TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

Hundreds of years ago, nostalgia was a diagnosable medical condition. Johannes Hofer, a seventeenth-century Swiss physician, named the condition, which he identified in homesick soldiers. The nost in nostalgia means “homecoming”; the algia means “pain.” Symptoms of nostalgia among Swiss soldiers included melancholy, malnutrition, sleepiness, brain fever, and hallucinations.

Hofer’s idea of nostalgia as an illness is the pain of not being able to go home. But “home” can be a place, or a time, or a person. Home can even be a version of yourself, a version you miss and would love to get back to. 

I joke that I can be nostalgic about a moment while it’s happening. That might be the writer in me: part of me is in the moment, and part of me is already thinking about it from a distance, and seeking the language to write about it. Thanks to technology, I have nostalgia at my fingertips at any moment of any day. Shutterfly wants to show me what my life looked like 11 years ago today. Facebook wants to show me my memories over the years. My photo library on my phone offers up highlights and algorithmically selected moments from the past. 

My point is, if I wanted to forget about a time, a place, or a person, my devices won’t let me. Look, there are my children on their first day of school several years ago. There’s my son’s grin with his front teeth missing, there is my daughter learning to ride a bike.

Today’s poem beautifully captures the pain of distance, of longing, of wanting to be somewhere, or with someone, when you can’t be.

Nostalgia
by Matthew Minicucci

The worst  part of  it is  that I’ve forgotten  your face. Or  the idea  that each 
tide was a slender finger pulling at these knots, loose end then left to work 
on  another  day.  Lost  at  sea,  love  is a  logogram:  less  than,  fewer  still, a 
word made nothing more than cauter-mark on starboard hard, port I left all 
those    years    ago.   Sometimes,    I  dream   of   my   own   (sorry,   our   own) 
great-rooted  bed,  shaped   from  something   still   alive.   Eurycleia   means 
“broad fame” and that’s a sandy-pit, if you ask me. It’s an island beautiful as 
a scarred oxen’s back,  sowed with lash  and  eyes.  I saw something  of  you
the  other   day  in  this   glass  of  magic,  vase  filled   with  smoke’s  children. 
There’s that dress you wore, I said to no one in particular.  There’s that blue
that never  bled to  red  wine,  dark  in  its  never-nocked-arrow  waves.  And 
suddenly you’re the moon, again, lost in reflection’s sea. I follow the light to
nowhere  as I  wander  through  the  sipped sleeve.  Because.  Because  you 
walked  the  stairs  that  night  before  I left, after  we heard  the rain spill like 
grain from  a split sack.  You walked in front of me,  just above  the cochineal 
stars,  bright  bald  ember,  fashioned  still  spear.  I  think of  nothing else but 
you. It’s true. It’s the worst  part of forgetting, all this remembering.

"Nostalgia" by Matthew Minicucci. Used by permission of the poet.