Home, Nostalgia, and The Odyssey

Home,Home, Nostalgia,Nostalgia, andand TheThe OdysseyOdyssey Warren Zhu, Year 13, Churchill House

Few men can keep alive through a big serf to crawl, clotted with brine, on kindly beaches in joy, in joy, knowing the abyss behind: and so she too rejoiced, her gaze upon her husband, her white arms round him pressed as though forever —The Odyssey

The Odyssey is about Odysseus’ journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War—a 10-year journey after 10 years of war. In the decade Odysseus survives and endures (though all of his crewmates travelling with him have perished) the anger of Poseidon, Calypso’s imprisonment, the offerings of the Lotus Eaters, the fury of the Cyclops, the temptation of the Sirens, the sweet embrace of Circe, the desire for the Cattle of the Sun, only to arrive back home with irreverent suitors courting his wife whilst wasting away his estate. With the help of Athena and his son Telemachus (much matured after his own journey to search for his father), Odyssey disguises himself as an old beggar and kills all the suitors, reuniting, at last, with his family.

The late Roger Scruton said that in the centre of The Odyssey is nostalgia. Nostalgia is a combination of the Greek nostos, the returning to home, and algos, pain. The locus of nostalgia has always been ‘home’; this can be discerned through the aforementioned Greek word nostos—the coming back home. Home need not be a physical location—like Ithaca that Odyssey tried so hard to sail back to—but it has to be the place where ‘the past’ dwells. There is a sense of familiarity and a Heideggerian knowing-your-wayaround at home, but also the sense of naturally being an element within it. And nostalgia is just that desire to find or to return (though every re-turn is always a re-discovery), to a place in the universe that belongs to oneself and to which oneself belongs. Nostalgia is Dasein (as Heidegger would say) in its quest of finding itself because Dasein “is its past, whether explicitly or not” , and it, Dasein, is that being with “historicality… [as a] determining characteristic” . Nostalgia is the longing to re-join with that part of

1 oneself—lying, now, forlorn in the past—that one loses to the steady, unrelenting flow of time. Nostalgia manifests itself as a wish to return to a time where everything was right and (thank God!) people were not so decadent. Either for the paradise that was so unwittingly lost—that’s the Christian narrative of innocence, or a glorious time with glorious people before mankind was tainted by society—that’s Rousseau’s story of the noble savage or a glorious era that once was and is now long gone—that’s the Roman story of the senate and the founding of the empire. At the very least, nostalgia, for each individual, is that yearning for one’s past, which, though its misgivings, is painfully wonderful, for lying in the middle of all that loveliness is a ‘sweet unrest’ —a pain that we are most powerless to quench because we are timely beings thrown into a rectilinear stream who have, as our direction, a constant moving forward. (As Kant says, we are creatures who intuit time and create this stream in which we swim, sometimes effortlessly, sometimes less so.) Nostalgia, in this sense, is a paradoxical enterprise, for it is the search for a past, or, at the least, the salvaging of what remnant of it we can find in the future. For the past is always past, and no longing, after the past has passed, can make it less so.

In this sense, Odyssey has its modern counterpart in In Search of Lost Time, Proust’s masterly effort to regain the past—with all that was dear and wonderful and sad and painful there, dwelling deep in the unconscious, only to be activated by a chance detail (the so-called Proustian moment) that has not lost any of its potency precisely because it has not been recalled. In Search of Lost Time, however, draws out

another aspect of nostalgia: whatever one is salvaging is not necessarily lost to the world, but, instead, lost in oneself. This returning home is never the discovery of anything new, but the reawakening of whatever was forgotten and neglected. The quest back home, spurred by nostalgia, is always a quest in self-understanding. Nostalgia, whenever and wherever it manifests, is the pointing-toward some neglected part of oneself.

To develop on this point, allow me to give a synopsis of Heidegger’s philosophy. Heidegger called the being of each person Dasein . And Dasein is Dasein, in virtue of the fact that it ha 4 s an understanding of its being. This understanding of itself is mostly unmental (and this is the long-held distinction of man as the thinking thing that Heidegger was trying to rebel against) , and is manifested in doing, as know-how, acquired by being in a culture with multifarious social practices and being in relation with people. This is similar to a point made by Wittgenstein in On Certainty, about how for most of the time we don’t think about what we do, but just do it out of habit. What this has to do with nostalgia, is that the going back home to the culture—the place, the environment, the kind of people, the way of life—that had been instrumental in determining one’s outlook as well as one’s sense of identity—who one is, what one does, what one likes, what one wishes to achieve in life, what it means to be oneself—aids Dasein in its understanding of itself. Thinking along this line, nostalgia, perhaps, is not as tragic and futile as I have made it seem in the paragraphs above. At its most authentic (and Odysseus’ journey back home— in contrast with all the other shipmates who have all lost themselves on the way—would be the epitome of this authentic nostalgia), nostalgia can be constructive. Constructive, here, used, in the sense that nostalgia is not a completely hopeless affair, but its effect is less like construction, but archaeology: a bringing to the light of consciousness all that one understands but does not know. This nostalgiaguided ontical-archaeology is important because it is only to the extent that we bring our past, our history, our being to bear can we be autonomous. For the past is always driving us forward (as Faulkner says “the past is never dead, it is not even past”), 6 more so if it lies hidden from us, and it is only in understanding ourselves that we are in control of ourselves. Heidegger says, slightly after the passage that I quoted above: “Only because it [an era] is ‘historical’ can an era be unhistoriological. ”

This character of nostalgia, that it does not trap oneself into history, but liberates (to the extent that one is able to be liberated) oneself from the future, is perhaps the reason why in the Greek tradition, following The Odyssey, the returning home (nostos— homecoming) is always heroic. The hero is the person who leaves home (The Iliad) and returns again. Both journeys require courage—the one away and the one back—and perhaps more so for the journey back home (or else why would all of the sailors who accompanied Odysseus to Troy not have survived in this journey back?). This, I speculate, is because the past is a much more painful place than the future (though the future has its own set of concerns).

Allow me to develop my point using Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXX, where the pain of the past is articulated marvelously:

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When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

Lying in the past are ‘old woes’: unhappiness, pain, and grievances that do not simply disappear when one ceases to experience them, but instead lies still, dormant in one’s memory. The journey back is a voyage through all that has once beaten one down: it is sorting through the unconscious, releasing what is repressed within, confronting those terrible and demonic parts of oneself, and coming to terms with them. The past is first painful because it brings to

4. For Heidegger there is a difference between Dasein, as an ontological status (a kind of being), and human, as in the DNA and the number of chromosomes and what else biology would call human. There is an interesting section in Being and Time, called, specifically, “How the analytic of Dasein is to be distinguished from anthropology, psychology, and biology” 5. Interestingly—and this really helps to give one a sense of the Early Heidegger—Heidegger explained logos, not as ‘reason’, or ‘logic’, as one would normally translate it (and this is how Aristotle’s famous “λόγονἔχον” is translated, as the ‘animal rationale’), but ‘speech’, as in discourse and communication with fellow human beings. In one of his lectures, he said that we can best understand what logos meant to the Greeks by comparing it with reading the newspaper (take into consideration that it was in the 1920s, so newspaper played a much more important role in the society), as in, engaging in civil life and caring about the polity. 6. The interested reader can read the preface to Between Past and Future, with a discussion on one of Kafka’s vignettes, of a Human stuck between two persons, one pushing him forward from behind (the past), and another pushing him, from the front, backwards (the future). The striking thing is that it is the past that drives us forward, and the future that forces us back. 7. English 42, German 20 8. Freud, in some sense too, pointed at the enslaving effect of the past in his discovery of the unconscious, and Jung, even more radically, raised the past to a new height in his postulation of a Collective Unconscious.

realization the essential tragedy in human striving— that most of what we seek we do not get. And this pain is doubly felt when we realize that, since nothing human is infallible, we have not made the best use of the past (“wail my dear time’s waste”).

Characteristic of the past is that, as I’ve mentioned before, it is past, and can never be summoned back:

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,

And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe, And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight;

Although, for Shakespeare, not all is lost. There lies salvation in friendship:

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.

Note, however, that to end his sorrow, the speaker need not physically see the ‘friend’ , but only ‘think on’ him. Isn’t this, then, the sweet part of nostalgia—the element of nostos, the envisioning of being back home with one’s friends and families and all that one loves that sustains spirit and life—as the natural counterpart to algos, the pain in never being able to re-experience the past?

It is perhaps worth noting, related to this, that the past, throughout history, has constantly been viewed as a burden (as Nietzsche called it in his thought experiment called “the eternal recurrence”), for it is the thing that one cannot change but is nevertheless attached to oneself forever. There have been many attempts to erase the past, in Communist China, in the Soviet Union, in Nazi Germany—what this does is that it makes us stranger to ourselves. George Santayana said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” . We need not accept his proposition in full to understand his point: Along with the loss of the past is the loss in our ability to judge.

It is also the case that the past, if unresolved, can lead to present conflicts. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an example of that. What this demonstrates, again, is the value in returning and straightening whatever crooked thing lies dormant in the past through returning home. Though valuable and necessary, however, this returning is not an easy process, because to return to one’s past is to shoulder responsibility for all one had done, since, as mortals, we make mistakes, and this acknowledging, accepting, and taking responsibility of our mistakes is a process unbearable-beyond-belief—especially so, looking back far from the future, with the benefit of hindsight, knowing that I could have made a better choice, that if only I….

To relate back to The Odyssey: To return to the past is to take care of those ‘who’ whom one bears the duty to care—the suitors crowding around Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, and Odysseus’ father, Laertes, terribly sick because of Odysseus—since it is in the past, not the present or the future, where duty and obligation lies.

To end, I want to point you to another part of the heroism in nostalgia, that is, the willingness to put one’s imagination—what one imagines the home to be like, how wonderful it is—against reality. This rises out of the fact that it is not ‘I’ , but remembrance, who remembers, in that much of the imaginings and remembrance of the past is faulty, rising out of the urge, the innate human need, for remembrance—and this is the myth of the Golden Age, for we tend, in our need to remember and to have an anchor that we can always strive back on, romanticize it. A famous Chinese poem ends: (the closer to home, the more reluctant I proceed, I see him who came from home, but I dare not ask how it is), which articulates the exact fear that is actualized in Odysseus’ confrontation with the suitors surrounding his wife, Penelope. When Athena reveals to Odysseus what dangers lie in his house, Odysseus thanks her:

“God help me!” the man of intrigue [Odysseus] broke out: “Clearly I might have died the same ignoble death as Agamemnon , bled white in my own house too, if you had never revealed this to me now,

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