Nostalgia

"The Orpheus myth recalls nostalgia, the painful longing to return to a past that never was. Nostalgia is from the Greek, nostos, meaning "to return home" and algos, meaning "pain," and suggests a deep longing for an earlier time. But, the time Orpheus desperately longs for is necessarily imaginary, not of space (which we can return to), but a wish to override the irreversibility of time. Nostalgia is a reaction to lost time, the inability to return. It is primarily an emotional response to fate, to time’s irrecoverable nature in conscious awareness. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that accounts for nostalgia's power. However, this is not the past as actually experienced; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through memory and desireWhat Orpheus does not realize is that his fixation on the past is in fact about the present, an inverted history, we might say, of a perceived unattainable ideal life which is projected into the past. Nostalgia is a recollection that is, at the same time, a forgetting (or, dynamically speaking, an ignoring, or dissociation, which reflects the inability to assign emotional significance to a situation) at the service of fantasy’s desire to reconstruct the past.This taking flight is an exile, a “turning away” from self-awareness and the responsibility of the present—which might very well mean confronting (and therefore, grieving) a past that was complicated, contaminated, difficult, and ugly, or confronting an irretrievable loss that precludes the fulfillment of a future fantasy-- of what could have been..."

brother paul