Anthony Esolen - Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

Copyright 2018 by Anthony Esolen

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ISBN 978-1-62157-801-7

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Extracts from The Book of Common Prayer, the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crowns patentee, Cambridge University Press

Scripture quotations from The Authorized (King James) Version. Rights in the Authorized Version in the United Kingdom are vested in the Crown. Reproduced by permission of the Crowns patentee, Cambridge University Press

Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible (NASB), Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.Lockman.org

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T he man is sitting on the shore, looking out upon the sea, his arms about his knees. Thats what he has done for a long time now, longer than he can remember. He sheds a tear.

All around him is beauty. The sea glints with the light and play of wine. The breeze is gentle, and the plane trees and the oaks dapple the hill behind him with shade. He hears the chatter of a bird abovea kingfisher, circling about and suddenly plunging into the shallows beak-first. Will he come out with his dinner? The man is distracted for a moment. Yes, there he isbut no dinner. Well, he will get his fish before long. All is well with the bird, and with the fish that swam away from his enemy.

In all the world, only the man is lost, only the man is not well.

Its a beautiful world, often a world of terror and pain, but always beautiful. So it seems to the man when he is not sighing and sitting on the shore. He has lived all his life in places where the weather was warm and mild and men and women spent most of their waking hours out of doors, by the sea, atop high and rocky hills, on windy plains beneath the endless sky, and in deep mysterious valleys where the winding river was so clearly a god that it seemed a holy thing to bathe your feet in his waters. He has an eye for beauty. It is the great heritage of his people.

She, the woman who is keeping him here on the island, she the goddess, who spends most of her day weaving and singing, is beautiful. There is no doubt of that. She loves him, as she might love a favorite pet. In days to come, he will meet a girl who will save his life, when he washes up on a foreign shore naked, half-dead, soiled with seaweed and brine. She will be taller than her girlfriends, and a goddess will fill her heart with courage, so that she will not run away from him as they do but stand her ground and listen to his tale of suffering. I was on the island of Delos once, he said, and I saw a palm tree, slender and perfect, and I thought I had never seen so beautiful a thing in my life. You remind me of that palm tree.

Then there was the beautiful and cunning and dangerous woman, the cause of the war that he and his armies were compelled to fight. He too had been a suitor for her hand in marriage, he and many others. She made her choice, whether out of cunning or caprice or both, he never quite could decide; she chose a good man, but not the best, strong in battle, but not the strongest, certainly no half-wit, but slow to make a decision, handsome enough with his red hair, but not such a form as to cast in bronze. That man was a fool to take her, but hed have been a greater fool to refuse. Yet that marriage had undone the knees of thousands of good men, whose ashes were scattered by the winds in that faraway land, the land where he had spent ten long years, fighting.

All those women were lovelier than his wife. And when he thought of that, he shed another tear.

Is it a countryside he longs for? What is special about that place, what makes his heart yearn to see it again? You cant do much with thoroughbred horses there, because the terrain is too rocky. It isnt a center of commerce, where you might meet many strangers traveling to and fro. Its good for wheat and raising pigs. He had quite a few pigs, hundreds of them, and many head of cattle; who knows how many of them would be left now?

Is it a large family he left behind? No, the gods never blessed him that way. He was the only son of an only son, and he himself has one son, who was but a baby when he left home with his army, twenty years ago. He remembers one day in particular, and a small and mischievous smile comes to his lips, even with the tear in his eye. He didnt want to leave. To Hades with the vow he made, to support his red-headed friend if someone should ever try to steal the dangerous woman from him. He pretended to have lost his wits, and strapped himself to his plow like an ox, zigzagging across his fields and making chaos out of them. But a couple of his fellow generals saw through the ruse. They knew his ways. So they took the little babyFighter-from-Afar was his nameand placed him in his fathers path. Every time they did that, he would swerve aside.

Odysseus, they said, master mariner, man of many turnings, come now, we see that you are not mad. You too made the vow. You must join us in the war.

He did, against his will. By now the son must have grown to manhood, and his wifes hair would be turning gray.

Would it not be easier to give up hope, to stay here on the island, and let things go as they must go, faraway? The goddess is kind. And she has promised him much more than her loyalty. He will not age, so long as he remains with her. Perpetual youth, utter security, on a beautiful island, with a goddess who loves him as you love a pet, and who takes him into her bed every night; plenty of good food, wine, and peace.

A flutter of wings and spraythe kingfisher, with a fish in his beak. All is well, except with the man. He suffers the pang of something bitter and sweet, and more bitter than sweet. Yet he does not wish that the feeling would go away. He cherishes it. It is in his language the algea for the noston : pain for the return, ache for the homecoming.

The Welsh call it hiraeth , longing, and in one of their folk songs they say that nobody can tell what exactly hiraeth is, but it brings both great joy and intense pain. That song was written at a time when poor Welshmen were leaving the mines and quarries in the land they loved to go to America or Australia, or Argentina of all places, where there is still a small Welsh-speaking outpost in the pampas, called yr Wladfa , the colony.

In German, it is Heimweh , home-woe, or Sehnsucht , seeking to see againin English, homesickness . In Italian, you feel mancanza di casa , that is, you are missing the home, literally the house; it is like a hole in your heart. The Italians also express it by the Greek word that has entered English and is the subject of this book: nostalgia , the ache to turn back home.