What causes nostalgia?
When I was driving from Colorado to Tennessee, I had the opportunity to explore the town in Illinois where I lived when I was 6. Even though I only lived there for a year, I was struck by the power of the emotions I felt when I walked around my old old house and the school where I went to kindergarten. This could be any house, any school, any ( Read more... )
Also, way to not talk it over with me. :(
1. I have to disagree -- true nostalgia is not easy, I think. Sure, nostalgia like, "I love 1984!" is really easy, not to mention really self-indulgent. But true nostalgia -- the OED says:
1. Acute longing for familiar surroundings, esp. regarded as a medical condition; homesickness. Also in extended use.
2. a. Sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual's own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past.
(I'd just like to point out that when it says "Subscriber: Oxford University" on the OED's webpage, it makes me happy.)
At any rate, nostalgia! It hurts! You said it yourself: you had a really strong emotion towards the place you saw, one so strong that you are still struggling to define its meaning in your life -- how is that easy?
Now here we might see a difference in your definition of nostalgia -- you seem to associate it with a "happier time" implying both a. that such a time existed and b. that it exists no longer; ie, that there was a temporal limit on true happiness. Your perception of nostalgia as memories of "something better than now" doesn't seem to fit what nostalgia really is: a longing for one's perceived past, good or bad.
2. Nah.
3. I miss audiogalaxy too! And I don't know about this one; I don't particularly miss the person I was when I was younger, in fact, when I look back on the person I was five minutes ago and beyond, I try not to dwell on who she was because her ignorance makes me cringe. Literature suggests that many of us are secretly longing to return to youth; I would argue that many of us are secretly longing not to return to a former self, but to return to a world where the biggest responsibility we had was tying our shoes right. In all seriousness, I think we miss times when we did not have the cares that we have today. This should not be confused with our self-definition from the past.
4. Well didn't that statement lead me straight into #4... and I think that to some extent, it is the memories of our strongest emotions that we do hold onto the most. Possibly this is why so many of our memories that we are nostalgic for come from our childhood -- when did we emote the most, when did we throw our hearts into things fully? When we were young. Why is "homesickness" in that definition above? Because we are all homesick for the first (and maybe only) place that we truly loved -- the place where we spent our childhood. Very few people are not nostalgic for the place where they had their first happy emotions.
4b. Nostalgia begins the moment that, I think, you truly realise that you can't get back what you've had. So if that's the morning after you've just had your first kiss, and you realise that you can never get that moment back to live again, then you are nostalgic. See what I mean? Not sure if I am expressing this correctly. You can always get back breakfast -- you can always get up tomorrow morning and make the same thing. But sometimes you can get nostalgic for moments like "the first time I ever did x" for example, the first time I ever walked into the dining hall at Hertford and thought, "Holy crap, this is the most amazing place." Now I'm starting to get jaded towards it -- and I remember my first few wide-eyed days in Oxford and know that I will remember them, and miss their sense of discovery, forever.
An interesting question is, I think, why did we develop a sense of nostalgia? What does it say from an evolutionary point of view about human development as a whole? For example, does it imply that staying close to home, close to familiar patterns, is better for our survival, so we have developed a way to make ourselves want to do that?
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-This is what I was trying to get at when I said "notalgia is easy." You put it better than I did.
"Nostalgia begins the moment that, I think, you truly realise that you can't get back what you've had."
-This has emerged as a common theme in the comments, and I agree with it. You have to be seperated from the memory somehow in order to feel nostalgia.
"why did we develop a sense of nostalgia?"
-That's what I'm really curious about. The "close to home" theory could be a part of it.
It might be interesting to look at how different cultures deal with nostalgia. You could argue that Americans have a compulsion to live in the past and try to recreate it, "Great Gatsby"-style. Apparently, the Portuguese are pretty serious about their own form of nostalgia, called "saudade."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudade
How sad is it that I just thought, "Wow, this would make a good thesis topic"? Two or three years too late, my friend.
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