Nostalgia

I have been engrossed in a British aristocrat's letters home: It Is Bliss Here, written in wartime and published posthumously, sixty years later. Myles Hildyard, 1914-2005, was educated at Eton, the son of a judge, and became an army officer at the beginning of World War II. His ancestral home, looking like this in John Piper's drawing of 1977, was Flintham Hall.

I came across the links in the above paragraph via Landschaft, a website created by a "tone-sculptor" (i.e. experimental composer, not unlike the fictional Hermann Simon in the film series Heimat, if you ask me) called Alan Walker, his project "encompassing music, photography, film-making and historical research, exploring themes of nostalgia [...] tapping into the lost memory of the landscape."

The way that's put calls to mind the quintessentially English poem:

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

This is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain.
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

(A.E. Housman).

I've just learned that the Spanish word for "homesickness" is "nostalgia", the word originating from the Greek "nostos" (=return home) and "algos", (pain). This morning my Spanish conversation group read an article by Cesar Antonio Bello—in the Ottawa Latin American immigrants' paper Mundo en Español—entitled Nostalgia, seeming to claim that if you do tap into your longings for the land of lost content, good things can come of it, for it creates a web of solidarity between those who have left the place they came from and the people who stay. Human society thus becomes more interconnected every day:

... Es lo que permite que la solidaridad humana se exprese como una densa red [literally = dense network] global que une a los que se fueron y con los que permanecen en el lugar de origen. La nostalgia es pues un sentimiento de apego [= a feeling of attachment / devotion] con todo lo que amanos. Está [...] es también parte de nuestra identidad en un mundo cada dia más globalizado e interconectado.