Heimweh
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The photo above is one of the best I’ve ever taken. I snapped it during a flight with my dad over Rabun County, and it shows, from a position just southwest of Lake Burton, the lake, Charlie, Glassy, Tiger, and Black Rock Mountains, and other points north just as golden hour settles in over the folds of the mountains. Just looking at it gives me a powerful case of Heimweh.
I’ve been rereading the Odyssey for the first time in years in preparation for a podcast. The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’s nostos—his homecoming. This Greek word, combined with the suffix -algia (from algos, pain), gave us nostalgia, the pain and suffering felt when wanting to go home. The word nostalgia was coined in a medical school dissertation in 1688 as a scholarly form of the German Heimweh—literally “home-woe,” later borrowed and Anglicized in our tongue as homesickness.
Note that nostalgia and Heimweh were therefore medical terms. Indeed, nostalgia—homesickness—was regarded as a literal sickness until relatively recently. The original patients zero for Heimweh were Swiss mercenaries who, having left the fastnesses of their mountain homeland, often came down with the otherwise irremediable illness and had to take leave in order to recover. Without at trip home they would pine away, and even die. Being myself a child of the mountains, and having been at times homesick enough to feel it as a genuine illness, I’ve always felt a deep kinship with those long ago pikemen. I feel it even now. I ache to go home.
The word nostalgia today is a weak, bastardized ghost of what it once meant, and is the easy target of criticism. Nostalgia, we continuously hear, elides, obfuscates, or deliberately lies about the past, or offers cheap, commodified, kitsch versions of a tidied up past that is as good as a lie. There is indisputably some truth to this, but it is not the whole truth, and the corollaries that critique of nostalgia almost inevitably leads to—that there were no good old days, that the past must be remembered with scorn or a know-it-all attention to its failings, that there is only the present, that even the present is inadequate compared to the future toward which we march—are genuinely dangerous.
But the Odyssey gets nostalgia right. I have been struck, on this read-through, by Odysseus’s continuous, vocal Heimweh. But his pain and his desire to go home are not rooted in cheap reproductions of the past or self-aware cosplaying of previous decades, but in the real, concrete goods that he has lost—is losing—so long as he remains a maroon on a goddess’s island.
“Mine is a rugged land but good for raising sons—
and I myself, I know no sweeter sight on earth
than a man’s own native country. . . .
So nothing is sweet as a man’s own country,
his own parents, even though he’s settled down
in some luxurious house, off in a foreign land
and far from those who bore him.”
Rereading the Odyssey now has been a revelation. Now, with sons I pray fervently to raise well and settled in a luxurious house (much nicer than I ever expected to live in at this stage of life, anyway) in a foreign land, far from those who gave me life in the rugged place where I was born… What is this pang in my chest? This sudden melancholy? Why do I feel so listless? Why does even a hazy glimpse of the mountains on the horizon, seen from a highway in the Piedmont, overpower me so?
Nostalgia can be false, undoubtedly. But real nostalgia, real Heimweh, is a sweet pain that can lead you back to goodness. It’s the call of rootedness, of the past and the future together in chorus, of restoration. Homer ably dramatizes that in the Odyssey, which, perhaps, is why Western literature, in the nostos of the canon, keeps trekking back to it.
The translation above is that of the late great Robert Fagles for Penguin Classics. I highly recommend it. The lines quoted after from Book IX, ll. 30-41 in Fagle’s translation.
