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Two current books raise a word that has never been buried, nostalgia, which has become fashionable lately, almost, because it is contemplated by writers, politicians, anthropologists and, of course, musicians. The books are ‘On Nostalgia’, by Diego S. Garrocho, and ‘Lo neorrancio’, signed by several authors. Both have nostalgia as a key or key, but they thrive in opposite directions. Garrocho fulfills a bible in this regard, rich, deep and very pleasant, and states that we live in a more nostalgic time than others, culturally. In the pages of ‘Lo neorrancio’ it is noted that perhaps a past was never the best.
In any case, the nostalgia is there, between the illness and the anesthesia, like a perfume that goes and
comes, deciphering us. The word nostalgia has been given a lot of use, and politics looks to the past, to thread a future, while a searching psychology finds the climates of the eighties beneficial. I don’t know if the pandemic has made us stronger, but it has made us more hostage to nostalgia, which sometimes is pure nostalgia for the future. From nostalgia come some unforgettable songs, and nostalgia often goes to life to make a nest, because “the future is the only past that can be changed”, according to Garrocho’s diagnosis.
“The tram that passes hurts me, and also the one that does not pass,” he wrote Ruano. Y Juan Ramon, always sick of distances, closes a soulful verse: «Acute, infinite nostalgia for what I have». The word nostalgia has a date of invention, June 22, 1688, when Dr. John Hofer he coined it to explain the illness or sadness of soldiers far from the homeland. So we owe the term to a doctor, and not to a poet, although poetry has been the use that has given fuel nostalgia, and validity, and prestige, from Greece to today.
“To live is to see come back”, summed up a lyricist, and the nostalgia lodged there is and is not the nostalgia of Marcel Proustwhich fulfilled miniature of seven volumes in the past, or the nostalgia of William Cabrera Infante, who loved Havana, because it does not exist. It’s no wonder that the tango ‘Nostalgias’ is the most covered version of its genre, nor that ‘Yesterday’ is a wealth of royalties and devotees. There is a future in nostalgia, obviously, which ultimately remains where it always is: on the shores of the summer of childhood itself.