. In his doctoral thesis, Hofer recorded the cases of a student and a waitress suffering from severe health problems. Both were on the verge of death and, for different reasons, were brought home to die alongside their family. Miraculously, they both improved.
In those days, nostalgia was considered a very serious symptom. If a soldier felt this feeling, he was immediately sent home. The same thing happened to the sailors.
nostalgia and home
Apparently, nostalgia is always associated with elements or feelings related to what we can call "home". The very concept of home, however, can turn out to be much more complex than it seems at first glance.
Home is childhood, with its games and constant surprise in front of the world. Home is all the people and situations that welcome us in their arms, just as if we were at home. Home is also our land, the place where we do not feel foreign.
More than being a specific place, home is a state of mind. It is characterized by an atmosphere of trust, peace and fullness.
nostalgia and memory
Memory is primarily an affective function. We rarely remember people and things as they really were, rather as we feel they were. Our memory is not like that of computers, which store data without modifying it.
On the contrary, human memory is very malleable. It doesn't always reflect the facts exactly as they happened, but it gives them a different meaning depending on the circumstances.
The mother who put the dishes on the table was one when we observed her in person. She is another when she is gone, and we remember her.
That simple gesture takes on different meanings and, for this reason, we sometimes attribute to people action words that have never been said, but that complete the emotional memory we build.
Nostalgia and lack
Another sister word of nostalgia is lack, which can be understood as the suffering that causes us not knowing where someone is or how he is. This is what happens after the death of a loved one: the people we love leave, and something inside of us would like to know more about them.
Believers want to know whether they have gone to heaven or not. Atheists will try to decipher the philosophical or existential meaning of death, assign a place in the symbolic world to those who are no longer there.
Nostalgia and creativity
A North American university carried out an experiment with 175 participants. Each of them was asked to elaborate a story based on a memory that caused them nostalgia.
The story had to include a princess, a cat and a racing car or start with the sentence: "On a cold winter morning, a man and a woman were awakened by the sound of an alarm from a nearby house."
The result was that anyone who managed to evoke a nostalgic event with greater clarity scored significantly higher compared to those who could not remember any event that generated deep nostalgia in them.
The researchers concluded that nostalgia favors creativity. The reason for this would be that this emotion triggers feelings of security, belonging and meaning, which are an excellent basis for unleashing the imagination.
Image courtesy of Claudia Plebani
