Def: Nostalgia

Definition

From Ancient Greek νόστος ‎(nóstos, “journey” or “return home”) + ἄλγος ‎(álgos, “pain”).

Placing Blame

I blame my kid. I was never particularly sentimental or nostalgic until my son came along. Then at some point after he arrived, I started the slow devolve into a soft pile of saccharine goo.

When you’re young you clear out the old and have little tolerance for keeping things around that serve no practical purpose in the present. The typewriter makes way for the word processor, which makes way for the computer, which makes way for the tablet….

In the year leading up to my son’s birth, my wife and I cleaned out four generations’ worth of accumulated stuff and, frankly, junk from my family home.

[1] Two trips to the recycling center with a horse trailer filled with old water-damaged papers and cardboard and bits of plastic and glass,
[2] three trips to the Salvation Army and Habitat for Humanity with the same two horse-trailer, and five 200 yard dumpsters filled later our house wasn’t ready but fatigue implored us to stop rather than sentimental attachment to what was left. There are a few boxes of letters left that I haven’t gone through yet, scraps of family sentiment that, perhaps needed more nostalgic incubation before they could be looked at.

The evocative emotions of nostalgia are, as history warns,

[3] debilitatingly apparent. But at some point in recent history
[4] nostalgia became a romantic notion to be praised and quietly admired.

I feel the original pathological and modern sense of the word when I watch this video by Bora Barroso and realize how wonderfully innocent and protected my childhood was, and how I haven’t seen a Disney film since my father died in 1994.

[5]

2:38 long.

Films Used

  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
  • Pinocho (1940)
  • Fantasia (1940)
  • Saludos Amigos (1942)
  • The Three Caballeros (1944)
  • The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949)
  • Cinderella (1950)
  • Alice in Wonderland (1951)
  • Peter Pan (1953)
  • Lady and the Tramp (1955)
  • Sleeping Beauty (1959)
  • One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961)
  • The Sword in the Stone (1963)
  • The Jungle Book (1967)
  • The Aristocats (1970)
  • Robin Hood (1973)
  • The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977)
  • The Fox and the Hound (1981)
  • The Black Cauldron (1985)
  • The Great Mouse Detective (1986)
  • Oliver and Company (1988)
  • The Little Mermaid (1989)
  • The Rescuers Down Under (1990)
  • Beauty and Beast (1991)
  • Aladdin (1992)
  • The Lion King (1994)
  • Pocahontas (1995)
  • The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1996)
  • Hercules (1997)
  • Mulan (1998)
  • Tarzan (1999)
  • Dinosaur (2000)
  • The Emperor´s New Groove (2001)
  • Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
  • Lilo & Stich (2002)
  • Treasure Planet (2002)
  • Brother Bear (2003)
  • Chicken Little (2005)
  • Meet the Robinsons (2007)
  • Bolt (2008)
  • The Princess and the Frog (2009)
  • Tangled (2010)
  • Wreck-It-Ralph (2012)
  • Frozen (2013)
  • Big Hero 6 (2014)
  • Zootopia (2016)

  1. This preceded a home rehabilitation, slight renovation, and spousal nesting project intended to bring the original 1957 part of the house’s electrical and plumbing systems up to late twentieth century standards. We replaced all the original windows, knocked out a couple of walls, repainted everything, added a bathroom, jutted two other bathrooms, added a closet, and, partly, water-sealed our basement.  ↩

  2. This was back when our area had a recycling center. We’re only the state capital so it isn’t surprising that we don’t have any facilities to do this. I’m only still slightly furious about this…  ↩

  3. Nostalgia was listed as a disease and even fatal one. During the U.S. Civil War (between 1861 and 1866) 5,537 Union soldiers were diagnose by doctors with nostalgia. 74 died from it.  ↩

  4. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary 1920 was the first recorded mentioning of nostalgia as a “wistful yearning for the past” in French literature.  ↩

  5. Separate thoughts about the diverging style of Disney animation - soft, warm lines before 1994 and harsher, flat lines from 1995 through at least 2008 - might be interesting at some point. The harder more obviously early computer-use drawn animation never appealed to me.
    Also, The Lion King is a lousy last Disney film to watch after you’ve lost your father.  ↩

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