Synchronicity

Was just in LA for the day and picked up a Milan Kundera book in the airport store. "Ignorance: A Novel." I've read a lot of his stuff, though I can't really remember it anymore. But this passage from p. 5 caught my eye:

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most Europeans can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness."

... But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: soknuour: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimpra: longing for the homeland.

... In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there.

I've been thinking about how to write a song about those feelings, though I myself haven't had them, haven't been driven from my homeland (the farthest I've gotten from my homeland of Berkeley is Oakland). Visiting Cuba made me think of it--how that nostalgia grips its exiles and how when they finally return to their fictional paradise they will strangle it with modernity.

Funny how I was just contemplating the meaning of saudades (see below) and I pick up this book.