One could call it ante-chronological (against or opposite of normal chronology), one could call it asynchronous (lacking temporal concurence), but it doesn’t really matter. What it is, is out of place. Perhaps then, a better — less instrumentalist — term would be orphaned nostalgia. Because the feeling of longing that I am talking about is not one for things past, but for things that have not yet happened or perhaps never will; it has no origins which can be identified, other than that it exists.
The sentiment is not to be confused with desire, or want, or simply wishing this or that, because in many cases the patient (nostalgia, in the eighteenth century, like so many matters of the heart, was considered a disease not unrelated to that of melancholy) does not even yearn for something per se. He just feels the emotions that accompany a certain state of longing.
Nor is the feeling restricted to time or geography. The subject of one’s grief can be near or far away, long ago, now, or in the future. It may even be impossible, not take place in any real environment, or never been imagined before. But those are the rare cases; only experienced by the most sensitive of all.
It may seem, to the untrained eye, that the affliction is characterized by a certain gloom, but that, too, is incorrect. These feelings of sudden proximity or presence which arise when an attack is imminent, need not necessarily be despondent or depressing. They can easily be filled to the brim with joy or excitement, lust for life and an insatiable urge to act.
So far this has been vague, and it is, of course, in the very nature of nostalgia that these feelings of ethereal desire are vague. They must be, because otherwise it would, theoretically at least, be possible to fulfil them with ease, thus eradicating the essence of the unfulfilled desire. But perhaps it is, in fact, necessary to provide an example or two.
When hearing, for instance, a French song on the radio, it is entirely to be expected that the patient instantly transmigrates into an exiled Parisian, thinking fondly of the narrow streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, or, in the worse cases, imagines the world around him transforming into the fifth arrondissement. Taxis will take on the shapes of rickety Renaults with their West-African immigrant chauffeurs, and perhaps he will feel/remember (because here the confusion kicks in) the little café on the corner and the girl he never met (who, as the attentive reader may already suspect by now, may not even exist) and who served him his café au lait with warm skimmed milk, instead of carelessly offering the loathed plastic little containers of coffee creme.
But it may be similarly easy to slip into imaginative states that convey all the drama of refugees fleeing the Huns from their Carpathian homes, some crisp clear day in the early 5th century, or simply (re-)generate the feeling of being stuck in the rain near an empty roadside on the Indian subcontinent, and and finally hitching that ride that will lead back to the hotel after a long trek in the primeval bush.
It is merely imagination then, this nostalgia, and nothing more, some might argue. Perhaps, but let us finish with an excerpt from Henry McKenzie’s 1771 novel The Man of Feeling which, since it stems from the Age of Sentimentalism and Sensibility makes such a better, albeit perhaps more formal yet, attempt at explaining the sentiments at heart of this matter.
It would be trite to observe the easy gradation from esteem to love: in the bosom of Harley there scarce needed a transition; for there were certain seasons when his ideas were flushed to a degree much above their common complexion. In times not credulous of inspiration, we should account for this from some natural cause; but we do not mean to account for it at all; it were sufficient to describe its effects; but they were sometimes so ludicrous, as might derogate from the dignity of the sensations which produced them to describe. […] And the picture which had been drawn amidst the surrounding objects of unnoticed levity was now singled out to be viewed through the medium of romantic imagination: it was improved of course, and esteem was a word inexpressive of the feelings which it excited.
Improved indeed. Long live imagination. L’imagination au pouvoir.
