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INTIMATIONS
OF NOSTALGIA
Multidisciplinary Explorations
of an Enduring Emotion
Edited by
Michael Hviid Jacobsen
First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

Bristol University Press

University of Bristol
1-​9 Old Park Hill
Bristol
BS2 8BB
UK
t: +44 (0)117 954 5940
e: bup-​info@bristol.ac.uk

Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk

© Bristol University Press 2022

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​1476-​5 hardcover

ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​1477-​2 ePub
ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​1478-​9 ePdf

The right of Michael Hviid Jacobsen to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording,
or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press.

Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted
material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher.

The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editors
and contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The
University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to
persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication.

Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age
and sexuality.

Cover design: bluinc, Bristol

Front cover image: Unsplash/​Ameen Fahmy
Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible
print partners.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow
 Contents

Notes on Contributors v
Preface and Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: The Many Different Faces of Nostalgia – Exploring a 1

Multifaceted and Multidisciplinary Emotion
Michael Hviid Jacobsen
1 Philosophy and Nostalgia: ‘Rooting’ within the Nostalgic 31
Condition
Giulia Bovassi
2 History and Nostalgia: Historicizing a Multifaceted Emotion 52
Tobias Becker
3 Political Theory and Nostalgia: The Power of the Past in the 70
History of Political Thought
Andrew R. Murphy
4 Sociology and Nostalgia: Micro-​, Meso-​and Macro-​level 89
Dimensions of an Ambiguous Emotion
Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Janelle L. Wilson
5 Psychology and Nostalgia: Towards a Functional Approach 110
Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides
6 Anthropology and Nostalgia: Between Hegemonic and 129
Emancipatory Projections of the Past
Michael Herzfeld
7 Media Studies and Nostalgia: Media Philosophy and 151
Nostalgizing in Times of Crisis
Katharina Niemeyer
8 Marketing and Nostalgia: Unpacking the Past and Future of 171
Marketing and Consumer Research on Nostalgia
Ela Veresiu, Thomas Derek Robinson and Ana Babić Rosario

iii
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

9 Literature and Nostalgia: Vestiges of Paradise 191

Niklas Salmose and Eric Sandberg
10 Architecture and Nostalgia: The End of History, the End of 211
the Future and the Prospect of Nostalgia
Fernando Quesada and Andrés Carretero
Postscript: On Nostalgia of the Future and the Future of 229
Nostalgia – Some Scattered Concluding Observations
Michael Hviid Jacobsen

Index 244

iv
 Notes on Contributors

Tobias Becker is Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany,

where he is working on a history of nostalgia since the 1960s. His research
focuses on the cultural, social, urban and intellectual history of Western
Europe since the 19th century, particularly the history of popular culture.

Giulia Bovassi is Associate Researcher at UNESCO, Chair in Bioethics

and Human Rights and a PhD student in Bioethics at UPRA, Rome,
Italy. Her research focuses on neurobioethics, bioesthetics, posthumanism,
digital ethics, human rights, the role of technology, biopolitics and
contemporary philosophy.

Andrés Carretero is an architect, critic, teacher and independent editor

based in Madrid, Spain. His practice encompasses an expanded conception
of architecture intersected by art, critical theory and the political. He is a
co-​founder of the MONTAJE c​ ooperative of architectural production and
co-​editor of Materiales concretos.

Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social

Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, United
States, and International Institute for Asian Studies Visiting Professor of
Critical Heritage Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. His research,
largely based on fieldwork in Greece, Italy and Thailand, addresses heritage
politics, eviction and gentrification, bureaucracy, craft transmission and the
theory and ethnography of knowledge production.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University,

Denmark. His research focuses on emotions, death and dying, palliative care,
crime, literary sociology, social theory, qualitative research methodology
and utopia/​nostalgia.

v
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

Andrew R. Murphy is Professor of Political Science at Virginia

Commonwealth University, United States. His research is concerned with
the history and politics of liberty of conscience, religion and political theory
and the role of religion in early modern political thought.

Katharina Niemeyer is Professor of Media Theory at the Faculty of

Communication, University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. Her research
interests reach from media theory, media archaeology and media history to
nostalgia, social memory and mediatization.

Fernando Quesada is Associate Professor of Architecture at Universidad

de Alcalá, Spain. His work focuses on social theatricality, bodily space, the
politics of urban form, architectural avant-​gardes and utopia.

Thomas Derek Robinson is Lecturer of Marketing at City University

Business School, London, United Kingdom. His research focuses on
consumer temporality in a number of contexts including mobility (tourism,
commuting and migration), nostalgia, sleep, branding, technologies such
as mobile phones and robotics, sustainability and climate change, food
consumption and friendship.

Ana Babić Rosario is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Daniels College

of Business, University of Denver, United States. Her research centres on
technology-​enabled consumption and communication, such as electronic
word of mouth and social media. She is also concerned with nostalgic
consumer practices and the role of online social interaction in consumers’
lives –​especially in the context of health and wellness.

Niklas Salmose is Associate Professor of Literatures in English, Linnaeus

University, Sweden. He is a member of Linnaeus University Centre of
Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) and much recent research
has focused on interdisciplinary topics fusing intermediality, ecocriticism
and nostalgia.

Eric Sandberg is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at

City University of Hong Kong, China, and Docent at the University of
Oulu, Finland. His research deals with topics including the modern and
contemporary novel, crime fiction, cultural prestige and adaptation.

Constantine Sedikides is Professor of Social and Personality Psychology at

the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. His research focuses on
self and identity, including self-​relevant emotions.

vi
 Notes on Contributors

Ela Veresiu is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Schulich School of

Business, York University, Canada. Her research focuses on understanding
and promoting consumer diversity and market inclusion at the intersection
of identity, technology, branding and institutions.

Tim Wildschut is Professor of Social and Personality Psychology at

University of Southampton, United Kingdom. His research is focused on
emotions, in particular on nostalgia.

Janelle L. Wilson is Professor of   Sociology at the University of Minnesota

Duluth, United States, where she teaches courses primarily in social
psychology and deviance. Her primary research interests include the
sociology of everyday life, nostalgia and generational identity.

vii
 Preface and Acknowledgements

When I was a young boy –​at least as far as I am able to remember –​I never
felt nostalgic, perhaps because there was really not yet much life to look back
upon and remember oh so fondly. Now, as an increasingly middle-​aged man,
nostalgia has crept its way into my life and has become a much more familiar
feeling. I frequently find myself falling victim to nostalgia in the form of
reminiscing, remembering and reimagining my own life and past. From my
own personal experience, nostalgia can perhaps best be described as a sort
of misty mood in which the present is shrouded in the foggy recollections
of a long-​since forgotten past. I am not always sure if the past I remember
was in fact the way it is now being remembered or if it has been filtered
through the selective sieve of time and is thus a gestalt of how I would have
liked the past (and particularly my own past) to have been back then. So,
in this way, the present book is to some degree the outcome of my own
increasing awareness of the important role nostalgia plays in my own life
and in my own attempt to understand this strange feeling.
Besides this personal testimony, nostalgia has also grown into quite a hot
topic within many academic disciplines and research agendas. There has been
a noticeable upsurge in publications devoted to the study of nostalgia, and
in many ways we do now live in what Zygmunt Bauman has aptly called
‘an age of nostalgia’. My recently released edited volume titled Nostalgia
Now: Cross-​Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present (published by
Routledge in 2020) is but one example of a more general trend within the
social sciences to take nostalgia seriously as a promising and potent research
topic in its own right. Despite the quite extensive list of academic disciplines
covered in the present volume, not all angles of nostalgia have been covered.
A chapter on nostalgia and the arts unfortunately did not pan out as planned,
which was also the case with a chapter on economics and nostalgia. However,
these omissions notwithstanding, this new book provides a comprehensive
overview of how nostalgia has been conceptualized, treated and discussed
within a number of social science and humanities disciplines.
This book would not have been possible were it not for the fruitful and
constructive collaboration with a number of international colleagues from

viii
 Preface and Acknowledgements

whom I have learned a lot about nostalgia throughout the past year’s writing,
reading and production process. I would like to take this opportunity to
thank all the scholars involved in the book for their insightful contributions.
Moreover, I want to extend my gratitude to Associate Commissioning Editor
Shannon Kneis and Bristol University Press as well as Gail Welsh from
Newgen Publishing for getting involved in this volume. I am hopeful that
the book, not least with its novel perspectives and extensive references to
existing literature, will provide its readers with a useful overview of different
disciplinary approaches to nostalgia for relevant teaching as well as research
purposes. Furthermore, I hope that the book may work as a catapult for
further imaginative empirical and theoretical explorations of nostalgia in
different social and cultural contexts.

Michael Hviid Jacobsen

Aalborg, Spring 2021

ix
 Introduction: The Many
Different Faces of Nostalgia –
Exploring a Multifaceted and
Multidisciplinary Emotion
Michael Hviid Jacobsen

Introduction
The past is not dead –​it is very much a living thing. We may try our best
to kill off the past, deny its importance, remove it as far away from our
recollections as possible or make it irrelevant to our present concerns, but
it is still there, lurking beneath the surface of time and memory. Everything
that once was does not disappear but has a spectral presence in the way we
live now. Even though the past may be forgotten, and attempts to deny or
eradicate the past from the present (individual and collective) are indeed
manifold, it can never be unmade. Throughout history, humans have always
attempted not only to anticipate and shape the future, but also to make sense
of and relate to the/​their past. The past is often regarded as the already known
territory, whereas the future is regarded as an alien and sometimes even scary
terrain. Time, however, is a tricky thing. What we may think we already
know well and have left behind us long ago sometimes returns to haunt and
pester us –​even many years after its actual occurrence. At other times, the
re-​acquaintance with or revisits to the past –​voluntary and involuntary –​are
much more pleasurable and positive. It is part of our human-​being-​in-​the-​
world that we seek to create a sense of meaning, direction and purpose with
the time that has passed –​the time of our own individual lives as well as of

1
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

broader historical time. ‘Nostalgia’ is a name given to the way (or rather the
ways, plural) we somehow seek to connect with the past.
But why is the past so important to most of us –​as individuals, groups and
societies? Why do we entertain memories, why do we reminiscence, why
do we feel nostalgic? There may be many different answers to this question.
Perhaps the most obvious answer is that nostalgia arises because we necessarily
live our lives from what was once in the past into what is now the present
and towards what at the moment constitutes the future –​and this future,
near and distant, is to many unfathomable as well as uncertain. We know
what has been, but we know not what will come. Life does not stand still –​it
constantly moves in only one direction: forwards (towards the end). Since
we for all practical intents and purposes cannot know the future (in German
philosopher Ernst Bloch’s memorable words ‘the not-​yet’) –​and thus have
no memory or recollection of it (although we may indeed long for the
future) –​we normally turn our minds towards that which we already know
and which has already been, namely the past. Reaching back to what was
before, searching for the roots, remembering, recollecting, rummaging in
the past or longing for what once was is perhaps one of the main trademarks
of being human. Whether animals can in fact feel nostalgic is difficult to
determine, but there is no question about the human ability to think about
and long for what has been before. Often this type of thinking and feeling
is regarded as standing in opposition to the optimism towards the future,
to the determination to bring about change and with the never-​quenched
dissatisfaction with the way things were or currently are. However, there
has probably never lived a human soul who did not somehow think back
to childhood, prehistoric times (whether real or imagined), or who did not
entertain happy and fond memories about past experiences. In this way,
nostalgia is an all too normal emotion.
Nostalgia is all around us, sometimes visibly, other times invisibly. Nostalgia
can pertain to individuals’ feelings (often described as ‘nostalgics’) or to
communities and collectivities (for example, people living in an ‘age of
nostalgia’). Total immunity to nostalgia is not a common condition. Most
people feel nostalgic at certain points in their lives. It is indeed difficult
to imagine someone being entirely unconnected to, unconcerned with
or dissociated from his/​her past. No matter how we consider life, it is in
linear fashion always lived forwards from past via present to future, from
birth towards death, but –​as Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard once
mused –​life is often understood backwards from the place we stand now as
we consider and contemplate the trajectory leading from the present back to
our past. In this way, the past is always with us –​the present is pregnant with
the past, unable fully to cut the ties with what went before it. Most people
are somehow rooted in their constantly evolving life trajectories made up

2
 Introduction

of everything that has happened to them prior to this very moment in time.
Even though some people purposively may seek to forget, deny or run away
from their past, they will often find that the past somehow catches up with
them –​for better or for worse. For some people, it is a painful experience
to be reminded of their past (especially if the past was a container full of
unpleasant things), whereas for others the past is a pool of fond recollections
and cherished memories. Whereas the former may seek to bury the past once
and for all, escaping the nasty phantoms of childhood or youth by looking
ahead to brighter times, the latter rather insist on keeping the past alive in
their lives, actively resuscitating and reviving the things that previously made
sense and provided comfort and meaning. This is why nostalgia has been so
aptly called a ‘sanctuary of meaning’ (Wilson 2005/​2014). Those who are
deemed or designate themselves as ‘nostalgics’ are often those who revel in
what once was, with the hope that this may be brought back to life again. It is
important already, here in the beginning, to stress that ‘the past’ that nostalgics
want to bring back to life is not necessarily the past as it once really was or
really happened. Our memories of the past, our childhood recollections and
cherished moments of youth, are often selective and distorted and gain their
eerie and seductive glow from the time that has passed since then. This is
why our nostalgia for the past is always something which requires that we
consider what is really meant by ‘the past’ and the yearning for ‘the past’.
This book is dedicated to the exploration of nostalgia and to the multiple
ways in which different disciplines from within the social sciences and
humanities have sought to conceptualize, understand, analyse and debate
nostalgia as part of their overall research ambitions. In the remainder of
this introductory chapter we will look at various aspects and dimensions of
the phenomenon of nostalgia and discuss how we may understand it as an
integral part of our lives and as an important sign of our times.

‘Nostophiles’ versus ‘nostophobics’

Obviously, not everybody is a ‘nostalgic’ –​and not everybody is it to the
same extent. How many people are indeed nostalgics is difficult to determine
with any kind of empirical certainty or statistical accuracy. Although scales
and techniques have already been developed that propose to detect and
determine someone’s nostalgia proneness, nostalgia is not an emotion that is
easily measured or can meaningfully be divided into percentages or fractions.
But clearly, in the population at large, there are nostalgics (or ‘nostophiles’)
and there are anti-​nostalgics (or ‘nostophobics’). The former are those who
somehow long for or remember the past (their own past or ‘the past’ more
generally) ever so fondly as if in a kind of beautiful, blurry haze, who are
more than willing to admit and embrace such feelings and who express a

3
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

sense of loss about the past. The latter are those who normally regard the
former as sentimentalists and who themselves hardly ever think fondly
about the past or, at least, admit to doing so. They are suspicious about
attempts to make the past ‘stick’ or serve as a guideline for present and future
actions. Nostophilia and nostophobia, however, are not merely individual
emotional states. They are also feelings that pertain to and influence larger
groups of people. Feeling nostalgic or nostophilic for that matter is thus
not only something that people do individually by remembering their own
private or personal pasts, it is also a highly collective phenomenon at times
gripping larger groups of people, even entire populations and nations that
give in to nostalgic sentiments by longing for a return to a great historical
period, celebrating past victories or honouring legends and long-​gone
heroes of importance to their local/​national community (Davis 1979). As
such a collective force, nostalgia has a transformative capacity to change
societies and the life experiences contained within them. When collective
nostalgia is set in motion, it is often based on a dissatisfaction with the way
things are currently run and with a desire or demand to return to how life
was lived before.
Perhaps there is a particular potential for nostophobia –​the repugnance
or dislike of the past –​in society at large when the past is regarded with
either suspicion or contempt, and when everything that does not necessarily
point forward or is not future oriented is labelled as ‘backward’ or ‘stagnant’.
This often unfounded antipathy towards nostalgia and nostalgics is perhaps
often not always explicated, but it is certainly there, as when people who
are longing for yesterday, expressing social pessimism or voicing (legitimate/​
illegitimate) concerns about the present state of affairs are ridiculed and seen
as ‘relics’ or, perhaps even worse, their sense of nostalgia is pooled together
under the headings of ‘populists’ or ‘radical right-​wing’ supporters. There is
social research showing that nostalgia seems particularly to thrive among some
right-​wing sympathizers such as the so-​called ‘Brexiteers’, ‘Trumpeteers’
or ‘Tea Party’ supporters (see, for example, Kenny 2017; Steenvorden and
Harteveld 2017), but this is hardly either the whole or the only story about
nostalgia. Obviously, there may indeed be valid reasons for suggesting or
suspecting a certain overrepresentation of so-​called ‘nostalgics’ in such right-​
wing milieus (they are ‘the usual suspects’); however, it is unevidenced to
detect and delimit nostalgia only to one end of the political continuum as
has been one of the habitual ‘sins’ of much contemporary social research. In
this way, important nuances, fine-​grained differences and obvious similarities
are lost in translation. In contemporary society, and perhaps particularly
in contemporary politics, those who seem to want to keep a firm grip on
tradition, to safeguard monuments, defend existing ways of life and praise
the past are generally depicted as obstacles to progress and as reactionary,

4
 Introduction

religious and conservative fanatics. They are the ‘locals’ (often referred to
as ‘traditionalists’, ‘nationalists’ and ‘anti-​globalists’) in a world increasingly
governed by the ‘globals’ and their cosmopolitan visions of dismantling
borders, emancipation from tradition and opening the world up to everything
new, different and at odds with the past. In such a world, nostalgics are often
regarded as yesterday’s news –​someone unable to keep up with the speed
of change. It seems, however, that within the last decade or so, this more
locally/​nationally oriented group –​the ‘nostalgics’ or ‘nostophiles’, as it
were –​who want to maintain national borders and preserve local/​national
heritage/​identity –​have gained momentum, evident not least in a number
of political campaigns around the world (often exemplified by the British
Brexit movement, Donald Trump’s period of presidency and the Visegrad
Group). Whether or not this has in fact much to do with nostalgia is a matter
of some debate, but it certainly points out that there is a constant push and
pull –​an ongoing battle inherent in world history –​between those who want
change and those who resist it. It shows also how globalization is a game that
has winners as well as losers (Bauman 1998). The winners are those who
are set to gain –​power, mobility, freedom or wealth –​from globalization,
whereas the losers are those who rather see globalization as a threat to their
values, privileges and identities or who will gain absolutely nothing from
opening up the world to change. Nostalgia is therefore an expected response
to globalization and to the seemingly uneven and uncontrollable nature of
world events, perhaps particularly to the increasingly globalized economic
situation with recurring spells of crises (Oliete-​Aldea 2012). The pendulum
thus swings from periods in collective history that are characterized by
showdowns with ‘the past’ in the name of ‘the future’, to other periods more
devoted to calling attention to how mores, traditions, practices or beliefs
prevalent in earlier times may guide or inform contemporary ways of life
or take us through a crisis situation.
The proposed separation between ‘nostophiles’ and ‘nostophobics’ is
obviously simplistic, unvarnished and in some cases maybe also unwarranted.
In fact, it is difficult to imagine a person who is completely inoculated
against or immune to nostalgia. Most people will, at certain points in their
lives (perhaps especially when crisis, adversity, transition or death and grief
strike), think fondly about life before things went wrong or something
painful happened. The same, in fact, goes for many societies. It seems
plausible to claim that individuals and societies alike are much more prone to
widespread nostalgic sentiments whenever crisis, rupture or uncertainty set in.
Undoubtedly, as indicated already, some people (and some societies) are more
prone or perhaps even disposed to nostalgia than others, and whereas some
people (and some societies) may feel nostalgic for shorter spells of time, for
others it is seemingly more of a chronic condition. However, to try to define

5
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

a distinct ‘nostalgic personality type’ may be difficult, for the simple reason
that nostalgia is sometimes an acute response to changes taking place outside
of the person that, for shorter or longer periods of time, reverberates within
the individual and then disappears again. Hence to be born with particular
‘nostalgic genes’ makes no sense –​at least the evidence for this is slim if not
non-​existent. Nostalgia rather seems to thrive when people are confronted
with hardships, trials or crises with which they try to cope and create meaning.
This may be something happening only to the individual, but it may also
be something that encompasses larger groups of people who are affected by
social or environmental changes. For example, in what has recently been
called ‘ecological grief ’ –​the sense of loss, longing and grief associated with
the destruction of nature –​there is a clear element of individual as well as
collective nostalgia involved: once our earth was greener and less affected by
climate change and the relentless human exploitation of its limited resources
than is now the case. Ecological grief –​or what has also been called ‘solastalgia’
(Albrecht et al 2007), thus playing directly on the nostalgic undertone –​is
thus an expression of the sadness and longing connected to a time before
industrialization, deforestation, rising CO2 levels, global warming, polar
ice melting and so on (which is, to the presently living, something whose
origins, to some extent, extends back to well before our own lifetime). We
are thus not nostalgic about something we necessarily remember ourselves,
but about something that predated our own lifetime but of which we now
experience the consequences. Nostalgia is thus a neighbouring emotion, as
it were, to many other human emotions associated with a sense of loss: grief,
melancholy, sadness, longing, sometimes even despair.
As mentioned earlier, nostalgia is all around, and although some cultures
and historical epochs are undoubtedly more nostalgic (or nostalgia prone)
than others, nostalgic sentiments can be found almost universally. Even
though there may be quite significant historical differences in what specific
meanings people ascribe to the emotion of nostalgia, according to extensive
survey material a common prototypical understanding of nostalgia can
nevertheless be seen across widely different cultures (Hepper et al 2014).
For example, many cultures and languages have a specific word to describe
feelings of nostalgia. As American sociologist Arlie R. Hochschild recently
noted in her study of feelings of mourning and anger among American
right-​wing sympathizers: ‘Throughout time such feeling has been widely
acknowledged. The Portuguese have the term saudade. The Russians have
toska. The Czechs have litos. Others too name the feeling: for Romanians,
it’s dor, for Germans it’s heimweh. The Welsh have hiraeth, the Spanish mal
de corazon’ (Hochschild 2016: 49–​50).
Despite the lingual differences in specific connotations and meanings,
nostalgia is a word that is widely used and an emotion that is widely shared

6
 Introduction

across time and space. In his careful and elegant elaboration of the idea of
nostalgia, Swiss literary critic Jean Starobinski once noted how all emotions
acquire their meaning from being attached to a specific word: ‘Emotion is
not a word, but it can only be spread abroad through words’ (Starobinski
1966: 81). From this it becomes obvious that the way we name an emotion,
the way language is used to capture and compare an emotional state or
experience, impacts on the way this emotion is being understood –​perhaps
even the way this emotion is being felt and expressed. This goes for all
emotions. Whenever we hear the word ‘anger’, we immediately think and
visualize a certain emotional expression and mood. The same is the case with
‘love’, ‘hate’, ‘disgust’, ‘fear’, ‘shame’ and so on –​whenever we hear the word,
we almost intuitively know and recognize the feeling. The word ‘nostalgia’
also evokes certain images of and ideas about people: how they think, how
they live, how they look, how they feel, how they vote, what they like, what
they dislike, what they buy, what they eat, how they dress, what music they
prefer and so on. However, it was also Starobinski’s point that the language
we use about emotions is not universal or historyless: ‘Inevitably, we speak
the language of our time’ (Starobinski 1966: 83), he stated, and we should
therefore be careful not to attribute emotions or subjective experiences to
people living in the past by relying on contemporary word usage and vice
versa, just as we should beware not to uncritically transfer the meaning of
an emotion from a Western context to the meaning of the emotion from an
entirely different cultural background. This is perhaps particularly important
when dealing with ‘nostalgia’, which is indeed a word for an emotion that
has changed not only its meaning but also its reception quite substantially
throughout time.

Nostalgia as pathology
Like any other human emotion, nostalgia is always a child of its time –​it
derives its meaning and gains its perspective and depth from the specific
historical and cultural context in which it is experienced and expressed, but
also from the historical backlist that has shaped and changed its trajectory.
Nostalgia in some shape or form has probably always existed. Even though
it is impossible to know exactly what people really felt during, for example,
the Stone Age or Middle Ages, having only secondary data sources with a
considerable uncertainty attached to them from which to make inferences,
there is no reason to suspect that nostalgia was not somehow an emotional
experience known also to prehistoric people. But, to be honest, we do not
know for sure. The history of the specific concept of nostalgia, however, can
be dated and detailed quite specifically. The first recorded scientific use of
the term ‘nostalgia’ was by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, who in

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a somewhat obscure dissertation described nostalgia as an ailment or illness

identified among Swiss mercenaries stationed away from home (Hofer 1688/​
1934). As Hofer wrote, in his work nostalgia was used ‘to define the sad
mood originating from the desire for the return to one’s native land’ (Hofer
1688/1​ 934: 381). The literal meaning of the term ‘nostalgia’ is a combination
or contraction of the ancient Greek notions of nostos (home) –​owing its
origin to the Homeric epic The Odyssey –​and algos (aching/​pain/​grief) and
it can thus be seen as a description of the aching or longing for a return to
a home that has been abandoned or left behind. In this way, the early usage
of the notion of ‘nostalgia’ related specifically to spatiality, to mobility and
to being away from one’s ‘home’. It is also indicative of the term that there
are challenges and obstacles to being able to return home and that this is
thus regarded as a great difficulty producing sentiments and feelings of
loss, despair, regret and sadness. Even though nostalgia as a concept in the
literature on the topic is thus often dated to the time of Hofer’s dissertation,
to which we shall briefly return, it is probably safe to say that it is an emotion
that is for all practical intents and purposes unrateable. It has probably been
there all along. In all likelihood, people also felt nostalgic prior to Hofer’s
naming of the emotion/​pathology of nostalgia. The fact that people long
for or idealize the past is thus not something that was invented by Hofer,
although he was the first specifically to name the term ‘nostalgia’ as a word
composed to capture this emotional reaction.
Hofer’s original text provides an interesting read but it will also strike most
contemporary readers as the product of a specific time and mentality. Hofer’s
dissertation is a medical treatise concerned with developing a vocabulary
with which to diagnose, describe and treat a newly discovered suffering.
This was a period prior to the time when other types of human feeling also
began to be clinically observed, diagnosed and treated, such as melancholy
and hysteria. As mentioned, the sadness associated with being away from
one’s birthplace, land of origin or home (‘Fatherland’ as Hofer wrote) is of
Homeric origin and has later been pursued by poets such as Virgil, Dante
and Milton (Austin 2010). In Hofer’s work, the main concern was with
understanding and dealing with this nostalgic disease and with providing care,
relief and comfort for its unfortunate victims. Hofer located ‘nostalgia’ in
the middle brain, and it manifested itself in the body and mind as ‘continued
sadness, meditation only of the Fatherland, disturbed sleep either wakeful
or continuous, decrease of strength, hunger, thirst, senses diminished, and
cares or even palpitations of the heart’ (Hofer 1688/​1934: 386). Hofer’s
text also outlined sensations that may trigger or provoke nostalgia (such as
familiar sounds and smells from the homeland or being confronted with
foreign food and the variety of the weather) and he proposed that rest, care
and ‘appropriate remedies’ could be administered to ease symptoms or even

8
 Introduction

cure the disease. Hofer was thus instrumental in providing a useful term to
cover the emotional experience of longing for the home left behind (and,
indirectly, something lost from one’s past, whether remembered or imagined),
and, even though the science of nostalgia has progressed quite considerably
since Hofer’s original writings, his terminology still attracts the attention of
scholars, writers, poets, politicians and ordinary people who with the notion
of ‘nostalgia’ seek to make sense and/​or use of this special feeling of longing.
Since Hofer’s treatise, for quite some time nostalgia remained a concern
primarily within the medical and later also the psychological/​psychiatric
disciplines. By the middle of the 18th century, due to many scholars and
physicians relying on and referring to the work of Hofer, nostalgia had
become a well-​established and frequently mentioned phenomenon within
medical and later also psychological discourse, focusing on the physical
and psychological distress of homesickness among soldiers stationed far
away from home (see, for example, Rosen 1975; Roth 1991), and the
mentioning of nostalgia thus often featured as part of various phobias,
neuroses or emotional disturbances. But the interest in nostalgia as a clinical
diagnosis gradually waned and the entry disappeared from most medical and
psychological encyclopaedias, which were instead equipped with the entries
of ‘schizophrenia’, ‘depression’ and other personality disorders. However,
even close to our own time –​throughout the period from the 1940s to the
1970s –​there was still a detectable interest within different parts of psychology
and psychiatry in regarding nostalgia as a potentially pathological condition
and the concept still appeared in various clinical contexts (see, for example,
Freedman 1956; Kleiner 1977). In this kind of work, nostalgia was sometimes
discussed as a substitute for mourning, as an attempted mastery of life through
idealization and the displacement of a painful past, as evidence of resistance
in psychoanalysis and as a counterphobic mechanism (Werman 1977: 338).
Moreover, French psychoanalyst Dominique Geahchan specifically coupled
nostalgia to a certain narcissistic personality type when stating:

The nostalgic object thus represents a narcissistic structure of the

personality. The nostalgic cannot relinquish his search for the lost object
because that would represent giving up his own narcissistically invested,
grandiose self-​image. It is now not simply the absent, repressed mother
who is nostalgically longed for, but rather the mother as internalized
into a personality structure. (Geahchan 1968, quoted in Boren 2013)

Such conventional psychoanalytic descriptions of nostalgia (but also of

many other psychopathologies) –​trying to relate the emotion to repressed
childhood memories –​are no longer commonplace, although the interest
within psychoanalysis and neuropsychiatry in nostalgia has far from

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disappeared (see, for example, Phillips 1985; Hirsch 1992). Instead, nostalgia
has, as we shall see later, gradually and generally become normalized
throughout the past few hundred years. This does not mean, however, that
nostalgia is now being regarded necessarily as something positive or desirable.
The aforementioned pathologizing tendency of the emotion of nostalgia
has not entirely disappeared with the coming of the recent centuries, and
nostalgia is still surrounded with an aura of the somewhat strange and world-​
weary. People who are nostalgics are peculiar, sentimental or unable to deal
with the harsh realities of life –​and for whatever reason prefer to live in
the shadows of the past. For example, it has been observed that ‘nostalgia is
always suspect. To give ourselves up to longing for a different time or place,
no matter how admirable its qualities, is always to run the risk of constricting
our ability to act in the present’ (Atia and Davies 2010: 181). In this way,
nostalgia is still somehow seen as an obstacle to development –​almost as a
sort of apathy or paralysis –​or as a hindrance to action in the ‘real world’.
Here already, however, some conceptual caution is required. It needs to be
stressed that the often proposed link between nostalgia and sentimentalism
is neither self-​evident nor clear cut. The matter is, in fact, rather
complicated. True, the Wikipedia entry for ‘nostalgia’ directly defines it
as ‘a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy
personal associations’. However, it is not necessarily the case that nostalgia
and sentimentalism/​sentimentality go hand in hand. It is indeed possible to
be sentimental without being nostalgic, just as it is possible to be nostalgic
without being sentimental –​but it is also possible to be both things at the
very same time and for the same reasons. It does, therefore, seem as if these
two experiences are often –​but not necessarily –​correlated or regarded
as intimately connected.
In everyday understanding and the vernacular there is thus still some
suspicion surrounding the notion of nostalgia, still a remnant of its
erstwhile association with disease or disorder, although nowadays nostalgia
is perhaps more regarded as a personal oddity rather than as an individual
pathology. As such an odd personality or character trait, nostalgia is often
associated with a rather sentimental, backward-​looking, melancholic and
romanticizing feeling towards the past. True, nostalgia can be all that.
However, nostalgia can also serve as a trigger for personal development,
provide feelings of happiness, as well as inspire meaningful action (see, for
example, Sedikides and Wildschut 2018; Newman et al 2020). Even though
nostalgia may at first sight seem as something almost familiar, self-​evident
and self-​explanatory, it is in fact an emotion that contains many different
dimensions, angles, processes and functions, which is also why the title of
this Introduction refers to the ‘many different faces of nostalgia’. Despite
some convergence on how to define and understand nostalgia, nostalgia is

10
 Introduction

certainly not a static, shallow or one-​dimensional emotion, but something

that means many different things to different people and which serves
many different pivotal purposes and functions in their lives. It is therefore
important to stress, as recent psychological research has done, the deep-​
seated complexity and multifaceted character of nostalgia –​its mixture of
the bitter and the sweet, loss and happiness, memorization and memory-​
reconstruction and so on (see, for example, Hepper et al 2011; Batcho
2013). But, as with anything else about nostalgia, this is also a contested
or contestable claim. Perhaps nostalgia, in the end, is but a prominent
example of what Scottish philosopher Walter Bryce Gallie (1956) once
termed an ‘essentially contested concept’ –​something that continues to
cause disagreement and heated discussion –​not only because so many
different meanings can be attached to it but also because it can be valued
or devalued, elevated or degraded, worshipped or detested, depending on
the reasons why, how, where, when and about whom the concept is being
used (Batcho and Jacobsen 2021).

The ‘normalization’ of nostalgia

As we saw earlier, nostalgia, as a scientific concept deriving its original
meaning from ancient Greek poetry, was born as a disease but later
matured into an emotion –​however, still with some semi-​pathology or
semi-​strangeness attached to it. The early –​and to some extent long-​
lasting –​pathological connotations associated with nostalgia gradually began
to disappear when it no longer featured in medical textbooks or was listed
as a psychological disorder to be diagnosed and treated (see, for example,
Illbruck 2012). In time, nostalgia grew into a descriptive and general notion
for a longing for the past (perhaps more so than for a specific place as was
Hofer’s view) without the references to disease and disorder that previously
characterized it. Nostalgia is thus no longer –​among professionals or
laypeople –​routinely associated with or surrounded by the aura of disease
that originally gave birth to its name. Nostalgia is now mostly a notion that
describes a normal and quite common emotional response to a sense of loss
or a memory of a time past that seems to stick. Even though the notion of
nostalgia may still have a certain derogatory or negative ring to it (being a
‘nostalgic’ is often a matter of some friendly ridicule), today most people
would admit that they every now and then feel nostalgic.
Even though nostalgia has thus slowly been depathologized, people
who are accused of being nostalgic will often somehow have to defend
themselves, as there is almost something inherently ridiculous or sad about
longing for the past. ‘Come on, live in the present, not in the past!’, seems
to be the almost overbearing advice given to those who dwell on memories

11
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

or express a longing for something that once was: childhood, youth, a lost
love relationship, better health, better looks and so on. They are seen as
world-​weary, escapist, sentimentalist, melancholic and mournful daydreamers
who basically need to realign with reality. Despite the gradual normalization
of nostalgia throughout the past centuries, removing from it the previous
pathological connotations and association with disease, nostalgia is in
common discourse therefore still regarded mostly as a somewhat negative
phenomenon often based on a caricature of what nostalgia actually is (see,
for example, Schiermer and Carlsen 2017). Admitting that one is ‘feeling
nostalgic’ or insisting that the ‘past was much better’ is regarded with ill-​
concealed contempt and as a sign that one is incapable of dealing with the
present –​and nostalgia is seen as something that is thus closely associated with
sentimentalism, pessimism, retreatism, backwardness and resistance to change.
Moreover, nostalgia is frequently also associated with political conservatism,
reactionary/​traditionalist attitudes or with a colonial or nationalist mentality –​
longing for the ‘Glory Days’ when the Empire, the Nation or the Fatherland
ruled the world. True, within some of these orientations nostalgia thrives;
however, to reduce nostalgia to any such political or ideological positions
is to miss most of the point. Nostalgia cannot be owned by or reduced to
political movements or ideological stances, just as compassion, anger, hatred,
happiness or solidarity cannot be monopolized by any specific group or
political faction in society. Nostalgia as an emotion is too ‘normal’, too
widespread and too multifaceted to be appropriated by any special interests.
Why has nostalgia been mostly regarded with such suspicion and negativity
or sometimes merely a general neglect not only in everyday contexts but
also within many social science and humanities disciplines for so long?
Regarding the latter, the answer may be quite plain and obvious: many of the
social science disciplines that took an interest in the study of nostalgia were
themselves the offspring of the age of modernity –​sociology, anthropology,
psychology and so on. They earned their scientific status and legitimacy –​
often after long and hard struggles –​from promises to enlighten the world
by breaking away from the powers of the irrational, human oppression,
backward living conditions and traditional ways of life. Nostalgia was in itself
regarded as an anti-​modern sentiment –​a longing for that which modern
society tried so hard to forget and eradicate: its own roots in superstition
and religion, feudalism as well as the reliance on the past. Modernity sought
to replace nostalgia with a future-​orientation, with ideas of growth and
progress and a determination for change, but it often found itself inescapably
interlocked with its own premodern past. Paradoxically, maybe the feeling
of nostalgia was in fact spread and reinforced by the coming of modern
society itself and its relentless uprooting, detraditionalizing and delocalizing
agenda. However, this negativity surrounding nostalgia –​perhaps particularly

12
 Introduction

prevalent within a discipline such as sociology –​is as unwarranted as it is

unfruitful. Nostalgia, like any other human emotion, contains positive as well
as negative potentials, depending on who feels it and how this feeling is being
expressed and used. All emotions can be used for ulterior motives, causing
individual and social harm, just as they can be mobilized for generating good
and desired results. No emotion is in and by itself either good or bad (for
example, love can be self-​destructive or excessive, while hatred under the
right circumstances can be understandable and even called for), and therefore
all emotions must be understood and interpreted in light of their specific
conditions. The perceived goodness or badness of an emotion is thus always
in the eye of the beholder or can be determined only by assessing it against
some desired or undesired outcome. Nostalgia can thus do good or it can
do bad, and it may, just like utopia, as Polish-​British sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman once suggested, ‘lead to a better life as much as [it] may mislead
and turn away from what a better life would require to be done’ (Bauman
and Tester 2001: 48–​50).
Although nostalgia –​even as a generalized and normal emotion devoid
of its previous pathological underpinnings –​may at first sight seem like a
rather simple, uncomplicated, shallow and perhaps almost one-​dimensional
emotional experience and expression, it is, in fact, a rather complex and
multi-​layered emotion. On the one hand, nostalgia is a feel-​good feeling –​
when feeling nostalgic, one is warmed or energized by the recollection of
something that was good, meaningful and fulfilling in one’s past. However,
there is also another dimension to nostalgia than feeling good –​the pain and
distress that is associated with realizing that it is indeed impossible to retrieve
or revive that which is no more –​the past, one’s childhood or youth, the
lost empire and so on. This is also why nostalgia is a so-​called ‘bittersweet
emotion’ –​the sweetness is always coated with a bitter glace. The past is no
longer here and one thus has to live with the sense of loss and deprivation that
the past –​childhood, youth, prehistory and so on –​has been irretrievably lost.
As mentioned, in modern society ‘nostalgia’ has often been associated with
negative connotations –​designating someone struck with sentimentality and
an unwillingness to accept changes and to embrace the new and emerging.
As many recent psychological studies have shown, to be nostalgic, however,
not only means that one lives in the past or desperately longs for it. It also
means to have an active approach to the past: even though the past may, for
all practical intents and purposes, be dead and gone, by fondly remembering,
reminiscing, recollecting and resuscitating the past, one finds meaning and
purpose in and for the present. Even though some people, as mentioned, are
doubtlessly more nostalgia prone than others, and even though some perhaps
even take nostalgia to extremes, nostalgia is probably a feeling most people are
familiar with –​the entirely non-​nostalgic person is indeed a rare breed. For

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 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

example, an expatriate I recently interviewed during an ethnographic study

in Thailand told me: ‘When you ask me about nostalgia, I think everybody
is nostalgic’ (quoted in Jacobsen 2020c). Whether this is in fact true or not –​
that everybody is nostalgic –​is difficult to determine beyond any reasonable
doubt. However, the fact that nostalgia is a feeling recognizable and known
to most people is perhaps easier to accept. For example, who has not felt
nostalgic when fondly entertaining memories of childhood experiences,
when listening to music from events that were of particular significance in
one’s life, when recalling one’s first infatuation, one’s first car, seeing one’s
progeny for the first time, or when thinking about those loved ones now dead
and gone? True, nostalgia is as such difficult to see, but we somehow sense
that it is there. Contrary to the emotional response of anger, which is a ‘you
know it when you feel (or see) it’ kind of emotion (Schieman 2006: 494),
nostalgia is not a so-​called ‘primary emotion’ that we can easily detect in
the bodily appearance of people. There are no blushing, no clenched fists,
no sweaty palms and no visible tears in nostalgia. Nostalgia is perhaps more
of a ‘you recognize it when you feel it’ kind of emotion. Although most
people are familiar with shorter or longer spells of nostalgic experience –​for
example, when they see, smell, touch, hear or think about something from
their past –​there is something intangible or fuzzy about nostalgia, making it
difficult to pin down. Despite being mostly invisible, nostalgia nevertheless
is and remains an integral part of our memories and recollections, and yet
it cannot be reduced to simple memory or recollection. In nostalgia there
is an unmistakable and deep-​seated sense of loss and longing that provides
depth and direction to our nostalgic sentiments.
As a ‘normal’ emotion rather than as a pathological affliction, the longing
for and the memory of the past is always with us. However, nostalgia is never
merely a plain and simple recollection or recording, but also a recounting
and reconstruction of the past as we –​from where we now stand in life based
on our accumulated knowledge, experience and expectation –​remember
it. As Marcel Proust, himself a formidable nostalgic, famously insisted in
The Search of Lost Time: ‘Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the
remembrance of things as they were’ (Proust 1913–​1927/​1992). A similar
understanding was revealed by Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending: ‘What
you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed’
(Barnes 2011: 3). What is here captured so well by the words of fiction can
also be expressed by the language of science, and American psychologist
Krystine I. Batcho eloquently summarized the same insight by stating that
‘one can remember without being nostalgic, but one cannot be nostalgic
without remembering’ (Batcho 2009: 269). Also, social gerontologist Jeanette
Leardi has noted how ‘nostalgia is much more than mere reminiscing; it’s
a feeling’ (Leardi 2013). There is thus no one-​to-​one relationship between

14
 Introduction

memory/​reminiscence and nostalgia (just, as we saw earlier, as there is no

necessary connection between sentimentalism and nostalgia), there is no
automatic connection between the cognitive recording of what actually
happened and the feelings attached to it, but without remembrance of some
sort, nostalgia is indeed unimaginable. Nostalgia is thus about memory and
remembrance, but it is always a memory and remembrance that is somehow
shaped or even tainted by the filters of selective recollection (individual and
collective), or at least a recollection that is mostly a mental distillation of
that which is cherished, revered and valued.
Based on these considerations, let it be emphasized already, from the
outset of this book: nostalgia is not a simple, straightforward or one-​
dimensional human emotion. Its meaning is not fixed once and for all. It is
not experienced in the same way by everybody. Its meaning does not stand
still and is not uncontested. If this were the case, there would hardly be any
need to devote an entire volume to the study of the many different forms
and expressions of nostalgia within various scientific disciplines. Then we
could sit back comfortably, relax our explorative endeavours and analytical
skills or put them to proper use elsewhere, and rely simply on common-​sense
meanings. However, nostalgia does not simply mean that people long for
the past or that they are unable to cope with the problems of the present or
other similar, frequently heard accusations against nostalgics. What people
perceive as constituting ‘the past’ differs, how they relate to this ‘past’ is
certainly not the same for everyone and why they do so is also something
that cannot be deduced simply from common sense, taken-​for-​g ranted
wisdom or what we think we know. There are many different dimensions
of nostalgia, and many analytical distinctions and typologies have been
proposed in order to account for nostalgia’s complexity (see, for example,
Jacobsen 2020b). American sociologist Fred Davis (1979) provided a useful
conceptual and analytical inventory of many different types of nostalgia such
as ‘simple nostalgia’, ‘reflexive nostalgia’ and interpretive nostalgia’, just as he
distinguished between ‘private nostalgia’ and ‘collective nostalgia’. Similarly,
British sociologist Bryan S. Turner (1987) has proposed four different types
of loss experience involved in nostalgia (for example, historical decline, loss
of personal wholeness and moral certainty, loss of individual autonomy, and
loss of spontaneity and authenticity). More recently, British researchers of
media and communication, Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley (2006),
for example detailed a number of different ‘modalities’ and manifestations
of nostalgia, thus showing how nostalgia is not a straightforward or one-​
dimensional phenomenon. In fact, as they revealed, nostalgia is an emotion
made up of multiple inherent contrarieties and contradictions such as the
regressive and the progressive. Moreover, as we have already hinted at,
nostalgia has both spatial and temporal dimensions and connotations (Wilson

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 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

2015). In fact, as we saw earlier, nostalgia started out as a ‘spatial emotion’

referring in the writings of Homer and Hofer alike to the experience of
Heimweh (homesickness), but later it turned into a ‘temporal emotion’ that
is more past oriented than place bound. Furthermore, late Russian professor
of comparative literature Svetlana Boym (2001) memorably distinguished
between ‘restorative nostalgia’ and ‘reflective nostalgia’, regarding the
former as being concerned mostly with reviving the past whereas the
latter is preoccupied with revisiting and thinking critically about the past
in order for it to play a constructive role in the present. But nostalgia, in
order to confuse matters even more, is not only about the past but also
about present and future. For example, American cultural critic Fredric
Jameson (1989) once seemingly paradoxically spoke of the ‘nostalgia for
the present’, insisting that a certain timelessness had descended upon the
postmodern world (especially evident in the commodification of culture and
popular culture), thus making people nostalgic not about the past but about
the present being emptied of ‘time’. Jameson thus distinguished between a
‘nostalgia mood’ (related to feelings or experiences of loss and longing) and
a ‘nostalgia mode’ (related particularly to how understandings of nostalgia
are being culturally produced in postmodern times marked by amnesia and
a waning of history). Only rarely, nostalgia is directly future oriented, but,
as we shall see in the Postscript to this volume, there are in fact scholars and
writers who read a distinctive future orientation into nostalgia. Obviously,
no matter how hard we try, we simply cannot remember the future (unless
we believe in science-​fiction scenarios allowing people to travel back and
forth in time), just as we cannot go back in time and relive our lives, but we
can indeed think about and long for the past in order to plan and prepare
for the future. Despite the ontological irreversibility of time, we may still
thus contemplate and anticipate the future (Jankélévitch 1983).
It is evident from the aforementioned that the notion of ‘nostalgia’
contains many different meanings, many different connotations and many
different dimensions, depending on who uses the word and for what
purpose. Like most other human emotions, nostalgia is an easy target for
normative evaluation claiming either that it is a good or a bad feeling, that it
is desirable or undesirable, benevolent or dangerous. In either case, we need
to understand that nostalgia in and by itself is significantly influenced by the
many social and cultural forces and processes that surround and shape the
way we talk about, approach, feel, share and sanction nostalgia. Nostalgia
ultimately gains much of its meaning –​for individuals as well as for larger
groups of people –​not only from what is does to people from the ‘inside’,
as it were, but perhaps even more so from the many intricate ways nostalgia
as an emotion is made available to them from the ‘outside’. In this way, what
has been termed ‘emotionology’ –​the study of ‘the attitudes or standards

16
 Introduction

that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic

emotions and their appropriate expression’ (Stearns and Stearns 1985: 813) –​
is as important when trying to describe, understand and analyse nostalgia as
it is with any other human emotion. This is exactly why the social sciences
and humanities hold so much promise for studying and analysing nostalgia.

Living in ‘the age of nostalgia’

As we saw earlier, the notion of ‘nostalgia’ was originally conceived within
a medical context when Johannes Hofer more than 300 years ago proposed
the notion of ‘nostalgia’ to account for the homesickness suffered by Swiss
mercenaries based far away from their homeland. Hofer –​and many of those
who later followed in his footsteps –​regarded nostalgia as an individual
pathology that often required medical intervention in order to be cured.
As we have seen, this is, not the case today, when nostalgia is now mostly
viewed as a widespread and normal emotional experience devoid of its
previous association with medicine, psychology and pathology.
Today, nostalgia is not only here to stay, it is a topic that, since the turn of
the millennium, has witnessed a heretofore unheard of boom within many
areas of social life. Back in the late 1970s, Fred Davis (1977) observed a
‘nostalgia wave’ in many different sectors of society. A quarter of a century
later, Svetlana Boym (2001) noted that we were witnessing a ‘nostalgia
epidemic’. It thus seems as if nostalgia never really disappears, at least not
for long, but pops up every now and then, reminding us of the impact and
importance of the past. The present –​perhaps nowadays in an previously
unprecedented manner –​is haunted by the past, not only as an ontological
premise, as suggested by the so-​called ‘hauntologists’, who argue that the
present is always and unavoidably pregnant with that which precedes it, but
also as an experiential dimension evident in the way people wilfully seek
out the relics of the past (or specific and selective parts of it) in order to be
able to endure the present. In many ways, nostalgia has turned out to be an
important yet also rather controversial ‘master narrative’ in contemporary
society, informing public, political and academic discourse alike (Becker
2018). This is evident within the worlds of politics, marketing, architecture,
the arts, consumer goods, television and the media and in many other
pockets of social life. Today, there are many different actors and agencies
involved in rewriting, repackaging and selling the past as something beautiful,
memorable and meaningful, sometimes even in the shape of ‘false history’
(Hatherley 2017). This revival of nostalgia has in recent years been fuelled
by many developments of late-​modern social life. In a consumer society
like ours, in which we are increasingly interpellated (by political and
commercial interests) as consumers rather than as producers, and in which

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 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

our identities are created around what we buy and how we look (Bauman
2007), consumption becomes an important generator for nostalgia. This
has spawned nothing less than a retro wave within technology, leisure-​time
activities, holiday and travel plans, housing arrangements, food and drinks
as well as fashion and clothing, where, for example, ‘vintage fashion’ is
regarded not only as a personal statement but also as a new search for aesthetic
authenticity (for example, Veenstra and Kuipers 2013). Think, for example,
about how football outfits from the 1970s and 1980s have now once again
become popular even among younger generations, T-​shirts from long-​since
dissolved rock bands from ‘the Golden Age of Rock’ are worn by old and
young alike and holograms of deceased celebrities are being screened at rock
concerts and pop shows in order to give it all a sense of history and patina.
This tendency extends also to many other realms of consumption, with vinyl
records, video tape recorders, old-​style telephones, classic black-​and-​white
movies, a newly found interest in board games (a long-​forgotten pastime, in
an age of computer gaming) and other practices signalling a demand or desire
for getting re-​acquainted with the not-​so-​very-​distant past. Things are being
brought down from the attic or up from the basement in order to be once
again put to use. And where there is nostalgic consumption there is destined
to be nostalgic marketing, nostalgic branding and nostalgic advertising
thriving on our thirst for the old, familiar, calm and cosy in a world of rapid
change and high-​speed life-​styles (just think of the recurrent ‘throwback’
phenomenon within marketing and sales). From within the realm of politics,
nostalgia has been there all along, but it is now perhaps more visible and
directly spoken than previously. For example, whereas former president of
the United States Barack Obama made the motto ‘Yes We Can’ his call to
action, thus insisting that we can change the present and future if enough
determination and perseverance are put into it, his successor Donald Trump
instead relied on the phrase ‘Make America Great Again’, playing specifically
on the idea and impression that American society was no longer as great as
it once used to be. Besides its revival within the world of politics, in recent
years nostalgia has also become a very much media-​driven phenomenon that
is evident in television advertising, game shows, re-​runs and re-​recordings of
old films and series, and there are constant marathons of old-​time television
productions and old cinema movies from the childhood and adolescent years
of the currently living older generations (see, for example, Niemeyer 2014;
Pallister 2019). All this adds up to suggesting that we now seemingly live in
an ‘age of nostalgia’ or a ‘nostalgic age’. As late American historian David
Lowenthal observed on the recent nostalgic wave in his 2015 revisit to the
topic of nostalgia 30 years after the first publication of his 1985 magnum
opus The Past is a Foreign Country:

18
 Introduction

Nostalgia is today’s favoured mode of looking back. It saturates the

press, serves as advertising bait, merits sociological study, expresses
modern malaise … Once the solace or menace of the few, nostalgia
now attracts and afflicts all. Myriad ancestor-​hunters scour archives;
millions throng to historic houses; antiques engross hoi polloi; every
childhood past is souvenired. Reversing earlier ill-​repute, nostalgia is
promoted as therapeutic, an aid to self esteem, a crutch for personal
continuity, a defence against reminders of mortality … Restaurants lead
the nostalgia boom … Nostalgia fuelled the nascent film industry and
suffuses modern cinema … Present woes are drowned in Irish theme
pubs … In sum, nostalgic remembrance is a burgeoning enterprise,
and almost any era will do. (Lowenthal 2015: 31–​39)

Nostalgia is all around, and Lowenthal is far from the only one acutely
aware of the relatively new and seemingly widespread appeal of nostalgia
in contemporary society, but whereas Lowenthal did not directly associate
this development with the world of politics (but, rather, with a general
globalization and commercialization tendency of nostalgia), others have
been more keen to point specifically to the potential political driving forces
behind and the ideological underpinnings of current claims to nostalgia.
For example, according to Zygmunt Bauman (2017), in one of his last
books before his death, we are, in his words, living in the ‘age of nostalgia’,
and in his view this new nostalgic (or what he calls ‘retrotopian’) mood is
particularly observable within the reactionary types of politics wanting to
find solutions to present problems by returning to past practices or ideas.
Although difficult to specifically date, this boom in retrotopia/​nostalgia –​
as has been observed by many other political commentators and cultural
analysts –​apparently coincides with and is probably also a response to the
appearance of many contemporary social problems on a global scale: mass
migration and mass immigration, financial crisis, international terrorism,
ecological challenges, welfare-​state crisis, existential uncertainty, political
apathy and so on. Perhaps the recent rise of nostalgia can be seen as a response
to these problems facing individuals, nations and the global community
alike –​almost as a sort of globalized sadness. Perhaps the desire for a time
when the world was seemingly less threatening, more transparent and less
complex, when one could distinguish clearly between friends and enemies,
and when it was, at least in principle, possible to confront, control and fix
the problems, is exactly what fuels the widespread nostalgia drive we are
witnessing in contemporary society.
What is so characteristic of the present nostalgia epidemic or nostalgia
wave is that, on the one hand, in many ways it is at odds with so many

19
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

trends and tendencies otherwise prevalent at this moment in time (for

example, a concern with the future of the planet, solving the climate crisis
and a preoccupation with dealing with acute problems like the COVID-​19
situation by relying on new medicines and innovative technologies), but
on the other hand it is also a reaction to the dissatisfaction and despair with
the way our contemporary society and world order tackles its problems
and crises. It has been suggested by many social theorists that our society
currently finds itself in a state of crisis. As such, there is nothing new in this.
There has been a consensus among many sociologists and social philosophers
throughout the past centuries in suggesting that society finds itself in what
seems to be a chronic state of crisis. After all, what use would there be for
critical sociologists and critical philosophers if there was nothing to write
or worry about? However, what is new, perhaps, is that a sense of doom has
descended upon our contemporary social landscape, whether it is associated
with climate changes, the COVID-​19 scare, international terrorism, financial
crisis, immigration problems, political impotence, political radicalism, fake
news and the like. Feelings of nostalgia seem increasingly to be mentioned
and targeted as the individual as well as collective response to the towering
challenges and problems confronted by contemporary society (see, for
example, Koppetsch 2018). In this sense, nostalgia is regarded as a sort of
safety raft for the hapless victims caught in the stormy weather and troubled
waters of contemporary social change and turmoil. So, whereas nostalgia
was originally conceived as an illness, it is itself now increasingly seen as a
remedy for and bulwark against the social pathologies of our time and age.
Obviously, besides its recent rise to prominence and attention, nostalgia has
been there all along, it has never disappeared and it is not a new invention –​
but it does seem as if the emotion has gained momentum in the post-​
millennial decades, in society and academic circles alike. Notions like ‘the
return of ’, ‘the revival of ’ or ‘the resurgence of ’ nostalgia have thus in the
past decade reverberated throughout social and cultural life, bearing witness
to the feeling that we seem to live in times characterized increasingly by
a nostalgic mood. The contemporary ‘mood of the world’ (Bude 2018) is
thus unmistakably nostalgic, just as we have earlier experienced moods –​
currents and condensations of collective emotional energies –​of depression,
fear, anger, grief, love and so on spanning several years or even decades
(‘The Great Depression’, ‘The Winter of Discontent’ or ‘The Summer
of Love’). In this way, we often seem to carve out slices of and measure
historical time by way of its prominent emotions. Nostalgia has not wiped
out such other emotional moods, but it seems to feed on, respond to and
exist alongside them.
Despite common claims to the contrary, claims not least audible in our
contemporary ‘now society’ (a society increasingly decoupled from past and

20
 Introduction

present), the past is not dead, it is a living part of the present in the memories,
recollections and epiphanies that people entertain and actively seek out in
order to connect with what has gone before. Obviously, not everybody –​as
we saw earlier –​is equally concerned with the past or their own past. There
are people and groups of people for whom only the present or the future
counts –​or at least, this is what they want to flaunt through their words and
actions. However, no one can escape the tentacles of time, no one is ever
entirely freed from the shackles of the past, no one can totally avoid contact
with or connection to that which went before. We always live in the shadow
of the past, but the questions only remain how we live in it and how we relate
to it. Here the notion of ‘nostalgia’ can provide us –​as ordinary people but
also as practising social scientists –​with useful pointers to how people try
to make sense of the past in the present. German sociologist Norbert Elias
(1987) once wisely warned against what he called ‘sociologists’ retreat to
the present’, whereby he meant that sociologists should always keep a keen
eye on the importance of historical time and historical context instead of
providing only historyless snapshots and analyses of what currently takes
place. The present state of affairs is always the outcome of extended and
complex historical processes leading from the past to the present –​in the
lives of individuals as well as in the lives of societies and cultures. Instead
of shying away from nostalgia or being afraid to admit to it, social scientists
should be nostalgic not in the simple sense of the term (insisting that the
past was so much better than the present) but, rather, in the sense that Fred
Davis (1979) once called ‘interpreted nostalgia’, whereby he meant that we
should always critically scrutinize the roots and question the expressions of
nostalgia in order to find out what it means, why, how, when and to whom.
In this way, we would be recognizing and admitting nostalgia its rightful
place as a topic of social research.
The recent rise of nostalgia is, as mentioned, not only related to the fact
that nostalgic sentiments and longings increasingly seem to influence culture,
everyday life, politics, the media, popular culture and our consumption
patterns, but also that nostalgia has gradually acquired a foothold within
many different areas of research, perhaps particularly within the social
sciences and humanities. Nostalgia is thus a new hot topic within social
science and humanities research. For example, I recently edited a volume
titled Nostalgia Now (Jacobsen 2020a), which provides insights into many
different theoretical and empirical dimensions of nostalgia as an individual
and collective emotion. Working on this volume made me aware that the
interest in nostalgia thrives in many corners of the academic world and that
nostalgia for many scholars and researchers increasingly constitutes a useful
lens for understanding how contemporary society and contemporary life are
in different ways trying to reconnect with the past. Moreover, a simple search

21
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

for the notion of ‘nostalgia’ in Google’s Ngram viewer reveals that the use of
the word ‘nostalgia’ in book titles –​including academic books –​throughout
the 20th century (and particularly throughout the past 50 years) has risen
exponentially. Furthermore, looking at the catalogues from major academic
publishing houses as well as searches of journal articles, it is obvious that
nostalgia has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars and researchers
from various disciplines now seeing a potential for doing interesting studies
and analyses of a topic that for a long period of time was almost routinely
neglected. The recent rise of the topic of nostalgia within different science
disciplines and fields of research in itself shows how this emotion is and
continues –​perhaps even more now than ever before –​to constitute an
important part of our human way-​of-​being-​in-​the-​world.

About this book

So far, this introductory chapter has described some analytical dimensions,
delineated some historical details and provided some personal and professional
interpretations of nostalgia that are, however, neither representative of
the breadth or depth of existing research on the matter nor by any means
uncontested. This volume is devoted to showing how nostalgia has been
conceived within a variety of scientific disciplines and how it continues to
inspire scholars working within different branches of research. The chapters
in the volume cover a broad range of disciplines from within the social
sciences, the humanities and the arts. Each chapter outlines, exemplifies
and discusses the way nostalgia has been approached, presented and analysed
within a specific disciplinary context and how nostalgia as a topic of research
has evolved over time. The chapters included thus provide evidence for the
fact that nostalgia has gradually –​after many years of absence –​gradually
developed into quite a hot and thriving topic in parts of the contemporary
research landscape. However, nostalgia is not only part of a generalized
disciplinary interest; also in more specialized sub-​branches of research such
as tourism studies, heritage studies, media studies, urban studies, memory
studies, consumer studies, childhood studies and popular culture studies the
emotion of nostalgia seems to be a particularly useful and fruitful theme
for shedding light on and understanding some recent changes in society
and culture.
Like the study of any other human emotion, the study of nostalgia
cannot be allowed to be monopolized by any single scientific discipline or
any unitary perspective. In order to capture its diversified and multifaceted
nature, nostalgia should be researched ‘in the round’, as it were, drawing on
insights from various different disciplinary, theoretical and methodological
perspectives. For example, psychology is particularly useful for understanding

22
 Introduction

the individual-​psychological as well as social-​psychological functions of

nostalgia; sociology for shedding light on the presence and importance of
nostalgia at the micro, meso and macro levels of society; anthropology for
showing the cultural and cross-​cultural differences and similarities in nostalgic
expressions; history for documenting epochal changes in the way nostalgia is
perceived; architecture for capturing the concrete and symbolic expression of
nostalgia in artefacts and urban planning; and so on. Other disciplines may
provide insights into other aspects of nostalgia. There are by now so many
classic and recent, recognized and unrecognized, works on nostalgia –​some
are very detailed and specific, others are more comprehensive –​that show its
bountiful analytical possibilities and its continued appeal to academics writing
within widely different and related disciplines (see, for example, Howland
1962; Fischer 1980; Shaw and Chase 1989; Golam 1995; Lowenthal 1996;
Austin 2007; Trilling 2009; Howard 2012; Angé and Berliner 2014; Cassin
2016; Dodman 2018; Groebner 2018; Maertz 2019; Sayers 2020). Because
nostalgia means so many different things to different people at different
times, we need to be careful not to limit our scope or confine our curiosity.
This book is deliberately seeking to open up nostalgia to inquisitiveness
and interpretation.
Within many scientific disciplines, nostalgia has often been a neglected or
forgotten feeling, emotion or sentiment (without wanting here to engage
in the intricate differences between ‘feelings’, ‘emotions’ and ‘sentiments’).
For example, within my own discipline of sociology, and even within the
sub-​discipline of ‘the sociology of emotions’, the topic of nostalgia is often –​
even in classic and more recent textbooks, introductions or encyclopaedias –​
conspicuous primarily by its absence, lacking a separate entry or even a
mention (see, for example, Franks and McCarthy 1989; Kemper 1990;
Cuthbertson-​Johnson et al 1994; Lewis and Haviland-​Jones 2000; Stets and
Turner 2007, 2015). This is quite surprising, but it nevertheless testifies to the
fact that even among many scholars working within the fields of ‘emotion
research’ or ‘emotion theory’, nostalgia is –​first and foremost –​often not
really regarded as an emotion. Nostalgia, it seems, is not taken seriously as
‘an emotion’ alongside so many other emotions studied, for example, love,
trust, shame, anger, guilt and so on. There are, however, exceptions that
show that nostalgia is in fact a phenomenon that should be included under
the heading of ‘human emotions’ (see, for example, Smith 2015). This
general neglect of nostalgia as an emotion is surprising, but it also makes it
opportune and worthwhile to study it by asking such quite elementary and
explorative questions as: When are people feeling nostalgic? Why? How do
they experience nostalgia? Who are the ‘nostalgics’ (or the ‘nostophiles’),
and who are the ‘nostophobics’? What are the consequences of nostalgia –​
on the individual and social level? How is nostalgia perceived, received and

23
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

sanctioned within a social and cultural context? Many more questions could
be added. Admittedly, there is by now a substantial portion of research on
nostalgia, but much of it is of a quite recent date and some of it opens up
new pathways for investigation. Fortunately, there are still so many important
and relevant questions to ask –​questions still searching for answers –​and the
chapters in this volume will try to suggest answers to some of them as well
as to so many others. In this way, this book is a treasure trove for anyone
wanting to get acquainted with nostalgia.
This book introduces the topic of nostalgia from a number of different
academic disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, history, sociology,
anthropology and psychology. The book aspires to provide readers with an
introduction to the way a number of important disciplines from within social
science and the humanities have conceptualized, studied and commented on
nostalgia. The overall purpose of the volume is to show how nostalgia has
been a latent presence within many disciplines for a long time, but also how
it has increasingly turned into a topic deserving of attention within various
academic disciplines and research contexts. The book is tightly organized
around a disciplinary focus, with each chapter devoted to the treatment of
nostalgia within a specific discipline (for example, sociology, anthropology,
media studies, consumer and marketing studies and so on). However, since
the book covers a broad range of neighbouring disciplines, the volume is
also multidisciplinary as it paints a diversified and broad-​spectrum picture
of how the topic of nostalgia across different disciplines has developed by
way of ‘interdisciplinary contamination’ and debates between different
disciplines. The book is intended as an introduction to nostalgia as such a
diversified and multifaceted phenomenon that can be captured, studied and
analysed from a number of different academic vantage points. In this way,
the book can be used as a resource for anyone interested in understanding
nostalgia as a topic that concerns scholars and researchers working within
their disciplinary, theoretical, methodological and normative backgrounds,
and as a testimony to the continued relevance and vitality of nostalgia in
contemporary academia.
Staring out with the so-​called ‘mother of all science’, the discipline of
philosophy, in Chapter 1 by Giulia Bovassi we are taken back to the ancestors
of modern thinking in ancient philosophy. The author shows how both
nostalgia and philosophy respond to the human need for meaning, and in
the chapter this need is traced through discussions of themes such as time,
memory and identity from classical Greek philosophy to contemporary
postmodern philosophical thought. Chapter 2 is written by Tobias Becker
and is devoted to outlining how and why historical science as compared to
other disciplines has been reluctant to engage more fully with nostalgia. The
author shows how a more elaborate historical understanding of nostalgia

24
 Introduction

could draw on a number of relevant approaches such as conceptual history,

memory studies, the history of temporality and the history of emotions.
In Chapter 3, Andrew R. Murphy introduces to the topic of nostalgia
within the field of political science. He shows how the theme and political
practice of nostalgia can be traced from the writings of ancient Greek
philosophers through the work of Niccolò Machiavelli and Edmund Burke
to contemporary Christian right-​wing politics in the United States. The
book’s Chapter 4 by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Janelle L. Wilson explores
sociology’s contribution to understanding and analysing nostalgia on the
micro, meso and macro levels. Admitting that sociology’s interest in taking
nostalgia seriously has been somewhat belated and reluctant, the authors
nevertheless show how nostalgia can in fact serve as an important prism
for understanding a wide range of sociological issues. In Chapter 5 by Tim
Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides, we turn to the discipline of psychology
and its particular ‘take’ on nostalgia. Based on a compact review of early
psychological studies of nostalgia, the authors propose a new regulatory
or functional approach to nostalgia and provide suggestions for future
directions for psychological research into nostalgia. Chapter 6 is authored
by Michael Herzfeld, who takes us on a tour of anthropology’s multiple
engagements with nostalgia. He shows how the anthropological interest
in nostalgia encapsulates numerous interpretations, of which some appear
in unexpected contexts. He critically discusses how the discipline analyses
nostalgia as well as how the discipline –​in the shape of so-​called ‘salvage
anthropology’ –​has sometimes itself engaged in an exoticizing nostalgia.
In Chapter 7, Katharina Niemeyer shows how nostalgia is increasingly
a mediated and mediatized phenomenon in contemporary culture. She
explores the intrinsic relationship between media, technology and nostalgia
from a media-​philosophical standpoint by discussing the current theoretical
and empirical scholarly work in the field. Nostalgia, however, is not only
increasingly a mediated emotion but also a marketed emotion. In Chapter 8,
Ela Veresiu, Thomas Derek Robinson and Ana Babić Rosario provide an
overview of how marketing and consumer research can shed light on the
role and function of nostalgia in times of consumerism. The authors outline
the importance of individual nostalgia among consumers, then move on
to producers’ application of nostalgia in advertising and branding strategies
as well as to illustrate the role of collective nostalgia in broader consumer
culture. Nostalgia is not only part of the universe of science or research
but also an integral aspect of artistic and literary expression. Chapter 9 by
Niklas Salmose and Eric Sandberg invites us into the wonderful world of
literature by examining the close relationship between nostalgia and literature,
surveying the history of literature through a selection of its most prominent
engagements with nostalgia, and then delineating the mechanics of a nostalgic

25
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

literary aesthetics. In Chapter 10, Fernando Quesada and Andrés Carretero –​

in a roundabout way –​introduce the topic and practice of nostalgia from the
field of architecture. The chapter proposes a narration of this phenomenon
in reverse manner, from today to yesterday, to conclude with a proposal for
the practice of ‘memory without nostalgia’. In this story, the authors give
preponderance to three very specific historical moments of epistemological
rupture as key points in the problematic relationship between architecture and
nostalgia: the present historicist postmodernism, 19th-​century eclecticism
and the Renaissance. The book is concluded with a Postscript in which
some of the recurrent and transversing themes from the Introduction and
the chapters are revisited, discussed and put into perspective. Moreover, the
Postscript also engages with the notion of ‘the nostalgia of the future’ and
discusses the possible future of nostalgia.
It is the hope and aspiration for this book to show the multidisciplinary and
multifaceted nature of nostalgia and to point to possible pathways for further
exploration of nostalgia as an emotion of importance for understanding
human life and society. Nostalgia is and remains an important emotion to
study for all social science and humanities disciplines, not least because it
provides us with an understanding –​particularly important in a ‘now society’
like ours in which everything associated with the past is regarded as outdated
and irrelevant –​of how the present is always connected in the hearts and
minds of people to that which went before it. The book’s chapters will
thus show some of the many different ways in which people find meaning
(and perhaps even hope) –​individually and collectively –​in a longing for
the past, and they thus pay homage to the important existentialist insight of
American philosopher and theologian Ralph Harper, who once stated that
‘through nostalgia we know not only what we hold most dear, but the quality
of experiencing that we deny ourselves habitually’ (Harper 1966: 26–​27).
To neglect nostalgia is to fail to recognize that the search for meaning (and
hope) is often rooted in what has already been experienced, felt and lived.

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 1

Philosophy and Nostalgia:

‘Rooting’ within the
Nostalgic Condition
Giulia Bovassi

Introduction
This chapter, without claiming to be exhaustive, aims to deepen the
investigation around the theme of nostalgia from a purely philosophical
point of view. The purpose is not to examine ‘philosophers’ or ‘philosophical
theories on nostalgia’ –​as they are difficult to identify –​but, rather, to locate
nostalgia within the philosophical heritage, trying to make famous thinkers
of the classical tradition interact with other, more contemporary ones.
By adopting this approach, it is possible to verify how the object of
analysis (nostalgia) can, in some respects, be considered a supra-​historical
constant: despite the ambiguity that characterizes it, the theme of nostalgia,
in fact, emerges with a certain clarity and redundancy in close correlation
with philosophical investigations related to the processes of memory (mnestic
functions) and to researches on the knowability (or definition) of time in three
dimensions (past, present, future). Through this examination, attention is
drawn to two other types of interaction between nostalgia and philosophical
knowledge, which link to those mentioned earlier: one concerns the
relationship between the nostalgic condition and knowledge (of ourselves
and of reality), where a reading of nostalgia as an instrument of knowledge
is proposed; the other makes some reflections, starting from the question of
how nostalgia can determine the construction of personal identity.
In the first section, ‘Nostalgia as maieutics’, the nostalgic condition
investigates philosophical exercise, making specific reference to the Socratic

31
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

metaphor. Socrates compared the philosophical exercise (in particular, the one
carried out in a dialogical form) to the maieutic art, the art of the midwife/​
obstetrician, asserting that the effort to be made by every human being in
the philosophical search for truth should be solicited to the point of making
the interlocutor ‘give birth’ to the expected truth. A similar procedure occurs
for any object of knowledge investigated, even the human being in all his
complexity. For this reason, the labour of knowing, together with the effort
that it implies, responds to the Socratic call to ‘take care of yourself ’ (epimèleia
heautou). The latter, from late antiquity to the contemporary age, has been
accepted as an appeal to make the philosophical exercise a cure for the soul
and a behavioural doctrine with social, moral and political implications, even
if it later lost the spiritual charge that was strongly present in the classical era.
Nostalgia –​being a rich mixture of contradictions and ambiguities in close
correlation with temporality, memory, knowledge and identity –​reveals itself
to the philosophical discipline as a tool to reach the truth. A ‘purified’ or,
we might say, ‘crisp’ (‘disclosed’, to use a philosophical synonym) truth. The
human being, in fact, while living the nostalgic condition, and thanks to
the conflicting experience (pòlemos, a term used to describe the intellectual
effort in the philosophical exercise) that it produces (or, rather, the backward
path, between memories, emotions, history, still projected in the present and
future), makes new knowledge emerge. The ‘return effect of truth’ (to use an
expression of Michel Foucault’s) just mentioned, capable of uniting nostalgia
and philosophy, will be explored here by referring in the first instance to
the Platonic allegory of the cave and St Augustine’s well-​known reflection
on time , and in a second case to the reflections of Edmund Husserl and, in
particular, of Martin Heidegger around the concepts of ‘temporalization’ and
‘Dasein’ (being-​there/​existence), in which the phenomena of experience of
the oblivion, of remembering and of recalling, assume an important position
to identify the object of nostalgia.
These last considerations lead to the second section, ‘Temporality and
identity within philosophical thought about nostalgia’. The aim of this section
is to further investigate the value of philosophical contributions regarding
the concepts of time and identity in relation to the nostalgic condition. It
brings into dialogue numerous authors who, although not having given
special consideration to nostalgia, provide valuable tools for reflecting on the
theme in question. We will come to the conclusion that the manifestation to
memory of the object proper to the nostalgic condition –​and the inevitable
transition from the present to the past –​brings a sort of ‘nostalgia for the
future’, that is, a human need to return ‘home’, to the ‘womb’. As we will
see, this can include within itself the danger of a deformation of the object
of which we are nostalgic, but it is equally evident that the ‘healing’ effect of
the nostalgic condition can occur at the moment in which the knowledge

32
 Philosophy and Nostalgia

it produces becomes the cause of a change rich in value for the human
being and his existence. In this sense, the two notions of ‘uprooting’ and
‘rooting’ present in Simone Weil’s thought are well suited: the first indicates
a state of ‘alienation’, namely the absolute extraneousness of the subject to
himself and to what he does; while the second indicates the need not to
get involved in a situation of rootlessness (nowadays often defined as the
state of liquid or nomadic identity in which human beings find themselves).
Two other voices will enrich these very current passages of philosophical
thought on nostalgia: Hannah Arendt –​through a concept similar to those
mentioned by Weil, the concept of ‘estrangement’; and the philosopher
Byung-​Chul Han, whose thought closely touches the absence of roots as
a distinctive feature of today’s society, as he considers it a consequence of
multiple causes, not least the fragmentation of time, namely the separation
between time and signification. This triggers the dispersion of the human
being, which is at the centre of Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the effects
of a compromised identity.
The liquid paradigm occupies the final section, ‘The nostalgic condition
within the post-​modern liquid paradigm’, where, among thinkers such as
Günther Anders and Gilles Lipovetsky, nostalgia develops in correlation to
the nomadic presupposition of the postmodern subject, who tends to deprive
himself of those intellectual tools which are useful to place himself as an
author aware of his own lived time. This is analysed simultaneously with the
metaphysical and anthropological deconstruction typical of secularization,
considering this aspect an integral part of the short-​circuit produced by
the conflict between the need for continuity (‘rooting’) and the new man,
defined by Anders as ‘without World’ and by Lipovetsky as the subject of
an ‘accelerated obsolescence’.
The premise of the present chapter is based on two observations: first, that
nostalgia constitutes a territory in many respects unexplored with systematicity
by the philosophical heritage; and second, that nostalgic specificity has much to
offer both to philosophical method and to the content of philosophical thought.
Thus, ultimately, not only does the philosophical approach offer a unique
contribution to the topic of nostalgia with respect to the type of discipline,
but nostalgia itself, explored with the tools of philosophy, offers a new way of
understanding philosophy itself and the philosophical comprehension of the
one/​those capable of experiencing the nostalgic condition.

Nostalgia as maieutics
Maieutics is the art of the midwife, the woman who helps and accompanies
women in labour. This comparison of midwifery with philosophy stems
from a fundamental Socratic lesson about education in the philosophical

33
 INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

exercise: in fact, it must be based on attitudes of gradual accompaniment

and stimulation, rather than trying to fill others’ minds with knowledge
given for granted. The one who leads to philosophical practice has instead
the responsibility –​responding well to the metaphor of the midwife –​to
encourage a ‘visceral’ effort from the individual, in order to reach the
knowledge of truth, first of all by himself and, second, acknowledging that
truth is something already present within his soul. The effort imposed by
maieutics, applied to philosophical praxis, is that of unearthing the forms
of knowledge already possessed by the individual in order to bring them to
memory; a process that Plato called ‘reminiscence theory of knowledge’,
precisely the process that makes the content of memory sharp, alive and
ready to be explored again by the intellectual faculties. To adhere to this
effort accomplished by thought means to access a different way of living
the experience of our own present. In particular, since thought is always a
thought of a human being who thinks, philosophical practice can turn out
to be only an attitude, an existential condition that inevitably passes through
the crisis, a time of strong transitory destabilization during which he feels
called to confirm past certainties, evolve them or abandon them.
This expedient of reason, on the inner and outer realities of the human
being, becomes an object of judgement, order and discernment in order to
distinguish what is weak (opinion) and what is strong (truth). The actions
of ‘thinking’ and ‘remembering’ ascribe the historical–​biographical legacy of
the human consortium and of each of its members, a legacy in which they
express their identity, their language and their relationship with the other.
In some ways, this awareness responds to the provocative Greek appeal of
epimèleia heautou (‘to take care of yourself ’), as expressed in the Socratic
exhortation of gnōthi seauton (‘to know yourself ’) (see Foucault 2011: 5)
later taken up within Foucauldian thought.
In the allegory of the cave, as described in the Platonic dialogue Republic
(Plato 1967: 339–​342), human beings, prisoners of a fictitious present
inhabited in conditions of precarious freedom, serve as a metaphor for
the expedient of truth on time, considering that what they live until
the moment immediately preceding the expedient is the mimesis of an
inaccessible knowledge, because inaccessible are the tools –​whose property
they ignore –​useful to access the first of all questions: quid est veritas (‘what
is truth’)? They share a state of imprisonment, chained as they are, neck
and limbs, at the bottom of the cave, without being able to know anything
else beyond the shadows cast by other individuals, outside, on a long wall
built in front of their eyes.
Through the allegory, Plato discusses what would happen if only one
of the chained men managed to undo the chains that prevent him from
knowing or discovering that what he was convinced he had already learned

34
 Philosophy and Nostalgia

was, in reality, only a fiction, and also wondering how gradually the eyes
of those who have spent an entire existence in the dark will now adapt to
the light of reality. The latter, the object of experience, is at the disposal
of the one (the human being) who can know its sense and meaning (from
the empirical to the metaphysical one); it lets itself be known by an act of
will of the subject. In order for this to happen, it is obligatory that he, the
individual, first makes the effort to escape from his own condition (to get
out of himself). As in a circular motion, after the exit from himself, the
individual returns to himself or acquires a new autonomy of thought that
makes him a different citizen of the past, present and future.
This mechanism is well identified with the phenomenon called ‘disclosure’,
which synthesizes the possibility for the main agent (the thinking individual)
of the philosophical exercise to see with the eyes of reason what was
previously hidden, inaccessible or deceptive. Emanuele Severino, in the text
Essenza del nichilismo (The Essence of Nihilism) (Severino 1982: 145–​153) –​
in which he argues the incidence of nihilism (a philosophical model that
absolutizes nothingness, the lack of every root and identity) in the structure
of the contemporary West –​distinguishes between the ‘Path of Day’ and
the ‘Path of Night’. The paths indicate two clear and definitive antagonisms
(Severino opposes the idea that there may be an ambiguity in this distinction),
being and nothingness. Now, this very explanatory image used by Severino
helps us to grasp an important aspect: what changes is the expression of reality
(being) in the pluralism of its forms, not its truth (substance), which instead
remains, regardless of the contingent change. In fact, Severino maintains that
‘a “truth” that does not know how to hold still is not a truth. ‘Philosophy’,
he continues, ‘is the place, the guardian of truth’ (Severino 1982: 41). This
happens only if that ‘original disclosure’ (Severino 1982: 41) which is the
exit from the cave and the fidelity to the immutable truth of the objects
of knowledge takes place. If it is compared to the nostalgic condition, the
juncture between the two paths is an instrument of discernment capable of
helping man not to implode the present in a melancholy or, on the contrary,
in a deconstructive utopia. The provocation dictated by nostalgia is exactly
that of not confusing what happens in historical time with immutable truth
(natural origin, roots, identity and so on). Whenever history has seen a break
in continuity between past, present and future, it has been at the same time
(or in retrospect) as an event so extreme as to prevent members of the human
family from recognizing themselves in a common origin that allows us to
talk about community. As Severino affirms:

The forgetfulness of the truth of being, in which the West got lost,
does not mean then that the appearance, in which Western man
consists, has emptied itself of its eternal spectacle. And primitive man,

35
Another random document with
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change this painful subject, she fell into a shy silence—which was
only broken at last by Mr. John himself.
“No, Lettie, I have not been always idle, and I have need,” said the
roused man; “and when I hear a little thing like you speaking about
work, and helping to keep a house, it makes me think shame of
myself, Lettie. You and your sisters, that might be so different,
working for your bread—and me this way!”
“Ay, but Miss Jeanie and Miss Aggie work more than we do,” said
Lettie, simply.
For always it is the angel from heaven, miraculous and strange, and
not the daily revelations of Moses and the prophets, which these
bewitched natures think will rouse them. Miss Jeanie and Miss
Aggie, with all their little vanities, had hearts sincere in this point, and
full of gracious unconscious humility. They never reminded the idler,
that they worked for him; never thought that they were pinched and
restrained, in the ostentations they held so dear, because “Johnnie”
hung a burden on their hands; never speculated, indeed, on the
question at all, nor dreamed of giving reasons to themselves for the
spontaneous natural impulse, which made this self-sacrifice
unawares. And he himself never realized it either; but he was struck
with the devotion of Martha and her household. This, unusual,
strange—a thing he did not see every day—moved him; the other
had scarcely occurred to him when Lettie spoke.
They left Glasgow the next day; for neither Agnes nor Rose could
bear to remain in this house, so familiar to them of old; and they did
not return to Mrs. Rodger’s on their way home; but when Miss Aggie
married the lumbering lodger, and came to be settled on the other
side of the Firth, at Alloa, and received her sister as a visitor, Miss
Jeanie made a pilgrimage to Allenders, and told them, with tears in
her eyes, that Johnnie, now a clerk with a Port Dundas merchant,
had said to her, that she should never want while he had anything,
and had given her money to buy the expensive unsuitable upper
garment she wore. Poor Miss Jeanie, with her vanities and
simplicities, never discovered that he owed her gratitude; but for
these words of kindness she was tearfully grateful to him.
 The month at Ayr passed very quietly. In this winter weather Uncle
Sandy’s little company of workers could no longer visit the leafless
garden; and though there was sometimes a great fire made in the
kitchen, and a special lamp lighted for them, yet their own fireside,
the old man thought, was the most suitable place for them now. So
the family were almost perfectly alone; left to compose themselves
into those quiet days which were but the beginning of a subdued and
chastened life. And Uncle Sandy did for them now, what Martha was
wont to do through the terrible time which preceded Harry’s death.
He read to them sometimes;—sometimes he was himself their book
and reader; and from his long experience, the young hearts, fainting
under this great sorrow, learned how many trials life can live through,
and were unwillingly persuaded that the present affliction would not
kill them, as they sometimes hoped it might; but must lighten,
perhaps must pass away. But they clung the closer to their sorrow,
and defied the very chance of returning gladness; and Agnes cut
away the curls of her bright hair, and said she would wear this
widow’s cap her whole life through; and Rose grew sick at sounds of
laughter, and believed she would never smile again.
 CHAPTER XX.

A gloomy piece this morning with it brings;

The sun for sorrow will not show his head.

romeo and juliet.

It was December, cold and dreary, when the family returned to
Allenders. Their very return was a renewal of the first sorrow to both
themselves and Martha. They came, and Harry was not there to
welcome them; they had never before felt so bitterly his absent
place; they came, but Harry came not with them—and Martha’s very
voice of welcome was choked with her anguish for the dead.
There had been much discussion with Uncle Sandy, whom they
were all anxious to induce to return to Allenders, and remain with
them there. The old man did not consent. Reluctant as he was to be
separated from them now, his own old house and neighbourhood
were parts of his gentle nature. He could not leave them—could not
relinquish his universal charge of “the bairns,” nor deprive his young
embroiderers of the air and sunshine, to which no one else might
think of admitting them. So Uncle Sandy brought his charge to
Glasgow, and bade them an affectionate farewell, promising a yearly
visit to Allenders; but he could not give up his little solitary home.
They settled immediately into the monotonous and still order of their
future life. Martha’s room, where there were few things to suggest
painful remembrances, they made a little work-room; and here
Agnes and Rose sat by the window at their work, and Lettie and her
little companion learned their lessons, and laboured with varying
industry—now enthusiastic—now slack and languid, at the
“opening,” in which they were soon skilled. And Martha, returning
wearied from business out of doors, or in the library, came up here to
take off her outer wrappings, and begin to the other labour which
called for her. And Lettie on the carpet, and Katie on her little stool,
kept up a running conversation, which sometimes gave a passing
moment of amusement to the sadder elder hearts; and little Harry
played joyously, beguiling his sad young mother into momentary
smiles; and the baby began to totter on his little feet, and make
daring journeys from the arms of Martha into his mother’s; and
gradually there grew to be a certain pensive pleasure in their
evening walk, and they roused themselves to open the window,
when the little Leith steamer shot past under the trees; and every
day filled itself with its own world of duty, and passed on—slowly, it is
true—but less drearily than at the first.
No one grudged now, nor mixed ill-feeling in the emulation with
which neighbouring agriculturists watched the fields of Allenders.
Something of fear and solemn awe startled the very labourers in
these fields when Martha passed them, assiduous and diligent in all
the work she set herself to do. They were not afraid of her—she did
not impress them with more than the respect which they gave
willingly as her right; but there was something solemn in a
representative of the dead—a person living, as it seemed, but to
carry out the thoughts and wishes of another who had passed away.
The stir and thrill of renewed and increased industry came again
upon Maidlin Cross. It was true they had no model cottages yet, but
the land lay marked out on the other side of the cross, where Harry’s
new houses were to be; and Armstrong thought Miss Allenders had
answered him almost fiercely, when he proposed to plough this land,
and enclose it in a neighbouring field. No—it was Harry’s will those
houses should be built, and built they must be, when justice and right
permitted; and it soon came to be known in Maidlin, where Harry in
his careless good-humour had promised anything without bestowing
it, that it needed but a hint of this to Martha to secure the favour. And
the works went on steadily and prosperously, and with a wise
boldness Martha drew upon Mr. Buchanan’s thousand pounds.
Armstrong, no longer driven to the sad alternative of doing nothing,
or acting on his own responsibility, became emboldened, and was no
longer afraid to be now and then responsible; and Allender Mains
became a great farm-steading, and began to send off droves to
Stirling market, and Falkirk tryste, and was managed as the cautious
Armstrong never could have managed it, had all this gainful risk and
expenditure been incurred for himself.
And on the Sabbath days when they leave the church—Agnes in
her widow’s weeds leaning on Martha’s arm, and Rose leading the
children—they turn aside to a little space railed off from the wall,
where moulders the mossed gravestone of the old Laird of Allenders,
and where the gowans and forget-me-nots grow sweetly under the
spring sunshine upon Harry’s breast. His name is on a tablet of white
marble on the wall—his name and age—nothing more. They go
there silently—almost as it seems involuntarily—towards their grave,
and stand in silence by the railing, visiting the dead, but saying
nothing to each other; and after a little while, as silently as they
came, the family go away. Nor do they ever allude to this visit,
though the custom is never broken through—it is something sacred,
a family solemnity, a thing to be done in silence.
And the ladies of Nettlehaugh and Foggo do not disdain now to call
on Mrs. and Miss Allenders, nor even Miss Dunlop, though she
stands upon her dignity, and has heard a secret whisper that these
hands she condescends to shake, work at her collars and
handkerchiefs, and earn bread by their labour. But at the end of the
dining-room beside Cuthbert’s window, some preparations were
begun long ago for the erection of that conservatory which Miss
Dunlop recommended to Harry—and to her mother’s consternation,
Miss Dunlop makes cool inquiries about it, and presumes they do not
intend to carry it out now. Martha answers with a blank gravity which
she has learned to assume, to cover the pang with which she
mentions his name, that other more important wishes of Harry’s have
to be carried out before she can come to this; but that what he
intended shall be done without fail, and that it only waits a suitable
time. “They say that Heaven loves those that die young,” says
Martha, with a grave simplicity, “yet the dead who die in their youth
leave many a hope and project unfulfilled—and few have been so full
of projects, and had so little time to work them out.”
This is all—but Miss Dunlop, bewildered and conscience-stricken,
dares scarcely speak again of the fickle weakness of poor Allenders,
and all his vain, magnificent aspirations, and efforts to be great. She
has a vague impression that she has blundered in her hasty estimate
of poor Harry, and that it was indeed because his sun went down at
noon that none of his great intentions ripened into success—for no
one ventures to prophesy failure to Harry’s purposes now.
And Cuthbert comes when he can spare a day—comes to bring
them news of the far-away world whose vexed and troubled
murmurs they never hear, and to receive with affectionate sympathy,
all they tell him of their own plans and exertions. Cuthbert is admitted
to the work-room, and takes out Agnes and Rose to their nightly
walk, upon which Martha, who, herself actively employed, has no
need of this, insists; and Agnes leans upon him as on a good and
gentle brother; and there comes a strange ease and repose to
Rose’s heart as she walks shyly by his side in the twilight, saying
little, but preserving with a singular tenacity of recollection everything
the others say. And Rose, waking sometimes now to her old
personal grief—a thing which seems dead, distant and selfish, under
the shadow of this present sorrow—recollects that Martha’s “capital”
is from Mr. Buchanan—that Cuthbert is his favourite nephew, and
that there may be truth yet in the story which fell like a stone upon
her heart. But Rose only speculates unawares upon these individual
anxieties—they seem to her guilty, and she is ashamed to harbour
them—yet still unconsciously she looks for Cuthbert’s coming, and
when he comes grows abstracted and silent, and looks like a shy,
incompetent girl, instead of the fair, sweet-hearted woman into
whose fuller form and maturity her youth developes day by day. Yet
Cuthbert’s eyes are witched and charmed, and he has strangely
correct understanding of every shy, half-broken word she says; and
Rose would start, and wonder, and scarcely believe, in her timid
unconscious humility, could she see how these broken words remain
in Cuthbert’s heart.
 CHAPTER XXI.

I am a very foolish, fond old man,

Fourscore and upward

king lear.
“I was born this day fourscore and five years ago,” said Dragon.
“It’s a great age, bairns, and what few folk live to see; and for every
appearance that’s visible to me, I may live ither ten, Missie, and
never ane be a prin the waur. I would like grand mysel to make out
the hunder years, and it would be a credit to the place, and to a’
belonging till’t; and naebody wishes ill to me nor envies me for my
lang life. Just you look at that arm, Missie; it’s a strong arm for a man
o’ eighty-five.”
And Dragon stretched out his long thin arm, and snapt the curved
brown fingers—poor old Dragon! Not a child in Maidlin Cross but
could have overcome the decayed power which once had knit those
loose joints, and made them a strong man’s arm; but Dragon waved
it in the air exultingly, and was proud of his age and strength, and
repeated again with earnestness: “But I would like grand to make out
the hunder year.”
Lettie, now a tall girl of fifteen, stood by Dragon’s stair, arranging
flowers, a great number of which lay before her on one of the steps.
They were all wild flowers, of faint soft colour and sweet odours, and
Lettie was blending hawthorn and primroses, violets and cowslips,
with green sprigs of the sweetbriar, and here and there an early half-
opened wild rose—blending them with the greatest care and
devotion; while Katie Calder, developed into a stout little comely
woman-like figure, stood by, looking on with half contempt; for Katie
already had made a superb bouquet of garden flowers, and was
carrying it reverentially in her apron.
 “It’s five years this day since Mr. Hairy came first to Allenders”,
continued the old man, “and it’s mair than three since they laid him in
his grave. The like o’ him—a young lad! and just to look at the like o’
me!”
“But it was God’s pleasure, Dragon,” said Lettie, pausing in her
occupation, while the shadow which stole over her face bore witness
that Harry’s memory had not passed away even from her girl’s heart.
“Ay, Missie,” said the old man vacantly; “do ye think the spirit gaed
willingly away? I’ve thought upon that mony a time when I was able
to daunder up bye to the road, and see the farm; and it’s my belief
that Mr. Hairy will never get right rest till a’s done of the guid he
wanted to do, and a’s undone o’ the ill he did—that’s my belief. I
think myself he canna get lying quiet in his grave for minding of the
work he left to do; and if there was ane here skilled to discern spirits,
he might be kent in the fields. What makes the lady sae constant at
it, think ye, night and morning, putting to her ain hand to make the
issue speedier, if it’s no that she kens about him that’s aye waiting,
waiting, and never can enter into his rest.”
Lettie let her flowers fall, and looked away with a mysterious glance
into the dark shade of the trees; for the vague awe of poetic
superstition was strong upon Lettie still.
“Dragon,” she said in a very low voice, “I used to think I heard Harry
speak, crying on me, and his footstep in his own room, and on the
stair; and all the rest thought that too, for I have seen them start and
listen many a time, thinking it was Harry. Do ye think it could be true?
Do ye think, Dragon, it could be Harry? for I came to think it was just
because he was aye in our mind that we fancied every sound was
him.”
“Ane can never answer for the dead,” said the poor old Dragon.
“Ane kens when a living person speaks, for ye can aye pit out your
hand and touch them, and see that they’re by your side; but I pit out
my hand here, Missie—it’s a’ clear air to me—but for aught I ken, an
angel in white raiment may be standing on my stair-head, and
anither within my door, laying a mark in the Book yonder that I may
open it the night at ae special verse, and read that and nae ither.
How is the like o’ me to ken? And you’ll no tell me that Mr. Hairy
winna stand by the bride the morn, and be the first voice to wish her
joy, though we may ne’er hear what he says.”
With a slight tremble, Violet, putting away her flowers, leaned upon
the step, and looked again into the darkening shadow of the trees;
and Lettie tried to think, and to pray in her simplicity that her eyes
might be opened to discern the spirits, and that she might see Harry,
if he were here. But again the mortal shrank from the visible
immortality, and Lettie covered her eyes with a thrill of visionary fear.
“Dragon, look at Lettie’s flowers,” said Katie Calder; “she wants to
put them on the table, where the minister’s to stand, instead of all
the grand ones out of Lady Dunlop’s; and I never saw such grand
flowers as Lady Dunlop’s, Dragon.”
“The dew never falls on them,” said Lettie, starting to return to her
occupation; “and if you were in the room in the dark, you would
never know they were there; but I gathered this by the Lady’s Well,
and this was growing at the foot of the stone where Lady Violet sat,
and the brier and the hawthorn out of that grand hedge, Dragon,
where a’ the flowers are; and if I put them on the table in the dark,
the wee fairy that Dragon kens, will tell the whole house they’re
there; but Lady Dunlop’s have no breath—and mine are far liker
Rose.”
As Lettie speaks, some one puts a hand over her shoulder, and
lifting her flowers, raises them up very close to a glowing radiant
face; and Dragon, hastily getting up from the easy-chair on his stair-
head, jerks his dangling right arm upward towards the brim of the low
rusty old hat, which he wears always. It is only persons of great
distinction whom Dragon so far honours, and Dragon has forgotten
“yon birkie,” in his excited glee about the approaching wedding, and
his respect for the “groom.”
“Very right, Lettie,” said the bridegroom, with a little laugh which has
a tremble in it; “they are far liker Rose. And will you be able to come
to the gate to-morrow, Dragon, and see me carry the flower of
Allenders away?”
 “But ye see, my man,” said Dragon, eagerly, shuffling about his little
platform, as he looked down on Cuthbert, “I never had her about me
or among my hands, when she was a little bairn; and if it was either
Missie there, or the ither ane, I would have a greater miss; for I’ve
gotten into a way o’ telling them stories, and gieing a word of advice
to the bit things, and training them the way they should go; so they’re
turned just like bairns o’ my ain. But I wish Miss Rose and you
muckle joy, and increase and prosperity, and that ye may learn godly
behaviour, and be douce heads of a family; and that’s the warst wish
that’s in my head, though you are taking ane of the family away, and
I never was married mysel.”
And Cuthbert, responding with another joyous laugh, shook hands
with Dragon, after a manner somewhat exhausting to the loose arm,
of whose strength the old man had boasted, and immediately went
away to the waterside, to take a meditative walk along its banks, and
smile at himself for his own exuberant boyish joy. Serious and
solemn had been many of the past occasions on which he had
visited Allenders; and now, as the fulfilment of all his old anticipations
approached so certainly, so close at hand, Cuthbert’s moved heart
turned to Harry—poor Harry! whose very name had a charm in it of
mournful devotion and love!
The sun shone in next morning gaily to the rooms of Allenders, now
suddenly awakened as out of a three years’ sleep; and Agnes curls
her bright hair, and lets the sunshine glow upon it as she winds it
round her fingers, and with a sigh, lays away the widow’s cap, which
would not be suitable, she thinks, on Rose’s wedding-day; but the
sigh is a long-drawn breath of relief—and with an innocent
satisfaction, Agnes, blooming and youthful still, sees her pretty curls
fall again upon her cheek, and puts on her new white gown. It is a
pleasant sensation, and her heart rises unawares, though this other
sigh parts her lips. Poor Harry! his little wife will think of him to-day!
Think and weep, but only with a serene and gentle melancholy; for
the young joyous nature has long been rising; and Agnes, though
she never can forget, laments no longer with the reality of present
grief. It is no longer present—it is past, and only exists in
remembrance; and Agnes is involuntarily glad, and will wear her
widow’s cap no more.
And Martha is dressing little Harry, who will not be quiet in her
hands for two minutes at a time, but dances about with a perpetual
elasticity, which much retards his toilet. There are smiles on Martha’s
face—grave, quiet smiles—for she too has been thinking, with a few
tears this morning, that Harry will be at the bride’s side, to join in the
blessing with which she sends her other child away.
And Rose, in her own chamber, in a misty and bewildered
confusion, seeing nothing distinctly either before or behind her, turns
back at last to that one solemn fact, which never changes, and
remembers Harry—remembers Harry, and weeps, out of a free heart
which carries no burden into the unknown future, some sweet
pensive tears for him and for the home she is to leave to-day; and so
sits down in her bewilderment to wait for Martha’s summons, calling
her to meet the great hour whose shadow lies between her and the
skies.
And Lettie’s flowers are on the table, breathing sweet, hopeful
odours over the bridegroom and the bride. And Lettie, absorbed and
silent, listens with a beating heart for some sign that Harry is here,
and starts with a thrill of recognition when her heart imagines a
passing sigh. Poor Harry! if he is not permitted to stand unseen
among them, and witness this solemnity, he is present in their
hearts.
 CHAPTER XXII.

Behold I see the haven now at hand

To which I mean my wearie course to bend.
Vere the maine shete, and beare up with the land,
The which afar is fairly to be kend,
And seemeth safe from storms that may offend.

faery queen.
Agnes, with her relieved and lightened spirits, goes cheerfully
about her domestic business now, and has learned to drive the little
old gig, and sometimes ventures as far as Stirling to make a
purchase, and begins to grow a little less afraid of spending money.
For some time now, Agnes has given up the “opening”—given it up
at Martha’s special desire, and with very little reluctance, and no one
does “opening” now at Allenders, except sometimes Martha herself,
in her own room, when she is alone. These three years have paid
Miss Jean’s thousand pounds, and one of Macalister’s four, and Mr.
Macalister is very happy to leave the rest with Miss Allenders, who,
when her fourth harvest comes, has promised to herself to pay Mr.
Buchanan. For assiduous work, and Martha’s almost stern economy,
have done wonders in these years; and the bold Armstrong boasts of
his crops, and his cattle now, and is sometimes almost inclined to
weep with Alexander, that there is no more unfruitful land to
subjugate and reclaim.
But before her fourth harvest time, Martha has intimated to Sir John
Dunlop’s factor that it was her brother’s intention to make an offer for
the little farm of Oatlands, now again tenantless, and Armstrong
does not long weep over his fully attained success; though Oatlands
has little reformation to do, compared with Allender Mains. And
Harry’s model houses are rising at Maidlin Cross; sagacious people
shake their heads, and say Miss Allenders is going too far, and is not
prudent. She is not prudent, it is very true—she ventures to the very
edge and utmost extent of lawful limits—but she has never ventured
beyond that yet, nor ever failed.
And Harry’s name and remembrance lives—strangely exists and
acts in the country in which Harry himself was little more than a
subject for gossip. To hear him spoken of now, you would rather
think of some mysterious unseen person, carrying on a great work
by means of agents, that his chosen privacy and retirement may be
kept sacred, than of one dead to all the business and labour of this
world; and there is a certain mystery and awe about the very house
where Harry’s intentions reign supreme, to be considered before
everything else. So strong is this feeling, that sometimes an ignorant
mind conceives the idea that he lives there yet in perpetual secrecy,
and by and bye will re-appear to reap the fruit of all these labours;
and Geordie Paxton shakes his head solemnly, and tells his
neighbours what the “auld man” says—that Allenders cannot rest in
his grave till this work he began is accomplished; and people speak
of Harry as an active, existing spirit—never as the dead.
It is more than a year now since Rose’s marriage, and not far from
five since Harry’s death, and there is a full family circle round the
drawing-room fireside, where Mrs. Charteris has been administering
a lively little sermon to Lettie about the extravagance of destroying
certain strips of French cambric; (“It would have cost five-and-twenty
shillings a yard in my young days,” says the old lady), with which
Lettie has been devising some piece of ornamental work for the
adornment of Agnes. But Lettie’s execution never comes up to her
ideal, and the cambric is destroyed for ever; though Katie Calder,
looking on, has made one or two suggestions which might have
saved it.
“For you see, my dear, this is waste,” said Mrs. Charteris; “and ye
should have tried it on paper first, before you touched the cambric.”
“So I did,” said Lettie, nervously; “but it went all wrong.”
And Rose smiles at the childish answer; and Mrs. Charteris bids
Violet sit erect, and keep up her head. Agnes is preparing tea at the
table. Martha, with little Sandy kneeling on the rug before her,
playing with a box of toys which he places in her lap, sits quietly
without her work, in honour of the family party; and Uncle Sandy is
telling Katie Calder all kinds of news about her companions in Ayr.
Why is Lettie nervous? Cuthbert at the table is looking over a new
magazine, which has just been brought in from Stirling with a supply
of other books ordered by their good brother; and constant longing
glances to this magazine have had some share in the destruction of
Lettie’s cambric. But Lettie is sixteen now, and Agnes thinks she
should not be such a child.
“Here is something for you,” says Cuthbert, suddenly. “Listen, we
have got a poet among us. I will read you the ballad of the ‘Lady’s
Well.’”

“She sat in her window like a dream,

She moved not eye nor hand;
Her heart was blind to the white moonbeam,
And she saw not the early morning gleam
Over the dewy land;
Nor wist she of aught but a tale of wrong,
That rang in her ears the dim day long.

Her hair was like gold upon her head,

But the snow has fallen there;
And the blush of life from her face has fled,
And her heart is dumb, and tranced, and dead,
Yet wanders everywhere—
Like a ghost through the restless night,
Wanders on in its own despight.

But hither there comes a long-drawn sigh—

A thrill to her form, a light to her eye:
Only a sigh on the wind, I wiss;
Keep us and guard us from sounds like this!
For she knew in the breath, for a mystic token,
The words of the rede, by that graybeard spoken.
The bridal robes are glistening fair
In the gray eventide,
Her veil upon her golden hair,
And so goes forth the bride—
Who went before to guide astray
All wayfarers from this way;
Whose the voice that led her hence,
How that graybeard came, and whence;
Known were these to her alone,
And she told the tale to none.

The fountain springs out of the earth,

Nor tells what there it sees;
And the wind with a cry, ’twixt grief and mirth,
Alights among the trees.
She sat her down upon the stone,
Her white robes trailed o’er the cold green turf,
Her foot pressed on the dreary earth,
Alone, alone, alone.
Not an ear to hear, not a voice to tell,
How the lady passed from the Lady’s Well.

The lady sat by the Lady’s Well.

When the night fell dark and gray;
But the morning sun shone in the dell,
And she had passed away.
And no man knew on the coming morrow
Aught but the tale of an unknown sorrow;
And nought but the fountain’s silver sound,
And the green leaves closing in around,
And a great silence night and day,
Mourned for her vanishing away.

But peace to thee, Ladie, lost and gone!

And calm be thy mystic rest.
Whether thou dwellest here unknown,
Or liest with many a kindred one,
 In the great mother’s breast;
The woe of thy curse has come and fled,
Peace and sweet honour to our dead!”

But Lettie, growing red and pale, dropping the paper pattern which
Mrs. Charteris has cut for her, and casting sidelong, furtive glances
round upon them all from under her drooped eyelids, trembles
nervously, and can scarcely keep her seat. When Cuthbert comes to
the end there is a momentary silence, and Martha looks with wonder
on her little sister, and Agnes exclaims in praise of the ballad, and
wonders who can possibly know the story so well. Then follows a
very free discussion on the subject, and some criticism from
Cuthbert; and then Martha suddenly asks: “It is your story, Lettie,
and you don’t often show so little interest. How do you like it? Tell
us.”
“I—I canna tell,” said Lettie, letting all her bits of cambric fall, and
drooping her face, and returning unconsciously to her childish
tongue; “for—it was me that wrote it, Martha.”
And Lettie slid down off her chair to the carpet, and concealed the
coming tears, and the agitated troubled pleasure, which did not quite
realize yet whether this was pain or joy, on Martha’s knee.
Poor Lettie! many an hour has she dreamed by the Lady’s Well—
dreamed out grand histories for “us all,” or grander still

“——Resolved
To frame she knows not what excelling thing
And win she knows not what sublime reward
Of praise and honour——”

But just now the sudden exultation bewilders Lettie; and there is
nothing she is so much inclined to do as to run away to her room in
the dark, and cry. It would be a great relief.
But the confession falls like lightning upon all the rest. Cuthbert,
with a burning face, thinks his own criticism the most stupid in the
world. Rose laughs aloud, with a pleasure which finds no other
expression so suitable. Agnes, quite startled and astonished, can do
nothing but look at the bowed head, which just now she too had
reproved for stooping. And Mrs. Charteris holds up her hands in
astonishment, and Katie claps hers, and says that she kent all the
time. But Martha, with a great flush upon her face, holds Lettie’s wet
cheeks in her hands, and bends down over her, but never says a
word. Children’s unpremeditated acts, simple words and things have
startled Martha more than once of late, as if a deeper insight had
come to her; and now there is a great motion in the heart which has
passed through tempests innumerable, and Martha cannot speak for
the thick-coming thoughts which crowd upon her mind.
That night, standing on the turret, Martha looks out upon the lands
of Allenders—the lands which her own labour has cleared of every
overpowering burden, and which the same vigorous and unwearied
faculties shall clear yet of every encumbrance, if it please God. The
moonlight glimmers over the slumbering village of Maidlin—over the
pretty houses of poor Harry’s impatient fancy, where Harry’s
labourers now dwell peacefully, and know that their improved
condition was the will and purpose of the kindly-remembered dead.
And the little spire of Maidlin Church shoots up into the sky, guarding
the rest of him, whose memory no man dares malign—whose name
has come to honour and sweet fame, since it shone upon that tablet
in the wall—and not one wish or passing project of whose mind,
which ever gained expression in words, remains without fulfilment, or
without endeavour and settled purpose to fulfil. And Martha’s
thoughts turn back—back to her own ambitious youth and its bitter
disappointment—back to the beautiful dawn of Harry’s life—to its
blight, and to its end. And this grand resurrection of her buried hopes
brings tears to Martha’s eyes, and humility to her full and swelling
heart. God, whose good pleasure it once was to put the bar of utter
powerlessness upon her ambition, has at last given her to look upon
the work of her hands—God, who did not hear, according to her
dimmed apprehension, those terrible prayers for Harry which once
wrung her very heart, gave her to see him pass away with peace and
hope at the end, and has permitted her—her, so greedy of good
fame and honour—to clear and redress his sullied name. And now
has been bestowed on Martha this child—this child, before whom
lies a gentle glory, sweet to win—a gracious, womanly, beautiful
triumph, almost worthy of an angel—and the angels know the dumb,
unspeakable humility of thanksgiving which swells in Martha’s heart.
So to all despairs, agonies, bitternesses, of the strong heart which
once stormed through them all, but which God has chastened,
exercised, at length blessed, comes this end. Harvest and seedtime
in one combination—hopes realized, and hopes to come; and all her
children under this quiet roof, sleeping the sleep of calm, untroubled
rest—all giving thanks evening and morning for fair days sent to
them out of the heavens, and sorrow charmed into sweet repose,
and danger kept away. But though Martha’s eyes are blind with
tears, and her heart calls upon Harry—Harry, safe in the strong hand
of the Father, where temptation and sorrow can reach him never
more—the same heart rises up in the great strength of joy and faith,
and blesses God: Who knoweth the beginning from the end—who
maketh His highway through the flood and the flame—His highway
still, terrible though it be—who conducts into the pleasant places,
and refreshes the failing heart with hope; and the sleep which He
gives to His beloved, fell sweet and deep that night upon the wearied
heart of Martha Muir.
the end.

LONDON:
Printed by Schulze and Co., 13, Poland Street.

Corrections

The first line indicates the original, the second the correction.
p. 90

to her ttle sister

to her little sister

p. 115

that is my concern—your’s is
 that is my concern—yours is

p. 239

the pain of them mingled wlth

the pain of them mingled with

p. 275

ROMEO AND JULIE T.

ROMEO AND JULIET.

p. 287

since Mr. Hairy ame first

since Mr. Hairy came first

Erratum

In chapter numbering, Chapter III is missing.

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