Such homesickness is a rich and genuine thing, because it reflects the truth that whatever we admire is decaying and slipping from our grasp, even as we admire it. It s not a depressing prospect. It s simply true. The world s very vividness and poignancy results from the momentariness of our experience. The beauty of a living thing springs directly from its frailty, its coming and its going.
Real nostalgia is as much about the algia, the pain, as it is about the nostos, returning home.
Real nostalgia is a loamy fertilizer, the brew of decaying life that we walk through in an autumn forest. Faux nostalgia denies the pain and avoids the depth it brings. Gone By with articles extolling the virtues of the gramophone and the icebox. It can also be a wallowing in the past and all the wrongs it wrought, a desire to return and settle the score, to remake what we regret. I recently spent a day in the town where I grew up, a small town in Pennsylvania, near Gettysburg.