On Nostalgia.

Boris Dralyuk, an old bloggic friend (dating back to 2012), has an essay in Poetry about looking backward:

Pain is at the core of nostalgia, a term that a Swiss medical student coined in 1688 to diagnose a manifest malady, a homesickness intense enough to dysregulate the heartbeats of mercenaries serving abroad. Some of us are especially prone to such acute symptoms, but all of us, at one time or another, have experienced nostalgia as a proper ache. And yet, that isn’t what makes nostalgia a hard feeling to write about. There is often a sweetness to nostalgia, a sugar coating that, left unchecked, thickens until it obscures the 
painful kernel. The longing for a past purified of its faults—or a past we never knew firsthand, encountered only on the page, on the screen, or in tales told to us before sleep or from a podium—becomes an indulgence. What makes nostalgia difficult to treat honestly in poems is how easily some of us fall under its spell.

I am a nostalgist. More susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me, I am also aware of my condition, even somewhat ashamed of it. This inner conflict—my attraction to the past, my effort to remind myself that the past is always a dream—has guided much of my work as a poet and translator. I suppose I could blame my personal history. Uprooted as a child from my native town of Odesa, Ukraine, thrust into an alien culture, I sought comfort in memories: of playing in the park with herds of cats and one terribly loyal stray dog as the sun set, while old men swapped inflated war stories over games of checkers and dominoes; of racing back from the water of the Black Sea to bite into incomparably flavorful tomatoes sprinkled with salt; of listening to my mother’s guests crack jokes in our warm, sweet-smelling kitchen. The memories grew ever cleaner, ever more pillowy in response to my needs.

Surely the experience of immigration reinforced my predilections, but some people are simply born looking backward. When the theologian Ronald Knox was four years old, he had trouble sleeping. He never made a fuss about it, just stayed in his room. A guest at the house asked what the boy did all night, and he replied, “I lie awake and think about the past.” That was me from the start, and that is me now. Many of my poems are born as phrases that come to me as I do what little Knox did.

I frequently conjure up, as a sobering slap, the image of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s Miniver Cheevy, the smalltown lush who “missed the mediæval grace/Of iron clothing,” who “thought, and thought, and thought,/And thought about” the storybook worlds of “Thebes and Camelot.” That fourth thought, coming after the line break, sent Robert Frost and Ezra Pound into a fit of laughter when they first read it. What a terrific dig at the paralysis of the nostalgic. Of course, they knew what kept Cheevy planted on that barstool as well as Robinson did. For all his talk of making it new, Pound was forever digging in the past, forever scorning the present, and, at his canniest moments, mocking himself for it. His Hugh Selwyn Mauberley—“out of key with his time,” striving “to resuscitate the dead art”—is as much a half-
tender, half-devastating reflection of himself as Cheevy was of Robinson.

He goes on to discuss nostalgia in Marina Tsvetaeva’s 1934 poem “Homesickness” (which I too love) and Donald Justice’s “Dance Lessons of the Thirties” (which I was unfamiliar with). I love the image of Frost and Pound’s fit of laughter, and especially the four-year-old Ronald Knox lying awake and thinking about the past. And that Swiss medical student was Johannes Hofer, whose little pamphlet Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, oder Heimwehe (1688) you can read at Google Books or at MDZ; the word is introduced on p. 5:

It was translated by Carolyn Kiser Anspach in “Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688” (Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 2.6 [1934]:376-391), available at JSTOR; she has an interesting paragraph about the title:

The first reprint of this thesis appeared in 1710, as part of the “Fasciculus Dissertationum Medicarum Selectorium” of Th. Zwinger (Basel). The original title is changed to “De Pothopatridalgia vom Heimwehe.” The text is almost identical with that of the first edition, although the term “nostalgia” is replaced throughout by “pothopatridalgia.” Zwinger also has introduced an additional case history between the fourth and fifth chapters, has revised and re-arranged parts of the text, and in his twelfth chapter mentions a sweet melody of Switzerland which tends to produce homesickness in everyone who hears it. He actually gives the notes of this “pathologic air,” which is called “Kühe-Reyen.”

I have a feeling “pothopatridalgia” was never going to catch on.