What's a good book on the subject of nostalgia?

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023112/0231125143.HTM

Nostalgia is analogous to the process by which the present experience of pain is fully painful, but the memory of past pain is only a signifier emptied of actual pain. In likewise, the present experience of life includes all the complications and perplexities, dull pettiness, struggles and boredom. The past is reduced to a story outline where much of this noise is filtered out and the wrinkles and irritations are smoothed out or replaced by empty signifiers. This process easily lends itself to falsificationof the past.

Finally, most feelings of nostalgia attach to a time when the subject of them was much more youthful and therefore less burdened with discouragement and less careworn. When hope for the future becomes less accessable, people paradoxically begin to project their hopes onto their past.

You know the Greek origin of the word?

The posts on this thread in particular were great, weren't they?

How about neither? He asked for a book on the topic.

nostos = to return home
algia = a painful feeling

in greek.

i've got some articles as PDF's and they've got nice works cited pages, email me if you want a copy.

Saudade is a Portuguese word for a feeling of longing for something you are fond of, which is gone, but can eventually return in a distant future. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longiness might really never return.

Saudade is generally considered one of the hardest words to translate. It originated from the Latin word solitate (loneliness), but with a different meaning. Loneliness in Portuguese is solidão, also with the same word origin. Few other languages in the world have a word with such meaning, making Saudade a distinct mark of Portuguese culture.

In Portuguese, this word serves to describe the feeling of missing someone (or something) you're fond of. For instance, the sentence "Eu sinto muitas saudades tuas" (I feel too much "saudade" of you) directly translates into "I miss you too much". "Eu sinto muito a tua falta" also has the same meaning in English ("falta" and "saudades" both are translated for missing), but it is different in Portuguese. It also relates to feelings of melancholy and fond memories of gone-by days, lost love and a general feeling of unhappiness.

In his book In Portugal of 1912, A.F.G Bell writes: "The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness."

Saudade is different from nostalgia. In nostalgia, one has a mixed happy and sad feeling. A memory of happiness but a sadness for its impossible return and sole existence in the past. Saudade is like nostalgia but with the hope that what is being longed for might return, even if that return is unlikely or so distant in the future to be almost of no consequence to the present. One might make a strong analogy of Nostalgia as a feeling one has for a loved one that has died and saudade as a feeling one has for a loved one that has disapeared. Nostalgia is located in the past and is somewhat conformist while saudades is very present, anguishing, anxious and extends to the future.

("Expertly tackling the philosophical and emotional themes of nostalgia, memory, love, loss, and endurance...")

I thought of it because the New Yorker ran an excerpt of it as a standalone piece called "Nostalgia."

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

—Billy Collins

When I went to university to read Psychology, I was somewhat preoccupied with nostalgia, by which at the time I mainly meant the acute pangs one feels when something (usually a smell, but sometimes just some inexplicable leap of synaptic connection) thows one back into an earlier time. I went to the library and expectantly, excitedly, looked up "nostalgia" on the PSYCHLIT abstracts CD-ROM (this was a pre-WWW era) but found nothing other than a few papers in psychoanalytic journals that weren't what I was after at all. I wanted stuff explaining that pure *rush*.

Academia let me down.

If you generalized this statement into "All X is the same and it is very easy to explain why it exists," and then plugged in other phenomena of human consciousness, even the ones you didn't like ("greed," "bigotry," "depression"), I think you'd be able to see how annoyingly glib this sounds. This is followed with the claim the subject's not worth a book -- and by implication not worth further examination beyond your definition -- which just sounds amazingly self-aggrandizing, like nothing could possibly improve upon this golden apple of a thought. It sounds evasive: nostalgia is NOT to be thought about but instead should be dispatched summarily.

I think I know why this is being said, as nostalgia is often seen as dangerous and seductive because of its relationship with reactionary political and cultural movements, but frankly this makes thorough analysis of it all the more imperative.

I'd like to say that the lot of you have come up with some inneresting candidates for further research, though right now I am a little more open to the "scholarly, philosophical" route than the novelistic one.

Masked Gazza, thank you for liking my posts.

Pardon me, Michael. The methods of exploitation of nostalgia by reactionary political and cultural movements is not what I thought you were asking about.

The fact that an emotion can be exploited for political ends is, to my view, not the same subject as an analysis of the emotion. Fear and anger are also exploited for political purposes, but if you had asked for books about fear and anger I would not assume you were seeking a political analysis of their misdirection and abuse by political propagandists.

I'm not sure that misunderstanding your question amounts to amazing self-aggrandizement. Thanks for clarifying your question. I won't make the same mistake again.

xpost haha

For a long time (or a long time ago) I used to go to bed early (or "at a decent hour"). Yeah, I can see how that's tricky.

"For a long time I went to bed early" seems reasonable enough.

Is "cesaria" related to the term "caesura"? Meaning (1) A pause in a line of verse dictated by sense or natural speech; (2) A pause or interruption, as in conversation; (3) In Latin and Greek prosody, a break in a line caused by the ending of a word within a foot, especially when this coincides with a sense division; and (4) In music, a pause or breathing at a point of rhythmic division in a melody.

Latin caesra, a cutting, from caesus, past participle of caedere, to cut off; see ka-id- in Indo-European roots.

http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/c/c0016900.html

It is for me, hon.

magazine is absolutely PAINFUL.

remember those days back when we had segregation....yeah...those were the days.

"temps perdu" can also mean time wasted

Aimless, you usually seem pretty impressive over on I Love Books, but now that I see you here competing with the wordsmiths and literary lions of ILE- the scales have fallen from my eyes!