i can haz nostalgia plz?

edmonton-lilac yesterday, alley at 112th & 82nd-ish street

I am having a bad case of nostalgia lately. This probably has something to do with the fact that I am in the midst of trying to finish off a 130-page thesis draft, and am therefore wishing I could periodically escape to another time & place... & since all my words are being used up in that 33 000+ monstrosity, & I am also slightly sleep-deprived, I am feeling everything really viscerally. Fewer words, more somatic impact. The smell of lilac blossoms makes me oddly euphoric... and also thrusts a bundle of Denmark-memories into the forefront, as that's where I was last year in the middle of spring. Coupled with an almond danish pastry (ah, wienerbrød!) I ate the other weekend (that was delicious, but not quite the same as the ones I ate there) I am experiencing little rushes of nostalgia for my weeks in København.

For the last while I have also been fascinated by the etymology of the word 'nostalgia' -- originally coined in the 17th century as a medical diagnosis for acute homesickness... (from the Greek 'nostos', home, and 'algos' pain). Nostalgia, I think, is a broader concept, than just a terrible wistfulness for one's birthplace or hometown or country, etc. Homesickness results from being placed in new/strange circumstances, away from the familiar, being caught in something lonely or isolating. But home, in the sense of nostalgia, is two dimensional -- it goes beyond places to include times, as well. I think we create little 'places' for ourselves throughout our lives, collections of experiences in various space-times that we dwell in, and these are our homes. When someone talks about 'that time in their life', a bounded unit or a certain stretch on a continuum, that is a home.

I was gone a month there, but I carved myself out a little home: at that old university building by the embassies in Christianshavn where the seminar met each day, flocks of bicycles at morning rush-hour, all-day conversations with all the people from the conference whilst we wandered everywhere & had beer & ice cream while dangling our feet over the canal & went for dinner & talked & walked back to the hostel & talked & had tea & talked & got up & did it all again. Total academic ecstasy, passionate people & feeling such an emotional-intellectual unity, synthesis. Lilacs & elderflowers & chesnut blossoms, the sea, the slant of light on the Kastellet moats at 8 p.m. on a May evening. The language of swallowed vowels & hoarse rustling, musicians at the Rundetaarn, cobblestone cloister-acoustics & the constant spray of fountains.

I would like to go back there someday, to Copenhagen -- but I also know it wouldn't be like going home, in the conventional sense, because 'home' is subject to time, just like everything else. My 'home' there has faded, it left with me when I flew away. Believing you can return to something, recapture it completely -- I think that's perhaps what causes the pain in nostalgia; I know that I can't, so while I long for it, it doesn't really hurt. Rather, this nostalgia ,with its lilac & almond pangs of longing, adds an aspect of richness to what I am feeling now, here, in the present time & place. It's the recognition of remembering, the acknowledgement of what I carry. & I am tremendously grateful for that. & despite the little pangs, there's also a satisfaction in remembering these things. They're still there, with you. & that is a lovely comfort.

& I always think of when my mama read me Tennyson's Ulysses... 'twas a long time ago, junior high, I think, but I still remember her repeating what she told me were her favourite lines:

I am part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.