Make Nostalgia Realistic Again

EDITORIAL | ISSUE TWELVE | NOSTALGIA

Written by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Editor

Dear reader, 

I’ve got a seriously bad case of nostalgia. 

As far back as I can remember, I’ve loved looking as far back as I can remember. It’s like an addiction. A compulsion to rehash every experience I’ve ever had and to bore any innocent bystander to death with my remembrances. Every day I wake up and exclaim in pure rapture that the day before has now become a day in the past that I can look back on with the rosiest of tinted glasses. 

You see, I did a bit of research earlier and ended up reading a most curious thesis published in 1688 by a young Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer, who coined the word “nostalgia” to describe acute homesickness among mercenaries. Just take a read of this:

 [...] the word Nostalgias, Greek in origin and indeed composed of two sounds, the one of which is Nosos, return to the native land; the other, Algos, signifies suffering or grief; so that thus far it is possible from the force of the sound Nostalgia to define the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one’s native land.

That’s from Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (“Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia, or Homesickness”). It was an interesting read, not least because the ailment he was describing seems (to my modern understanding) quite fucking obvious. But in my enthusiasm to read his dissertation, I failed to notice his year of birth: 1669. The man was only 19 years old. Young doctor? More like teen doctor!

A word that looms so large in our modern life, a word we all throw around like a well-used tea towel, was forged in the imagination of a teenager. Maybe it needed that – someone who was still close enough to the wonders of childhood, and sent far enough away from home to start seeing it with that low-saturation vintage filter. Someone who knew how much these soldiers missed home, because he himself had hardly cut himself from his mother’s apron strings. 

All this made me think about how we use the word now: more as a bittersweet longing for a past time or place than as a medical condition. I’m tempted to conclude that our boy Johannes was onto something. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered. Maybe nostalgia should be considered a medical condition.

I think I’m on to something here, dear reader, for surely we can still bring back nostalgia’s medical usage, better yet, get it into the DSM-5. From there it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump away from becoming a slur, as God intended. But what about treatment? Well, don’t worry your pretty nostalgic head over it – Johannes has a load of extremely seventeenth-century medical treatments, including purging, vomiting and bloodletting, but his most effective cure was considerably less grizzly: just let the poor bastard go home.

I can’t follow Johannes’s prescription and literally ‘go home’ to the past. But I can return to what remains of it: the places, the objects and the memories. The trick, I think, is to visit the past as it actually was, rather than the version nostalgia has renovated for me. Remember the good stuff, sure, but remember the low-rise jeans too. They weren’t good. They were never good.

In this editor’s humble opinion, nostalgia is kind of like psychedelics. For ordinary people with a healthy amount of empathy, a psychedelic trip can be a transformative, spiritual, and humbling experience, and for narcissistic assholes it fuels grandiose delusions of self-importance. The problem is narcissistic assholes become world leaders quite often, and nostalgia can be a powerful weapon. 

When Mussolini founded the first fascist movement, he drew heavily on an idealised vision of Italy’s past, invoking the power and grandeur of ancient Rome and promising a kind of national rebirth. Similarly, Hitler and the Nazi Party promised to restore Germany’s lost greatness, calling on Germans to have respect for their “great past” and pride in their “old traditions”. Sounds a little like “Make America Great Again”. 

That “again” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Make America great again. Great at what? Great for whom? And, crucially, when exactly was this great America we’re supposed to be returning to? The slogan never has to tell you. That’s the magic trick of political nostalgia: leave the past vague enough and everyone can fill in the blanks with their own rose-tinted version of it.

Nostalgia can’t be bought, but it can be sold. Nostalgia hard launched as a medical condition back in 1688, but from then on it’s developed more complex definitions, like a well-aged cask wine, or perhaps more like mould in a petri dish. I Google Image searched “nostalgia” and found myself staring hazily at photos of lolly bracelets, car city carpets, I Spy books, and cassette tapes, all with that low-saturation vintage filter and 35% vignette.

So let’s make sure we return home, like Johannes prescribed. But let’s actually return home – not to an imaginary version of it where everything was better and simpler. Let us be realistic in our longings.

I remember poring over I Spy books and chewing lollies off my wrist until it was sticky and disgusting. I remember fucking up more than one cassette tape with impatience. I also remember 9/11. It’s easy for me to think 2001 was a simpler time; I was four years old.

And maybe that’s the trick to treating my seriously bad case of nostalgia. I don’t need to stop looking back. I just need to take off the rose-tinted glasses every once in a while.

The past is worth going home to. Just don’t expect it to look exactly how you remembered it.