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FND · 2021
- Sg2
- Ct
- Ns
- Mn
Pink+White
Nostalgia colors the recall, the way things were once shown remembered warmer than the days that repeat it now.
Nostalgia
Backward Fire
EXTREME
RARE
MID-HIGH · Trans-Warm
Warmth for a past that may not have been as recalled. Nostalgia takes memory as its object, never the event itself, and it improves what it touches.
The word
Coined as a disease. In 1688 the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer fused the Greek nostos, homecoming, and algos, pain, to diagnose mercenaries dying of homesickness abroad. For two centuries doctors treated it as a physical illness. Only in the twentieth did it soften into what it is now: an ache about time more than place, and a welcome one.
The feeling
It arrives through the senses, a smell or a song opening a door that was not visibly there. The past comes back edited: warmer, simpler, better lit. There is sweetness with a hairline crack of loss running through it, and the body settles under it. It is one of the few aches people seek on purpose.
Against its neighbours
Saudade holds an absence in the present tense; nostalgia travels, returning to a past it cannot help improving. Longing wants its object back; nostalgia has quietly accepted that the door only opens one way, which is what makes it bearable, and warm.
In the work
Warmth pointed at something already gone. Light with the quality of a remembered source.
1 work composed with Nostalgia
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