Pino Blasone

Nostalgia, as a Philosophical Mood

1 – Above, Arnold Böcklin, Ulysses and Calypso,Kunstmuseum, Basel; 1883. Below, a scene from the Greekfilm Ulysses’ Gaze, directed by Theo Angelopoulos; 1995

Nostalgia, or Homesickness

The term itself may sound somewhat nostalgic. It is an early modern one, made up ofancient Greek roots: νόστος/nostos, meaning “return [home]”, and άλγος/algos, “sorrow” or“suffering”. Originally referred to the pain a sick person feels for his wish to return to hisnative land, and to his relevant fear never to see it again, this neologism was coined by theAlsatian student in medicine Johannes Hofer (1669-1752) in his Medical Dissertation onNostalgia, or Homesickness at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Let us read a passagefrom it, published in Latin in 1688, where a word destined to become so successful in theEuropean languages was born: Neque vero de nomine deliberanti convenientius occurrit,remque explicanda praecisius designans, quam Nostalgia vocabulum, origine graecum, etquidem duabus ex vocibus compositum, quorum alterum Νόστος reditum in patriam,

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alterum Άλγος dolorem aut tristitiam significat: ut adeo ex vi vocis Nοσταλγία designarepossit tristem animum ex reditus in patriam ardenti desiderio oriundum (“Nor in truth,deliberating on a name, did a more suitable one occur to me, defining the thing to beexplained, more concisely than the word Nostalgia, Greek in origin and indeed composed oftwo sounds, the one of which is Nostos, return to the native land; the other, Algos, signifiessuffering or grief; so that thus far it is possible from the force of the sound Nostalgia todefine the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one’s native land”).1

Explicitly, the nostalgia of Hofer is an illness, that is when the feeling usually calledhomesickness – in German, Heimweh – degenerates into a real pathology. He studied thismental disease, with special reference to contemporary Swiss mercenaries, gone to carry ontheir profession of arms abroad. The aspiring doctor had to be learned in classical languagesand literatures though, so much as to be inspired by Homer’s Odyssey and by Ulysses’longing to return to his homeland, the isle of Ithaca. In fact, the nostalgic expressionνόστιμον ἦμαρ/nóstimon ēmar, “day of the return”, is recurrent in the epic poem. And, justat its beginning, we can read about its protagonist: πολλὰ δ’ ὅ γ’ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃνκατὰ θυμόν,/ ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων, “he suffered many sorrows[algea] by sea in his heart,/ struggling in order to save his life and to gain a way back[noston] to his comrades” (lines 4-5). Long before the term was invented, Ulysses hadbecome a mythic hero of nostalgia. Also after that invention, for a lasting period the vocableHeimweh continued to be preferred in the German usage, to designate homesickness. This isthe case of Immanuel Kant, still in 1798. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View,the philosopher shows that he was acquainted with Hofer’s speech and had reflected on it.

In Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, such is the original title of the work,actually he writes: Das Heimweh der Schweizer (und wie ich es aus dem Munde eineserfahrnen Generals habe, auch der Westphäler und der Pommern in einigen Gegenden),welches sie befällt, wenn sie in andere Länder versetzt werden, ist die Wirkung einer durchdie Zurückrufung der Bilder der Sorgenfreiheit und nachbarlichen Gesellschaft in ihrenJugendjahren erregten Sehnsucht nach den Örtern, wo sie die sehr einfachen Lebensfreudengenossen, da sie dann nach dem spätern Besuche derselben sich in ihrer Erwartung sehrgetäuscht und so auch geheilt finden; zwar in der Meinung, daß sich dort alles sehrgeändert habe, in der That aber, weil sie ihre Jugend dort nicht wiederum hinbringenkönnen (“The homesickness of the Swiss – and, as I have it from the mouth of anexperienced general, also the Westphalians and Pomeranians from certain regions – thatseizes them when they are transferred to other lands, is the result of a longing for the placeswhere they enjoyed the very simple pleasures of life, aroused by the recollection of imagesof the carefree life and neighborly company in their early years. For later, after they visitthese same places, they are greatly disappointed in their expectations and thus also find theirhomesickness cured. To be sure, they think that this is because everything there has changeda great deal, but in fact it is because they cannot bring back their youth there”).2

1 J. Hofer, Dissertatio medica de ΝΟΣΤΑΛΓΙΑ, oder Heimwehe, Basel: Hans J. Bertsche, 1688, § II; and “Texts and Documents: Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer”, trans. C. K. Anspach in Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press), Vol. 2, 1934, pp. 380-81.

2 I. Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, abgefasst von Immanuel Kant, Königsberg: F. Nicolovius, 1800, pp. 86-87; and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trad. R. B.

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What Kant points out in this passage is that homesickness/nostalgia is often a contrastbetween expectation and disillusion; what is even more important, that the dimension ofsuch a sentiment or mood is spatial as much as temporal. Early, the concept evolved todesignate not only homesickness for a familiar place or for persons, who are related withthat place (for instance, in the Odyssey, Ulysses’ desire for homecoming, and to rejoin hiswife Penelope or his son Telemachus). Also, it was understood as a yearning for the past, fora time which most of times cannot revive at the present or in the future, in its genuinenessand integrity. Such a memorable past may be not only personal and individual, butcollective or cultural too. That is what is expressed by an artist coeval with Kant, the SwissJohann Heinrich Füssli in 1778-80, in a very strange and emblematic Neoclassical or Pre-Romantic drawing, today in the Kunsthaus of Zurich: Der Künstler verzweifelnd vor derGrösse der antiken Trümmer (“The Artist’s Despair Before the Grandeur of AncientRuins”). There, an artist is portrayed while sitting disconsolate near a few fragments of acolossal Roman statue. We deal with what has been called nostalgia for antiquity, and with arealized impossibility to restore or even only imitate the true spirit of classical arts.

However, I. Kant did not consider homesickness just only in a “pragmatic” albeit“anthropological” way. In Reflexionen Kants zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft (“Kant’sReflections on the Critique of Pure Reason”), edited by B. Erdmann at Leipzig in 1884, his“point of view” grows more theoretical and almost metaphysical. Let us translate thereflection there numbered “204”, probably written in 1777: Die Kritik der reinen Vernunftist ein Präservativ für eine Krankheit der Vernunft, welche ihren Keim in unserer Natur hat.Sie ist das Gegenteil von der Neigung, die uns an unser Vaterland fesselt (Heimweh). EineSehnsucht, uns ausser unserm Kreise zu verlieren und andere Welten zu beziehen (“Thecritique of pure reason is an antidote to a malady of reason, which originates in our nature. Itis the opposite of the propensity linking us to our fatherland, or homesickness. That is alonging to overstep our bounds and to relate ourselves to other worlds”). No doubt, in thisaphorism there is an anticipation of the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism,although the horizon is still rationalistic and the “propensity linking us to our fatherland” istreated – metaphorically, indeed – as a “malady” in Hofer’s fashion, of which above.

To our minds, we should have present the complex and not seldom contradictorysensitiveness, which was going to be the dialectic background of an early Romanticism andIdealism. Not too many years later, in 1798-99, the poet and thinker Friedrich vonHardenberg alias “Novalis” will annotate another famous and somewhat enigmaticaphorism, in his fragmentary Das allgemeine Brouillon or “Universal Notebook”: DiePhilosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh, ein Trieb überall zu Hause zu sein (“Philosophy isauthentic homesickness, an instinct driving to be at home everywhere”).3 No longerhomesickness is regarded as a malady. Not necessarily philosophy is perceived as a fullrational activity, but rather like an intuitive predisposition, needing to be rationalized. Nor isnostalgia understood as homesickness in a selfish sense, but rather like a pulsion toward anelsewhere and an otherness, what coincides with the utopian aspiration to be at homeeverywhere in a broad acceptation (it would be perfect, if Novalis had added “and in every

Louden, Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 71.

3 No. 21 in Novalis, Schriften, edited by J. Minor, Jena: E. Diederichs, 1923, Vol. II; p. 179. For a different translation, and numbering, see Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, edited by D. Wood, State University of New York Press, 2007; p. 155, frg. 857.

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time”, but we can presume this is implicit in the German voice überall). Of course, no littledepends on which interpretation may be given of that propaedeutic provocation. Within acertain range, below we will examine both progressive and conservative interpretations.

2 – The actress Domiziana Giordano in the film Nostalghia, by theRussian director Andrej Tarkovskij; 1983. Head of Odysseus, detail of

Roman copy from a Hellenistic sculptural group: MuseoArcheologico Nazionale, Sperlonga (Italy); ca. 1st century A. D.

Nostalgia and Utopia

What a kind of nostalgia is Novalis’ Heimweh, that is to say his philosophical“homesickness”? If we make a comparison with the medievalist utopia Die Christenheitoder Europa (“Christendom or Europe”, essay; 1799), easily we would infer that his is anostalgia for the past.4 Nevertheless, in the same Das allgemeine Brouillon, we can findsome fragments suggesting that his excursions into the past are a basis for a projection intothe future. Moreover, such a praised or regretted past is not as historical as it might seem.Rather, it is filtered through an alternating retrospective and perspective gaze, according to atypical utopian manner of proceeding. In particular, an aphorism is highly significant: DiePhilosophie ist von Grund aus antihistorisch. Sie geht vom Zukünftigen und Notwendigennach dem Wirklichen, sie ist die Wissenschaft des allgemeinen Divinationssinns. Sie erklärtdie Vergangenheit aus der Zukunft, welches bei der Geschichte umgekehrt der Fall ist(“Basically philosophy is antihistorical, since turning from the future, and from its necessity,toward reality. As the science of the universal sense of divination, it reads the past in thelight of the future. And this is the opposite of what history is used to”). Elsewhere, Novalis

4 Cf. Pauline Kleingeld, “Romantic Cosmopolitanism: Novalis’s ʻChristianity or Europe’”, in Journal of the History of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), Vol. 46, No. 2, 2008, pp. 269-84; and the chapter “Kant and Novalis on the development of a cosmopolitan community”, in Kant and Cosmopolitanism: The Philosophical Ideal of World Citizenship, Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 149-76.

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is not even less explicit: Alle Philosophie oder Wissenschaft der Wissenschaft ist Kritik. DieIdee von Philosophie ist ein Schema der Zukunft (“All philosophy, or science of science, iscritique. The idea of philosophy [itself] is a schema of the future”).5

A merit of the young poet and thinker is to have brought an element of utopia, more orless undefined, into the concept of homesickness or nostalgia. Notoriously, he well knewand appreciated Kant’s criticism. This is not the least reason, why his philosophy intendedas homesickness can be better interpreted by referring to Kant, even if with a paradoxicalinversion of terms. Not only homesickness is no longer perceived as a “malady of reason”.It is just this natural or instinctual predisposition, which can work as “a longing to overstepour bounds and to relate ourselves to other worlds”, instead of the “pure reason” privilegedby Kant. If the premises are inverted, the desirable outcome ought to be the same, for Kantas well for Novalis. In doing so, the border between Enlightenment and Romanticism hasbeen overstepped, and there is no doubt that Novalis is a ferryman in such a culturalferrying. It is also true, there is more transcendence than immanence in the basicallypoetical world-view of Novalis. Yet this is not sufficient, for forming an opinion of him as aconservative or reactionary theorist, whereas Kant had remained an old progressive one.

Clearly, Kant and Novalis thought differently about human nature and an universalityof its attitudes. For the former, only rationality can grow positively universal, whereas forthe latter irrationality is not excluded from this potentiality. If Kant’s “diurnal” reflection isabove all concentrated on the conscience, in Novalis’ “nocturnal” one there is the advanced– and optimistic – intuition of the incidence of an unconscious dimension of the psyche.Anyhow, Novalis’ concept of homesickness may well be conciliated with a cosmopolitanand philanthropic horizon, such as outlined by Kant and reliably influenced by a renewedhumanitarian and political “universal brotherhood” promoted by Freemasonry. A pertinentexample is that of a scarcely known Italian poet of the late 19th, early 20th century: indeed,even less known as a thinker. He is Mario Rapisardi, in his collection of aphorisms Pensierie giudizi (“Thoughts and Judgements“). What in Novalis’ conception might be defined as a“nostalgia for the undefined”, in the work of Rapisardi becomes a “nostalgia for theinfinite”, even though without religious determinations or transcendental connotations in astrict sense. According to the Sicilian thinker, the sole plausible transcendence is that of thehuman being transcending himself during his existence and in the course of history.

In Pensieri e giudizi, philosophy and religion are linked together in an original basicfeeling: “The trouble of all lofty spirits is a will of penetrating the mystery of humandestination. All philosophy and religion for sublime souls is reducible to this sentiment,which is like a nostalgia for the infinite. [...] I love music above other arts. It begins wherewords are at an end. It is an universal language, for all hearts which love and suffer on earth(…). It raises us from a grey reality to the endless and shining empire of dreams. It gives usthe sentiment and nostalgia for the infinite”. In which main sense such a homesickness is tobe interpreted, it appears clearer when Rapisardi explains his late Romantic ideal, patrioticand cosmopolitan at once: Quando ci diciamo cittadini del mondo, non intendiamo che1’amore della patria sia morto nell’animo nostro, vogliamo dire piuttosto che il nostro loconatio è per noi diventato ampio quanto la terra, che tutte le patrie si sono fuse in una sola,che il nostro amore si è diffuso a tutto il genere umano (“When we call us citizens of theworld, this does not mean that love for our fatherland is dead in our soul. Rather, we want to

5 Cf. David Wood (translated and edited by), Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon, cit.; pp. 179 and 159, fragments 1061 and 886.

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say that our native place has grown as wide as the earth; that all fatherlands have blendedinto one homeland; that our love has extended so far as to embrace the whole mankind”).6

In his essay La poesia filosofica (“The Philosophical Poetry”, 1898), nearly in apositivistic fashion Rapisardi asserts that true poetry proceeds from verity: La poesia prendel’ispirazione da questa verità, e sull’ale dell’immaginazione e del sentimento, spaziandoardimentosa sul gran mare della vita, ci fa sentire i dolori e le gioie che ci hannoaccompagnato nel faticoso cammino, presentire tutti quei popoli indistinti di esseri, tutta lavita non ancora esplorata dell’universo dalla cui sublime nostalgia l’animo umano saràperpetuamente tormentato e purificato (“Poetry is inspired by this trueness. On the wings ofimagination and of sentiment daringly spacing on the great sea of life, it makes us feelsorrows and joys which accompanied us along our laborious way. It gives us also apresentiment of all those still confused peoples of beings, or of the universal life not yetexplored, by the nostalgia for which human souls will be ever troubled and purified aswell”).7 Therefore, such a philosophical-poetical nostalgia is homesickness for the past aswell as for the future. Especially, it is not so much an identitarian selfish mood as rather anostalgia for otherness, aiming at converting alienness into alterity. We may even add, it is aregret for the so many “others” we might have been, but were never allowed or able to be.

Either by Novalis or by Rapisardi, nostalgic and utopian ingredients are mixed invarying proportions. If there is an ambiguity, probably this is due to a peculiar relationbetween the ideas of nostalgia and utopia, in the development of European civilization. Bothterms are early modern compounds, assembled with ancient Greek stems. About theetymology of “nostalgia”, we have already seen above. As to “utopia”, originally this is thepartial title of a treatise in form of novel, published in England in 1516. The Libellus... deoptimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia (“Little book... on the best state of arepublic and on the new island of Utopia”) was written in Latin by Thomas More, takingmain inspiration from the myth of Atlantis narrated in the dialogue The Republic by Plato.Literally meaning “no-place” or nowhere, Utopia is the name of an island where the authorfancies an exemplary model of society to have been established. If Atlantis was figured asexisted in a remote past, Utopia is pretended to exist at the present, but might well beimagined in the future. Which time, it does not matter so much. What matters is nostalgiafor something which essentially exists in our imagination, but could be realized or ought tobe imitated in part at least. In sum, nostalgia and utopia are complementary faces of onecoin, which modernity is. Their apparent antinomy belongs to the same cultural dialectic.

6 M. Rapisardi, Pensieri e giudizi, posthumously edited by A. Tomaselli, Palermo: G. Pedone Lauriel, 1915; pp. 33, 42-43, 73-74. In the lecture La religione di Vittorio Alfieri, (“The Religion of Vittorio Alfieri”, in Prose, poesie e lettere postume, edited by L. Vigo-Fazio, Turin: A. Formica, 1930; see the Website http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/La_religione_di_Vittorio_Alfieri), the eminent lay character of that religiosity is claimed, and again it is proclaimed that the nostalgia dell’infinito “is a troubling and and exhausting fever of every sublime heart”.

7 M. Rapisardi, “La poesia filosofica”, in Prose, poesie e lettere postume, op. cit.; reported at the Website http://it.wikisource.org/wiki/La_poesia_filosofica.

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3 – Maria Callas as Medea in the film Medea by Pier Paolo Pasolini,Italy, 1969; and Irene Papas as Penelope in the television seriesOdissea by F. Rossi, P. Schivazappa and M. Bava, Italy, 1968

Nostalgia and Boredom

Reliably like Johannes Hofer, inventor of the neologism, we cannot completely forgetthe Odyssey as a mythic antecedent, even if at Homer’s times the voice “nostalgia” did notexist in the form we have inherited. Tennyson, Graf, Pascoli, Kavafis, Seferis, Kazantzakis,Borges...: after Dante Alighieri, not a few poets variously imagined that Ulysses, thearchetypal nostalgic hero, when finally back at Ithaca, by time sank into boredom and gotaffected by a kind of nostalgia contrary to homesickness intended in a literal sense. Amongthem, a philosopher too, the Venetian Massimo Cacciari in his book L’Arcipelago. This wide“archipelago” is but the old Mediterranean Sea, where European civilization had its broth ofculture. Cacciari’s allegory is so strange, that it could not have arisen but in a philosophicalmind. Per absurdum, he imagines that Ulysses sets sail again and at last arrives to Utopia (inthe original narration by Thomas More, the traveller was named Hythlodaeus, “nonsensedealer”). This syncretic Ulysses symbolizes the Occidental civilization, at the turning pointof modernity. The author leaves us dubious about whether the Utopia, where his sailorlanded, is an actual one or instead a dystopia, that is utopia in a negative acceptation. Whatis interesting for us is a comparison between the two literary islands: if Ithaca represents anostalgia for the past, just as homesickness, Utopia allegorizes a sort of nostalgia for thefuture, for an elsewhere which might be a dangerous nowhere.8

8 Cf. M. Cacciari, sections “Di naufraghi e utopie” and “I rei” in L’Arcipelago, Milan: Adelphi, 1997; pp. 63-91, and, in particular, pp. 93 and following. Reliably with allusion to a different historical and political context, some diffidence toward realized utopias is expressed also by the Polish poetess W. Szymborska in her poem “Utopia”, in the 1976 collection Wielka liczba/“A Large Number”: “For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,/ and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches/ turn without exception to the sea” (trans. S. Barańczak and C. Cavanagh in Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, San Diego, California: Harcourt, Inc., 1998; p. 173).

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According to the late medieval Dante, in the Inferno of his Divine Comedy, theinquietude which makes Ulysses set sail again is a still unsatisfied and impious curiosity toexplore and to discover. Yet, for most aforementioned poets, that restlessness is strictlyassociated to boredom, in the existential connotation which first the French philosopherBlaise Pascal ascribed to such a mood. This survivor and disillusioned Ulysses does not findhis “homesickness cured” as Kant rashly supposed of his contemporary veterans, but hisboredom is a transition from that homesickness to a new – or, more likely, metamorphosed –“malady”. Now, our general context is varied enough and the ground is prepared, forpassing to examine homesickness and ennui, as they are combined in the philosophy ofMartin Heidegger. In Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik... (“The Fundamental Concepts ofMetaphysics...”, 1929-30), the German controversial thinker moves from a quotation fromhis compatriot Novalis, even though this starting point sounds more like a pretext, and hisarguing from it is so transcendental, as to easily appear a bit rhetorical or tendentious.

Let us read a first, ironical, passage: Novalis sagt einmal in einem Fragment: “DiePhilosophie ist eigentlich Heimweh, ein Trieb überall zu Hause zu sein”. Eine merkwürdigeDefinition, romantisch natürlich. Heimweh – gibt es dergleichen heute überhaupt noch? Istdas nicht ein unverständliches Wort geworden, selbst im alltäglichen Leben? Denn hat nichtder heutige städtische Mensch und Affe der Zivilisation das Heimweh längst abgeschafft?Und Heimweh gar als die Bestimmung der Philosophie! [...] Was ist damit – Philosophieein Heimweh? (“In a fragment of his, Novalis told: ʻPhilosophy is authentic homesickness,an instinct driving to be at home everywhere’. An odd definition, obviously Romantic. Isstill here anything like homesickness? Is not this word no longer intelligible, even ineveryday life? Has it not been repealed long ago, by the city man of our age, the ape ofcivilization? How may it be a determination of what philosophy is? […] What does it mean,philosophy as homesickness?”. This hail of questions introduces the listener into aconservative clime, implying a judgement on the present as deprived of homesickness, forhaving lost any memory of the origins. Thus, as its main current task philosophy ought toremind that “ape of civilization” of his human being, and of the Being in itself at once.

Let us go on reading, and translating: Novalis erläutert selbst: “ein Trieb überall zuHause zu sein”. Ein solcher Trieb kann Philosophie nur sein, wenn wir, die philosophieren,überall nicht zu Hause sind. Wonach steht das Verlangen dieses Triebes? überall zu Hausezu sein – was heißt das? Nicht nur da und dort, auch nicht nur jeden Orts, an allennacheinander zusammen, sondern überall zu Hause sein heißt: jederzeit und zumal imGanzen sein. Dieses ʻim Ganzenʼ und seine Gänze nennen wir die Welt. Wir sind, undsofern wir sind, warten wir immer auf etwas. Wir sind immer von Etwas als Ganzemangerufen. Dieses ʻim Ganzenʼ ist die Welt (“Novalis himself specifies: ʻan instinct, drivingto be at home everywhere’. Philosophy can be intuited as something like that, only if wephilosophizers do not feel at home everywhere. What is the aim of such an instinct? To be athome everywhere, but what does this mean? Not banally here or there, nor in all placessimultaneously, or in one after the other. Rather, to be at home everywhere stands for beingever and at one time inside the whole: a being inside the whole we call world, in itsperception of entirety. We exist. Insofar as we exist, almost we live in a perennial state ofexpectancy for a call by something like a whole, a wholeness which is but the world”).

Heidegger’s homesickness is a nostalgia for the absolute, although this is not proposedin any religious form but in the sense, somewhat ambivalent indeed, of a transcendentalimmanence. And such should be the main effect of the innate propensity, in human beings,

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to overcome their own limits. Yet a nostalgic inclination like that is interpreted as turnedtoward an alleged original past, more than oriented to a progressive future. Even where theauthor seems to hint at a future perspective, it happens not without a deal of ambiguity. Somuch, that those, who wanted to discern some ancient gnostic influences in his thought, mayappear not thoroughly wrong: Dahin, zum Sein im Ganzen sind wir in unserem Heimwehgetrieben. Unser Sein ist diese Getriebenheit. Wir sind immer schon irgendwie zu diesemGanzen fortgegangen oder besser unterwegs dazu (“The being as a whole: there is whereour homesickness drives. This restlessness is our authentic being. Somehow, we havealready departed toward that whole. It is better to say, always we are on the way to it”).9

All that presupposes a dissatisfaction with the present, anyway: nay, with the specificone which modernity is. In its turn, such a discontent generates an existential boredom,which in the best of cases ought to be at the basis of a renewed philosophical wondering andresearch. That is why boredom, homesickness and philosophical speculation, may bemutually associated or concatenated. Heidegger pushes as far as to draw a parallel betweenboredom and homesickness: Tiefe Langeweile – ein Heimweh. Heimweh, ein Heimweh...(“Deep ennui – a homesickness. Homesickness, a homesickness...”).10 The term obsessivelyrepeated betrays some personal solitude, even more than a tendency to transcend humanfinitude. Not by chance, the subtitle which the editor has given to the course of lectures weare dealing with is Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit (“World, Finitude, Solitude”).Undoubtedly, the author did not feel at home or felt uneasy with the world, such as it washistorically determined. Unfortunately or not, partly that world is ours, still at present.

9 M. Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit, edited by F.-W. von Herrmann, Frankfurt on Main: V. Klostermann, 1983; pp. 7-8. For a more literal translation, see The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995; pp. 5-6.

10 M. Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik..., op. cit.; p. 120.

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4 – Mnemosyne, granite statue by the contemporary Norwegiansculptor Fredrik K. B. (www.fredrik-kb.com); and marble statue of

Eros, Roman imperial period, about A. D. 190: Museum of FineArts, Boston (said to have been found at Laodiceia in Syria)

Eros and Mnemosyne

Other times or in other subjects, the discontent may arise not so much for a worldwhich one was thrown into like by a cast of dice, but rather for one’s self, such asexistentially determined. In order to exemplify, again we like to resort to the backgroundfigure of Ulysses, as revisited not by philosophers but by poets. The best known scene ofhim as a nostalgic hero is on a faraway shore, while scanning the horizon and weepingbecause of his desire to return home and to his wife.11 But in the sonnet Odyssey, BookTwenty-Three, Jorge L. Borges suggests that Ulysses, once back home, got nostalgic for hisnomadic self: “Now in the love of their own bridal bed/ The shining queen has fallen asleep,her head/ Upon her king’s breast. Where is that man now/ Who in his exile wandered nightand day/ Over the world like a wild dog, and would say/ His name was No One, No One,anyhow?”. And, in the sonnet In Ithaca, Andrew Lang insinuates that Ulysses’ discontentfor his sedentary self is mixed with the nostalgia for another woman or, better, a nymph: justthat Calypso, who had long detained him in the isle of Ogygia. Yet, most important is how

11 Homer, Odyssey, Book 5, lines 81 and following. Even if it the definition is older, the concept of “nomadic self” has been applied to the character of Ulysses, just as interpreted by J. L. Borges, by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001; p. 50)

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the poet extends the metaphor, so that the No One of Borges – and of Homer – might beanyone of us: “Thou too, thy haven gained, must turn thee yet/ To look across the sad andstormy space,/ Years of a youth as bitter as the sea,/ Ah, with a heavy heart, and eyelidswet,/ Because, within a fair forsaken place/ The life that might have been is lost to thee”.12

If both philosophers and poets are interested in nostalgia, less often in utopia,paradoxically we may notice that not rarely it is the poets who bring back the general topicfrom the heavens of abstraction down to a more concrete and personal ground, even whenthis is not so much a steady one as rather a “stormy sea”. It is also true, not a few criticalthinkers move from the free creativity of poets or of fictional writers. If Cacciari does itreferring to Dante Alighieri or Thomas More, and Heidegger is inspired by Novalis, inDifference and Repetition the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze proceeds from MarcelProust and his narrative Research of Lost Time. If literarily his referent and starting point isProust, philosophically he traces back to Henry Bergson, Immanuel Kant or even Plato, butwe may reliably suppose some psychoanalytic ascendency too. A very nice passage soundsemblematic: toute réminiscence est érotique, qu’il s’agisse dune ville ou d’une femme. C’esttoujours Érôs, le noumène, qui nous fait pénétrer dans ce passé pur en soi, dans cetterépétition virginale, Mnémosyne. Il est le compagnon, le fiancé de Mnémosyne (“everyreminiscence is erotic, whether we deal with a town or with a woman. It is always Eros, thenoumenon, who makes us penetrate this pure past in itself, this virginal repetition whichMnemosyne is. Eros is the partner, the betrothed of Mnemosyne”). Out of metaphor, therecannot be nostalgia or homesickness without reminiscence. Yet there is no reminiscencewithout a selective feeling, susceptible of delivering and restoring memories fromforgetfulness or removal, within an individual or collective unconscious. In ancient Greekmythology, Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory; Eros, the god of love and desire.

Nonetheless, into his metaphorization Deleuze introduces a third, explicitly Freudian,gooseberry or antagonist. He is but Thanatos, disquieting daemon of death.13 We maydeduce that Mnemosyne is not seldom found in front of a choice, between the nostalgicremembrance promoted by Eros and a dissolving oblivion of the self which Thanatos – aspresumed instinct of death – stands for. In the island of Ogygia, also Ulysses found himselfinvolved in a dramatic dilemma like that. In fact, Calypso had promised him the gift ofimmortality. He was shrewd enough, as to mistrust an immortality devoid of humanness, astoo similar or identical with death, whereas he was not so “modern”, as to quibble about thepossibility that the real life once enjoyed in Ithaca might have been an unrepeatablecondition. Thus, we know, the Homeric hero chose his nostos with no apparent hesitation. Incase he did not, most probably we were not here to discuss about “nostalgia”. Yet there hasbeen a modern poet, the Italian Giovanni Pascoli, in his poem cycle The Last Voyage, who

12 J. L. Borges, “Odyssey, Book Twenty-Three”, trans. R. Fitzgerald in Selected Poems 1923-1967, edited by A. Coleman, New York: Viking, 1999 (from “Odisea, libro vigésimo tercero”, in the collection of poems El otro, el mismo, Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1964); and “In Ithaca”, first published in A. Lang, Ballades and Rhymes, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1911, p. 32. Lang’s poem is expressly inspired by a letter which the ancient Greek writer Lucian of Samosata,in his fantastic novel Vera Historia, imagines sent to Calypso by the soul or shadow of Ulysses, from the Island of the Blest: evidently, that is to mean, a nostalgia stronger than death.

13 G. Deleuze, Différence et répétition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968 (and 2011); in particular, pp. 115, and 145 and following. Cf. Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994; pp. 85, and 109 and following.

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fancied that at last the old sailor returned to Calypso’s isle just in time for meeting with hisdeath, while the mourning nymph could nothing but wrap his corpse with her long hair.14

At this point, we should wonder again whether Ithaca, Utopia and Ogygia are mereislands – verisimilar or not, here it does not matter –, or they have a symbolic value aboveall. We have already discovered, or believed to discover, that Ithaca represents thehomesickness for the past, for a real past, whereas Utopia allegorizes a quasi nostalgia forthe future, for a possible even when improbable one. Now, a new problem is: what mayOgygia stand for? Only poets can answer a question like that, so showily idle. A. Lang hassuggested that Ogygia is homesickness for the lost “life that might have been”. G. Pascolihas insinuated that it is a presentiment of the death itself, or, worse, a wish for thedissolution of a troubled self. If we consider it well, the sole “fair forsaken place” wherethese events can happen at the same time, or where Mnemosyne – the memorialconsciousness – may be contested between Eros and Thanatos, is but the unconscious.Ogygia represents the nostalgia for an inner arena, where all memories are potentially alive,but where a tacit struggle is fought for deciding which of them are worthy of surviving andwhich are destined to the death of oblivion, in order to give us the impression of a continuityof our selves. Nostalgia is not only homesickness for a missing place or a dear person. It isalso instrument and warranty for an identity of the self, or for a functional illusion of it.

Or, else, we might wonder if to know which island, and what a kind of nostalgia, is amatter of real importance. Such is the actual question, that Calypso herself puts to Ulyssesin the dialogue The Island, which another Italian poet and novelist, Cesare Pavese, imaginesset in the isle of Ogygia. Prior to the departure of the sailor from there, she asks, trying totalk him into remaining: “What do you care, if the island is not that, you were searching for?Here anything never happens. Just a piece of earth and a horizon. Yet, this is where you canlive for ever”. But Ulysses does not change his will to leave. Then, Calypso resorts to anironical argument: “The past does not return. Nothing resists the lapsing of time. You sawthe ocean, the monsters and the Elysium. After all that, are you sure to succeed inrecognizing your house?”. And Ulysses answers: “You said it, I carry my island inside ofme”. At last, the nymph in love formulates a premonition, which sounds like a curse: “Youwill find it so changed, as to appear lost and mute. Just a sound of sea among the rocks, or athread of smoke. None will be able to share this with you, and your house will look like theface of an old guy, since your words have got a sense, which is other than theirs. Then youwill feel alone, worse than in the midst of sea. [...] What did, till now, your disquietwandering mean?”. And Ulysses replies: “If I knew it, already I had stopped and stayed”.15

The goddess knows, and the mortal hero has begun to learn, that the isle he carries inhis mind as an image of destination has no name, and that his homesickness is nostalgia initself or – we might even say – a nostalgia of nostalgia. Despite this awareness, Ulyssesmust go on, for there is no other plausible way. Even a disillusion in Ithaca would be better,

14 G. Pascoli, “Calypso”, in “L’ultimo viaggio”, in Poemi conviviali, Bologna: Zanichelli, first published in 1904. Cf. “Calypso”, in “The Last Voyage”, in Last Voyage: Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli, trans. D. Brown, R. Jackson, S. Thomas; Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2010.

15 C. Pavese, “L’isola”, in Dialoghi con Leucò, Turin: Einaudi, first published in 1947. Cf. “The Island”, in Dialogues with Leucò, trans. W. Arrowsmith and D. S. Carne-Ross, Boston: Eridanos Press, 1989. Cf. also a poem written in 1972 by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, ‘‘Odysseus to Telemachus’’ (in Collected Poems in English, trans. G. L. Kline, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000; p. 64): “To a wanderer the faces of all islands/ resemble one another”.

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than the illusion of Ogygia. As an experienced man, he has a lot of good and bad qualities,except the presumption to feel godlike. As an exceptional one, he is rather an antagonist ofgods (such as the “Odysseus” of Pavese is, in some Nietzschean sense). And, as prospectedby Calypso at least, immortality is a parody of that predisposition of men to transcend theirlimits, which in Ulysses is developed to a great degree. However, his nostalgia of nostalgiamakes him not merely a “transcendental” but also a transgressive figure (such as Dante, inhis Inferno, had well guessed). Of course, in the Greco-Roman culture other figures ofnostalgia were not wanting. One of them is the unlucky musician Orpheus, so nostalgic forhis beloved Eurydice, as to confront the gods of death in their underworld, in order topersuade them by means of his art to let her return to life on earth. In his work Spirit ofUtopia, the German thinker Ernst Bloch has metaphorized about this myth: Die Seele weintin uns und sehnt sich hinüber, setzt Gott und den Traum; was aber das Dunkel der Nachtvor sich herjagt, wie Orpheus die Schatten, ist rein aus der Seele geboren und hat nichts alsdiese innerste Euridike zum Ziel (“The soul weeps inside us and yearns beyond, posits Godand the dream; but what the darkness of night chases before itself, like Orpheus chased theshades, is born purely of the soul and has nothing but this inmost Eurydice as its goal”).16

5 – Angelica Kauffmann (or circle of), Penelope Weeping over theBow of Ulysses: Wolverhampton Art Gallery, U. K.; ca. 1779. On theright, Johann H. Füssli, The Artist’s Despair before the Grandeur of

Ancient Ruins: Zürich Kunsthaus, Switzerland; 1778-80

Archetypal Nostalgic Ladies

In practice, a prototype turns into archetype thanks to a long literary – and sometimesartistic – work. Whereas the former can be only passively copied or imitated, the latter is

16 E. Bloch, “Philosophie der Musik”, in Geist der Utopie, Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1918; p. 227. Cf. “The Philosophy of Music”, in The Spirit of Utopia, trans. A. A. Nassar, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000; p. 160 (we have adopted this translation, with a few trifling changes).

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susceptible to influence and orient the philosophical reflection. Deleuze would say that it isHabitus – the habit, in the sense of cultural practice – which makes such a difference, alongwith Eros and Mnemosyne. For certain, also a nostalgic archetype may degrade intostereotype, that is a vain repetition. On the contrary, it remains active and not rarely acts inan unexpected way, when is able to renew itself according with times and places. This is thecase of Penelope, the Homeric spouse of Ulysses. We are used to think of her as a model ofloyalty and patience, nostalgic for her long absent husband. If he is a restless hero – wemight suspect, in more than one meaning –, she is heroically firm in her determination. Yetwe cannot exclude that even, or especially, a heroine like her could meet with a bitterdisillusion. That is what has been insinuated by a Greek poet, Yannis Ritsos, in his poemwritten in 1968 and titled Penelope’s Despair. This despair is as intolerable as her hope hadbeen unshakeable, during the absence of Ulysses and her waiting for his return home.

The Odyssey had told that his first decisive act, when he was back at home, is a terribleslaughter of the self-interested suitors of Penelope and of the servant maids who werecompromised with them, in order to take again full possession of his royal mansion and torecover his power over his family and the realm of Ithaca. Justified or not, such as it hadhappened, that violence provokes fear and horror in the soul of the queen, showing her anUlysses so discrepant from the memory of him she had jealously preserved in her heart.Through the silent thoughts of Penelope, Ritsos’ verse portray the very moment when thatimage is broken, so wretchedly that the bright “day of the return” converts into a dark “nightof the return”: “Was it for him, then, that she’d used up twenty years,/ twenty years ofwaiting and dreaming, for this miserable/ blood-soaked, white-bearded man? She collapsedvoiceless into a chair,/ slowly studied the slaughtered suitors on the floor as though seeing/her own desires dead there. And she said ʻWelcome,’/ hearing her voice sound foreign,distant. In the corner, her loom/ covered the ceiling with a trellis of shadows; and all the/birds she’d woven/ with bright red thread in green foliage, now,/ on this night of the return,suddenly turned ashen and black,/ flying low on the flat sky of her final enduring”.17

We are also used to think of another heroine, in our cultural heritage, more as a tragicthan as a nostalgic one. She is Medea, so often opposed to Penelope as a negative femaleexample. Unlike Penelope, she was a foreigner: nay a barbarian, according to the ancientGreek perception. In both tragedies which the Greek Euripides and the Latin Senecadedicated to her, nostalgic hints to a desperate impossibility of going back to her country oforigin – the Colchis, today’s Georgia – are not lacking. She is the type of the exile, mostlyfor her own fault though. Yet there was a Roman poet of the imperial age, Gaius ValeriusFlaccus, who wrote an incomplete poem, titled Argonautica after the epic with the samename, composed by the Hellenistic poet Apollonius of Rhodes. In the verse of Flaccus, ayoung Medea is portrayed, while in love with the Greek navigator Jason. Already during hervoyage from Colchis to Greece on the Black Sea, an incipient sentiment of homesickness iswell described: “Away on the summit of the poop behind the vigilant steersman Medeaclung to the knees of Minerva’s gilded image; there sitting with her robe cast about her eyesshe still was weeping, solitary, though she journeyed with the Haemonian princes, andunsure of the wedlock that was to be. For her the coasts of the Sarmatian sea feel pity, for

17 Y. Ritsos, “Penelope’s Despair”, in Repetitions, Testimonies, Parentheses, trans. E. Keeley, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991; p. 91 (from Η απόγνωση της Πηνελόπης, in the collections of poems Πέτρες, Επαναλήψεις, Κιγκλίδωμα, Athens: Κedros, 1982).

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her, as she sails by, Diana weeps where Thoas ruled. No lake, no river of Scythia but mournsfor her as she passes; the sight of her, who late was queen of so many realms, stirred theHyperborean snows; even the Minyae now cease their murmuring, and now consent to takeher. Scarce lifts she her head at close, if ever, of some feast that her dear Jason spreadshimself, while he points out that now they pass Carambis with its pall of cloud, now Lycus’kingdom, and as oft beguiles her sighs by bidding her stand to see the hills of Thessaly”.18

Thessaly is the Greek region, which was homeland to Jason. As to Medea, a greatproblem to her will become impossibility of being at home: neither in the adoptive town ofCorinth, nor in her motherland or elsewhere. Not less than jealousy and will of revenge onher disloyal husband, that was a motive for her insanity and for her partly self destructivecrimes. At last, even in Athens the princess and sorceress had to feel stranger, exposed to arisk of being banned again, what actually later happened. Just in Athens, she fell a victim tothe worst kind of regret, that for her sons she herself had killed. At least, this is the storywhich a British poetess of the Victorian age, Augusta Davies Webster in her poem Medea inAthens, has told us. In her delirium, a middle-aged Medea presumes to speak to the ghost ofJason, freshly dead: “Thou, mock me not. What if I have ill dreams,/ Seeing them loathe me,fly from me in dread,/ When I would feed my hungry mouth with kisses?/ What if I moan intossing fever-thirsts,/ Crying for them whom I shall have no more,/ Here nor among thedead, who never more,/ Here nor among the dead, will smile to me/ With young lipsprattling ʻMother, mother dear’?/ What if I turn sick when the women pass/ That lead theirboys; and hate a child’s young face?/ What if – Go, go; thou mind’st me of our sons;/ Andthen I hate thee worse; go to thy grave/ By which none weeps. I have forgotten thee”.19

In reality, instead of a more common difficulty in remembering, it is an impossibilityto forget which is now added to Medea’s acquired incapacity for feeling at home anywhere.She cannot feel at ease even in any time, where her memory pushes her back like into a darkcorner. Some might object that both interpretations, of Yannis Ritsos concerning Penelopeand of Augusta Webster regarding Medea, are too modern for having some archetypal value.Then, not only let us recede somewhat into the past, but let us change cultural area, albeitonce more within a Mediterranean horizon. At least, because European civilization was asynthesis of different contributions. It is so that we meet with a third, unlucky, femalenostalgic figure. In this case, she is neither Greek nor “barbarian”, but biblical andevangelical. Indeed, neither the Old nor the New Testament report her name. Just only in theJewish exegetic Midrash she is given the name Edith or, better, Idit: the “choicest”. Yet letus read the Book of Genesis, 19:26: “As Lot’s wife looked back, she was transformed into apillar of salt”; and Jesus’ words according to Luke, 17:32-33: Μνημονεύετε τῆς γυναικὸςΛώτ. Ὃς ἐὰν ζητήσῃ τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ περιποιήσασθαι [or σῶσαι, as a variant], ἀπολέσειαὐτήν, καὶ ὃς ἂν ἀπολέσει, ζωογονήσει αὐτήν (“Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever tries topreserve [or “to save”] his life will lose it, and whoever loses it will revive his soul”).

What did Lot’s wife glance back at? At her town of Sodom, destroyed by a cataclysmas a divine punishment to its dissolute inhabitants, except Lot, his wife and daughters, who

18 V. Flaccus, Argonautica, trans. J. H. Mozley, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; Book 8, lines 202-16.

19 A. Webster, “Medea in Athens”, in Portraits, London: Macmillan & Co., 1870 and 1893; far more recently, in Portraits and Other Poems, edited by C. Sutphin, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2000, pp. 169-77 (lines 270-83).

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were escaping for having their lives saved. In her poem Żona Lota/“Lot’s Wife”, the Polishpoetess Wisława Szymborska wonders about all possible motives which made this “archaic”woman look back, transgressing a divine prohibition at risk of her own life. It turns outevident that the most human or humane ones are homesickness and piety: Obejrzałam siępodobno z ciekawości./ Ale prócz ciekawości mogłam mieć inne powody./ ... (“They say Ilooked back from curiosity./ But I could have had reasons other than curiosity./ ...”). 20 Isnostalgia a prevalent selfish feeling, contrasting with the biblical memento “Vanity ofvanities, all is vanity”, or may it be a virtual form of altruism? Not too obviously, it dependson circumstances. In his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the North-American Kurt Vonnegutexpresses a sarcastic opinion but largely shareable, if only we think of the historical event,which is starting point and background of his narrative (the devastating bombing ofDresden, in Germany, during the Second World War): “Lot’s wife, of course, was told not tolook back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and Ilove her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt”.21 And, wemight add, who is who failed to preserve his life but revived his soul: Lot, or his wife?

6 – A scene from the Brazilian-French-Italian film Orfeu

20 W. Szymborska, “Żona Lota”, first published in Twórczość No. 9, Krakow, Poland: Instytut Książki, 1973; pp. 5-6. Cf. “Lot’s Wife”, in Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts: Seventy Poems by Wislawa Szymborska, trans. M. J. Krynski and R. A. Maguire, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981; pp. 159-62.

21 K. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (first published in1969; let us notice that the bombing of Hamburg in 1943 had been actually designated as “Operation Gomorrah”), New York: Random House, 1991; pp. 21-22. Instead, in a tale by Elie Wiesel, the same image is referred to the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people of Europe in the same period; that is “Lot’s Wife”, in Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters, Random House, 2003 and2009 (read at p. 38: “All I know is that I understand Lot’s wife better than him. For at times one must look backward – lest one run the risk of turning into a statue. Of stone? No: of ice”).

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negro/“Black Orpheus”, directed by Marcel Camus in 1959

Nostalgia for the Language

So often nostalgia is an ambivalent mood, that it may seem like contested by oppositebut complementary feelings: in a spatial sense, between those which in German are calledHeimweh and Fernweh (“homesickness” and, literally, “longing for the faraway”), or, inFrench, mal du pays and horreur du domicile (“homesickness” and “horror of home [life]”,a hyperbolic expression coined by the poet Charles Baudelaire); on a temporal level,between a conservative and a progressive attitude, or regret for the past and hope in thefuture; more in general, between an introverted and an extroverted inclination and,ultimately, between illusion and disillusion. Moreover, mainly thanks to the intuitions ofpoets, we have striven to focus on a perception of nostalgia not so much as a selfish, butrather as a potential altruistic sentiment. In doing so, we have tried to give an interpretationof Novalis’ input, “Philosophy is authentic homesickness, an instinct driving to be at homeeverywhere”, somewhat alternative to that given by Heidegger. We might dare say, anostalgia for the other – be it a real otherness, or a simple elsewhere –, is ever better than forthe same old self. That is a dynamic device in the individual personality or in a collectiveidentity, and a critical control in our cultural belonging. To a certain extent, it alsodetermines what we usually deem to be an “open mind” or, on the contrary, a narrow one.

Before returning to a philosophical shore from the isles of literature or the caves ofpsychology, we want to concentrate on a couple of quotations more, from Russian poets.The former is from the poem Ithaka by Joseph Brodsky, where he fancies that Ulysses, onceback in his country, is hardly able to recognize it and to make people recognize him, evenhis son Telemachus: “Your son has grown tall: he is a sailor himself/ and he looks at you asif you were scum./ And the language they all shout in/ is a futile labor, it seems, todecipher”.22 Twenty years after, even the language has sensibly changed. Or, morerealistically, the veteran is no longer used to hear and to understand it in its fluent speech.Suddenly, the poet diverts our attention from the nostalgic gaze to a homesick, anddisillusioned, hearing. Yet, there is no doubt, here what really matters is the language. Thiscould have been also written, if only Ulysses had lived in a later epoch, like so manyrefugees, expatriates or migrants, still at present. No longer his native idiom sounds familiarto him, nor does he feel again at home – we are just paraphrasing Heidegger, after Novalis –in his own language, the same “mother tongue” he had long and tenaciously kept in mind.

The latter quotation is from a poem dedicated to Lot’s Wife again, by Anna Akhmatova.She imagines that the voice of the angel, an inner one more than a divine messenger, hadspoken differently to Lot and to his wife. From the Bible, we know what the angels said toLot. According to the poetess, Lot’s wife’s angel so told her: “It’s not too late, you can stilllook back// at the red towers of your native Sodom,/ the square where once you sang, thespinning-shed,/ at the empty windows set in the tall house/ where sons and daughtersblessed your marriage-bed”. In this short sequence of nostalgic memories, the firstimpressive image is that of the woman herself singing in an open urban space, be it a a

22 J. Brodsky, “Ithaka” (1993), trans. Z. M. Torlone in “Classical Myth in Joseph Brodsky”, in Classical and Modern Literature, Vol. 23, No. 1, Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri, Department of Classical Studies, 2003, pp. 95-114; see also excerpt in Poetry for Students, Vol. 35, Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010, p. 160.

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square or a courtyard. This time, we do not deal so much with the meaning, as rather withthe sound of language: in the specific case, the resonance of her own voice, from a familiarpast. We do not know or care which tongue Sodomites spoke. It is not important, becausewhat matters for Lot’s wife – here, we had better employ classical Greek words – is not arational logos but the sentimental phonē. In this inverted view, the phonē gives a sense ofdeepness, or works as an inspiring hint. It is this phonē, which grows the meaningful albeitdeceptive voice of her angel, and makes Lot’s wife turn back. And Akhmatova concludes:“Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem/ too insignificant for our concern?/Yet in my heart I never will deny her,/ who suffered death because she chose to turn”.23

The best female – and dissident – pupil of Heidegger was Hannah Arendt, who had toexpatriate from the Nazi Germany earlier to France, later to U. S. A. Thus, her most matureworks of critical political theory are in English, her adoptive language. We might say thathere the roles are inverted, with respect to Lot and his wife, because Hannah escaped fromthe catastrophe, whereas Martin – incidentally, her lover too – not merely chose to remain intheir homeland. Above all, he was conniving with those, who had determined thecatastrophe itself and carried it on, until its extreme and tragic consequences. Despite allthat, the Jewish daughter to German philosophy never ceased to turn her gaze back at herstepmother land and to feel homesick for her mother tongue, logos and phonē both included.Nor, for this, was she transmuted into a statue of salt. At most and at times, she became thebutt of direct or indirect polemics. Interviewed in 1964 by the German journalist GüntherGaus, she declared: “What remains? The language remains. […] I have always consciouslyrefused to lose my mother tongue. I have always maintained a certain distance from French,which I then spoke very well, as well as from English, which I write today. […] I write inEnglish, but I have never lost a feeling of distance from it. There is a tremendous differencebetween your mother tongue and another language. [...] The German language is theessential thing that has remained and that I have always consciously preserved”.24

In reality, Arendt’s attachment to her mother tongue is not only a matter of affection.She preserves it not so much as a component of her identity, but rather – in a Heideggerianstyle – like a tool for her interpretation of the world. The language, as an emotional filter,but also the repository of a collective wisdom, useful in extracting and constructing a senseof existence. It is also true, already some Greek thinkers, after Aristotle in his Politics,distinguished the logos, a rational discourse which is universal and can be translated, fromthe phonē as a peculiar speech depending on different languages.25 Paraphrasing Novalisonce more, thus we may object that one can feel philosophically at home in every languagehe knows or learns; nay, that so his interpretative spectre may become richer, emotionally

23 A. A. Akhmatova, Лотова жена/“Lot’s Wife” (1922-24), trans. S. Kunitz and M. Hayward in Poems of Akhmatova, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1973; p.77.

24 H. Arendt, “ʻWhat Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus”, in Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism. trans. J. Kohn, NewYork: Schocken Books, 1994 (from “Was bleibt? Es bleibt die Muttersprache”, in Gespräche mitHannah Arendt, edited by A. Reif, Munich: Piper, 1976); pp. 12-13.

25 In Greek, λόγος and φωνή. Cf. Hermes Trismegistus, Corpus Hermeticum, Treatise XII (“About the Common Mind”), Chapter 13. For an English translation, see Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius, edited by B. P. Copenhaver, Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995; p. 46.

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too. Is it not what we are striving to do, imperfectly though and confiding in the reader’sindulgence, in this very moment? In one sense, such an aspiration and imperfection itself ishomesickness for whichever language, “that might have been” and only accidentally wasnot part of our own selves: a nostalgia for a potential otherness, in its higher expression.

Finally, some might wonder about the indulgent angel or demon, who whispered toLot’s wife according to Akhmatova. Was he deceitful, or simply unwary of theconsequences of his hazardous suggestion, and impotent to prevent them? Has hedisappeared at all? Indeed, we meet with an analogue figure in a renowned passage of theTheses on the Philosophy of History – or On the Concept of History –, written during theSecond World War by the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. Like Lot’s wife,or else Orpheus, he is turned backward. Yet the object of his nostalgic attention is neither atown nor a woman, but our history itself. For this, he is also called “Angel of History”: “A[Paul] Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about tomove away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth isopen, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turnedtoward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe whichkeeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would liketo stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowingfrom Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longerclose them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned,while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress”.26

26 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, trans. H. Zohn from “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (written in 1940; later published in Gesammelten Schriften, I 2, Frankfurt on Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), in Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1992; p. 249.

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7 – Above, Etruscan-Hellenisticterracotta bust of Ariadne, Paris: Musée

du Louvre; early 3rd century B. C.Below, Ariadne 2, oil on canvas by theEnglish painter George F. Watts (1817-

1904): private collection

Afterword: the Irreversible

What have they in common, such turned backward figures like Orpheus, Lot’s wifeand the angel of Klee and Benjamin? Orpheus and Lot’s wife share their grief for a loss, andthe transgression of an alleged divine interdiction. Yet all of them share a regret, which iscaused by something irreversible: respectively, the untimely death of Eurydice; thecataclysmic destruction of the culpable Sodom; the human determined catastrophes inmodern history. Even the angel cannot “awaken the dead, and make whole what has beensmashed”. He can only represent an emblematic monition and a weak auspice, in order thatthose catastrophes will be not repeated. Actually, all these are extreme examples of what wemay call nostalgia for the irreversible, after Vladimir Jankélévic in his Irreversibility andnostalgia.27 Indeed, the French thinker maintained that, if we consider it well, all truehomesickness is nostalgia for what is irretrievable. And, in a narrow meaning, he is reliablyright. Of course, that has a lot to do with the irreversibility of time, or with a possibleremorse for choices we made or omitted in the past, but cannot however be corrected in its

27 V. Jankélévic, L’irréversible et la nostalgie, Paris: Flammarion, 1974.

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consequences, because they concurred to configure our present state in an indelible way.Rather than a linear development of time, a one way – and Borgesian – labyrinth: this

is the pertinent image, we can find in a tale in form of letter by Antonio Tabucchi, titled It’sGetting Later All the Time (it is the title of the tale, as well as of the fictional epistolary, inwhich the piece of narrative is included). The Italian novelist resorts to a female charactermore, borrowed from ancient Greek mythology. This time, she is neither the IthacanPenelope nor the Colchian Medea, but Ariadne, abandoned by the Athenian Theseus on theAegean island of Naxos. Unlike Medea, the Cretan princess could not be considered abarbarian, at least for her civilization was older than the Hellenic itself. Yet this Ariadne is amodern, or, better, an atemporal heroine. Like the classical one in the poetical precedent ofthe Heroides by the Latin Ovid, she too writes her hopeless letter to his far away – or,perhaps, already dead – disloyal hero: “I had you find your way out of a labyrinth, and youhad me go into one without there being any way out for me, not even the ultimate one. Formy life has passed, and everything eludes me without the possibility of any link that mightlead me back to myself or to the cosmos. I am here, the breeze caresses my hair and I amfloundering in the night, because I have lost my thread, the one I gave you, Theseus”.

This proverbial Ariadne’s thread becomes the link between the nostalgia for the selfand one for the infinite, the symbol of a contradictory correspondence. Yet it is the secret ofa reversibility of the irreversible too, something which is possible only in the humandiscourse, never in reality though. Not less than Tabucchi, comprehensibly Jankélévic wassceptical about. As a realistic or resigned thinker, his opinion was that such a kind ofdiscourse is but the illusory compensation of a consolatory imagination, a concept notunknown nor useless in the psychoanalytic reflection though. On the other hand, he thoughtthat also a spatial inquietude, such as the Odysseian damnation or propensity to wander,may well be a vain Pascalian divertissement or diversion from the insoluble problem ofirreversibility of time. As for us, after Novalis as well as after Leibniz, we can dare arguethat if really a polyhedral paradox like that is inscribed in human souls some relevant“sufficient reason” might exist. Clearly, this ought to be not the reversibility of time in itself,but rather the orientation which a simulated aim like this can imprint in the activity ofhuman beings. A tension to transcend their limits, even if within an immanent frame, whatsometimes may assume a connotation of symbolic revolt against a banalizing rationality.

There is an irreversibility which seems to be less irretrievable than others, anyway.This happens when that irreversibility is strictly associated with a regret or a remorse: withthe doubt that things might have gone otherwise, somewhat better of course, if only wewould or could act in a different way. In this ethical sense, the Angelus Novus/“New Angel”of Benjamin is a higher and even more realistic figure than the ancient Orpheus. His revoltagainst an alleged rationality of history looks more advanced than the mere refusal ofineluctability of death by Orpheus, even if Orpheus’ instrument is the magnificent illusionof an immortalizing power of art. Paradoxically, the political consciousness of the “Angel ofHistory” is more compatible with the repulsion for a patriarchal unquestionability ofreligion by the archaic Lot’s wife. That is because, in both allegories of the Angelus Novusand of Lot’s wife, there is an element which is lacking in the legend of Orpheus andEurydice. This is an albeit problematic “nostalgia for the future”, be it our progressive oneor the biblical “Promised Land”, a return to Eden for one chosen people. Nor can we forget,our progressive dream is grandson to that had by Abraham and Lot, in part at least.

If this world cannot be reversed – nay, at most can be destroyed –, it is susceptible of

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being improved according to human nature, a component of which – now, we may be betteraware of it – is “authentic homesickness, an instinct driving to be at home everywhere”.Unfortunately, in such a hypothetical nature not only opposite but also far lesscommendable components cohabit, so that it may appear composite or dissociated worsethan complex. In certain circumstances, some of those re-emerge in their worst expression,which easily become a source of shame or object of an attempted removal in our memory.Incontestably, one of these events was the Nazi persecution and genocide of the Jews inEurope, during the Second World War. We have seen above how Kurt Vonnegut, in his novelSlaughterhouse-Five, applied the biblical episode of Lot’s wife to the huge sufferance of thepopulation under the Allied bombings of German towns. With all the more reason, in a taleby Elie Wiesel, the same image is referred to the so called Holocaust. That is “Lot’s Wife”,in Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters.Nevertheless, Wiesel’s conclusion sounds very similar to what we have read written byVonnegut: “All I know is that I understand Lot’s wife better than him. For at times one mustlook backward – lest one run the risk of turning into a statue. Of stone? No: of ice”.28

What does it mean? That between Vonnegut and Wiesel some convergence wasunderstood, in homologizing the sufferings of persecutors and persecuted, with a confusionof roles and responsibilities (an analogue charge was made against Hannah Arendt, whenshe wrote on The Banality of Evil)? No, for certain. Rather, it was the gaze of Lot’s wife,which was so sharp and far-sighted, as to discern every human being as worthy ofcompassion per se, before than as an indiscriminate subject of culpability. In so doing,already she was “at home everywhere”, even better than an idealist like her husband in hisnomadic quest for a “Promised Land”. Not only she was a disobedient, turned backwardlady, but also a potential subverter of a primitive and despotic conception of divinity. If nota literal reversion, hers might have been a dangerous subversion. Her conversion into apillar of salt seems to have been something like a preventive, and deterrent, punishment.Thus, we can read Jesus’ sentence too, “Remember Lot’s wife”, in a light other than thatprevalently adopted. An interpretation of her motivation, as mere curiosity or homesickness,is reductive as well. Nonetheless, let us take leave quoting a few nostalgic verse once morededicated to her, by Gary J. Whitehead: “Standing in that wasted landscape,// she must haveseemed a statue erected there/ as a tribute to human frailty, white, crystallized,/ her headturned back as if in longing to be the girl// she had been in the city she had known”.29

28 E. Wiesel, “Lot’s Wife”, in Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters, Random House, 2003 and 2009; p. 38.

29 G. J. Whitehead, “Lot’s Wife”, in the collection of poems A Glossary of Chickens, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2013 ; pp. 7-8. If Whitehead perceives the motivation ofLot’s Wife as homesickness, an interpretation of it as curiosity is found in Voltaire, Toleration and Other Essays (1755; trans. J. McCabe, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912, p. 111). In the chapter “On the Interpretation of the Old Testament”, the French Illuminist ironically writes: “The crime that God punishes here is horrible; let that suffice us. Lot’s wife was changed into a salt statue for looking behind her. Let us curb the impulses of curiosity; in a word, let the stories of Holy Writ serve to make us better, if they do not make us more enlightened”.

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8 – Above, photo-portrait of thephilosopher Hannah Arendt as a young

woman, in 1933. Below, book coverillustration of April Yamasaki,

Remember Lot’s Wife, and OtherUnnamed Women of the Bible, Elgin,

Illinois: Faith Quest, 1991

More essays by the same author, in English, at the Websites below:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2531940/Space-and-Time-of-the-Annunciationhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/2681466/The-Cat-and-the-Angel-of-the-Annunciationhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/2913375/The-Hands-of-Mary-States-of-Mind-in-the-

Annunciatehttp://www.scribd.com/doc/2988387/Hail-Mary-Nazarene-and-PreRaphaelite-

Annunciationshttp://www.scribd.com/doc/3817130/Women-and-Angels-Female-Annunciationshttp://www.scribd.com/doc/4597267/Byzantine-Annunciations-An-Iconography-of-

Iconographyhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/5837944/Marian-Icons-in-Rome-and-Italyhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/8650381/The-Flight-into-Egypt-A-Transcontinental-Triphttp://www.scribd.com/doc/9568413/A-Long-Way-to-Emmaus-Almost-a-Samaritan-

Storyhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/11517241/The-Bodily-Christ

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http://www.scribd.com/doc/12902607/Magdalenes-Iconographyhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/15057438/Marys-Gaze-in-the-History-of-Arthttp://www.scribd.com/doc/14136622/Mimesis-in-Ancient-Arthttp://www.scribd.com/doc/16420824/Thinkers-in-a-Landscapehttp://www.scribd.com/doc/19582647/Figures-of-Absence-in-the-History-of-Arthttp://www.scribd.com/doc/24221344/The-Smile-of-the-Sacredhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/26251175/On-the-Traces-of-Alcestishttp://www.scribd.com/doc/28930322/Trains-and-Trams-An-Archaeology-of-

Modernityhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/30742254/Eros-and-Psyche-A-Hermeneutic-Circlehttp://www.scribd.com/doc/32595697/Mirrors-Masks-and-Skullshttp://www.scribd.com/doc/35178388/Excursions-into-Female-Portraiturehttp://www.scribd.com/doc/37125849/Pythagoreanism-An-Early-Italic-Philosophyhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/42468642/Stupor-Mundi-The-Pathos-of-Philosophershttp://www.scribd.com/doc/51101694/Orientalism-Veiled-and-Unveiledhttp://www.scribd.com/doc/2075273/Italy-through-a-Gothic-Glasshttp://www.scribd.com/pinoblasone/d/49497627-Orientalism-and-Turkish-Coffeehttp://www.scribd.com/doc/85506209/Philosophical-Imagery-and-Philosophy-Moods http://www.scribd.com/doc/207269125/A-Roman-Minor-Sculpture

9 – The philosopher Walter Benjamin, photographed by Gisèle Freundat Paris; late 1930s. On the right, Angelus Novus, oil and watercolor

by the Swiss painter Paul Klee, Jerusalem: Israel Museum; 1920

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