![]() ![]() Yet in the seventeenth century, nostalgia was considered to be a curable disease, akin to a severe common cold. It would not occur to us to demand a prescription for nostalgia. (Hofer also suggested nosomania and philopatridomania to describe the same symptoms luckily, these failed to enter common parlance.) Contrary to our intuition, "nostalgia" came from medicine, not from poetry or politics. The word was coined by the ambitious Swiss student Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation in 1688. "Nostalgia" is only pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek. The word "nostalgia," in spite of its Greek roots, did not originate in ancient Greece. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface. ![]() A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images-of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy. The word "nostalgia" comes from two Greek roots, nostos meaning "return home" and algia "longing." I would define it as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Optimistic belief in the future became outmoded, while nostalgia, for better or worse, never went out of fashion, remaining uncannily contemporary. ![]() The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia. ![]()
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