añoranza

Amit Varma has started a new category called 'Excerpts', where he will post about short excerpts he has enjoyed from books he reads. Its something I often do here.. and remember doing this right from 9th grade, when my interest in literature was lit. I started writing down quotes and excerpts from poems and books that I read. I probably ought to do it a lot more often these days as I read a lot more but giving my reading habits these days (reading as I sleep in bed late in the night or as soon as I wake up - its strange - I need reading to lull me to sleep as well as to wake me up!), I do not get the chance to write things down.

Anyways, in addition to Amit's post today about "remembering what you want to forget and forgetting what you want to remember" there is another aspect about remembering & memories that I find very interesting... it is related to what we call nostalgia. In 20/20 hindsight (to loose a cliched terminology with a slightly different meaning), even the bad/sad memories of the past seem to become wonderful memories.

Kundera has used the Spanish word - añoranza - to capture what nostalgia can mean...

A comment by a reader at this thread (on architectural photography, no less!) explains this concept better than I can:

"The word (nostalgia), as Kundera reminds us, is derived from the Greek nostos ("return") and algos ("pain, grief, sorrow"). In Kundera's novel, however, the term assumes a double meaning: not only of sorrow caused by the desire to return but also of pain caused by actual return. For Kundera, nostalgia is a profoundly deceptive sentiment. The author points out that in Spanish, the word for nostalgia or longing is añoranza, related, via the Catalan, to the Latin word ignorantia. We feel nostalgic because we no longer know the place or person or the moment in the past we long for. When nostalgia settles in, the object of desire is already fading. Nostalgia, writes Kundera, is a self-sufficient sentiment, "fully absorbed ... by its suffering and nothing else." In other words, it is a form of not knowing, and it rarely survives a confrontation with reality"

I got introduced to Kundera in the early 90s and have been a big fan since...though admittedly I have not read his last 3-4 books.