Nostalgia
Yay! It’s the beginning of September. For us Floridians this is the time of year we lift our faces to the sky, breathe in deeply and swear there is a tinge of briskness in the morning breeze. A promise of the relief to come from the heavy shroud of humidity that lasts from May until October. The whole world has been experiencing weather patterns that are wild and unpredictable, so one never knows—this year may be different for us. But usually relief comes and I’m going to assume it will this year as well. For me, autumn is a time for celebration, an awakening of my weary and dulled summer senses. A time for change.
I tend to get nostalgic and always think of my early childhood in Germany, when the landscape turned orange, red, and yellow, a precursor to the bare and wintry landscape soon to come. Time to collect chestnuts and stock up on firewood. Memories of Oma climbing wearily out of our cozy featherbed in the mornings and crank up the wood-burning stove to warm the kitchen before she came to get me up and dressed. I must have been four, or so. Oma and I shared her deep, soft bed because that was all she had to offer, but it was more than enough—it was essential to my sense of belonging, of safety and security. At night, she tucked me in long before she came to sleep. The door was left open a crack so the light could shine in and I would know I was not alone.
Nostalgia. The Germans may call it Heimweh, homesickness.
During the 17th to 19th century, nostalgia was actually considered a pathological disorder, a manic disease. The Swiss physician Johannes Hofer first presented the term, coined from the Greek nostos, homecoming, and algos, pain. The “disease” was considered akin to paranoia and melancholy, rendering the sufferer unable to function effectively in his everyday life. For a few hundred years, some doctors believed the feeling was brought on by an actual bone in the body, and searched for it to no avail. A French physician thought that nostalgia should be treated by “inciting pain and terror” to release the pent up emotion. Thank goodness we are past that.
Now the nostalgic memories come, and I allow them to wrap me up, cozy and warm, just like the feather comforter from my Oma’s bed. I’m also certain that on those cold days when I waited for the warmth of the stove, I didn’t sigh and feel the contentment and safety I remember now. Most likely I lay there twitching, anxious to get up and start the adventure of my day. If there was snow on the ground I would be planning my next sled run down the meadow behind our backyard to the frozen river.
The fuzzy feelings are a misrepresentation I want to hang on to. The narratives of our lives are built on memories. It’s up to us to interpret them, to choose which perspective we want to take. Just as Proust’s confectionary treats called madeleines prompted memories of childhood in Remembrance of Things Past, the first cool morning will bring on my best childhood memories, accompanied with the deep emotion of nostalgia. And I am thankful.
This is an excerpt from Remembrance of Things Past, the instant after the narrator bites into the madeleine confectionary:
An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory–this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs……And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine…
