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In search of home

Nostalgia. When are we actually home?
PSYCHOLOGY / Do we belong where we were born and raised? Or where we chose to form new roots? Many people are drawn to authoritarian environments, where organized contempt for people drives away decency and personal responsibility. Has rootedness possibly become less attractive than rootlessness?




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Do we belong where we were born and raised? Or where we chose to form new roots? Or are we perhaps primarily at home in the culture, in the music, in the language? Whoever asks this, has already decided that the topic affects each one of us, as individuals. For some, 'homeland' unconditionally means the country where you were born and had formative experiences. For others, formative experiences – wherever they first arose – may be located elsewhere, whether geographical, emotional or cultural.

The theme is brought up to date further through a generally troubled zeitgeist, where faith in the future falters, where all the crises of the present threaten to push us backwards, to something that once felt safe and warm. Many are drawn towards authoritarian environments, where organized contempt for humanity banishes decency and personal responsibility. The result will be higher walls against refugees, an inveterate fight against 'the others', whether they are Jews, Palestinians, conservatives, radicals, black or white, women or men.

homesickness

The term 'home' is closely related to the concept homesickness, which again leads the thought to 'nostalgia'. The French philologist and philosopher Barbara Cassin deals with the theme in the three-part essay Nostalgia. When are we actually home?.

Cassin would not have been a philologist if she had not connected the theme with Language. She corrects the misunderstanding that the term 'nostalgia' should come from Greek, a language that was used for exercise of power, or 'ontological nationalism': "Ancient thought tended to identify philosophy with a specific language, namely Greek, while the concept barbarian characteristically referred to those who spoke foreign languages ​​(not Greek).”

However, according to the language detective, 'Nostalgi' is a German-Swiss word. It is supposed to be the name of a disorder that was registered in the 1600th century. The suffering consisted of a homesickness – Homesickness – which the mercenaries of the 'Sun King' Louis XIV suffered from. This had military consequences, as the Swiss – as soon as they heard the shepherds' notes, the song of the Alps – according to Jean-Jacques
Rousseau "burst into tears, deserted or died, so strongly did it arouse the longing of the soldiers to see their own country again."

He must forget Greek and instead speak Latin.

On the whole, the German language world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is permeated by the circle around longing, Sehnsucht. Famous is JW Goethe's poem with the first lines: "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiß was ich leide." ("Only he who knows longing understands my pain.")

Cassin treats the theme through the view of three universal exiles: Odysseus, Æneas and Hannah Arendt.

Odysseus. © Pinterest.

Odysseus

The Greek poet Homer's epic poem Odyssey is the great tale of King Odysseus' journey from the Trojan War, home to Ithaca. The journey across the Mediterranean took many years and has become the symbol of all the obstacles and dangers the brave traveler must overcome to find his way home. Cassin's reading of the poem takes the journey further and describes the return home through self-knowledge. And the trials are countless. When he is finally home, Odysseus is not recognized, not even by his faithful wife Penelope. He must struggle to regain her trust (after all, he has not been a faithful husband), and even after this, the hero breaks up again after just one night. Is possibly root firmness became less attractive than rootlessness? Has Odysseus thus become more at home when he is alone on the way than when he is at home? A type of antiquity lone ranger? We realize that here the future may have freed itself from its origins, and that "not yet" – that which is always in motion – may mean a new kind of freedom. Freedom from belonging.

Vergils Æneiden

Another of world literature's great travel epics is described by Cassin through Vergil Æneiden. Æneas is the warrior who finds and founds a new home. A wanderer whom the Greeks chase from a burning Troy, an emigrant who is almost stripped of his homesickness. Who must discard roots in favor of a new home – Rome. Escape and exile are here the center of gravity of the narrative. Now we meet pious Aeneas, the pious Æneas, who becomes attached to the new fatherland with the ties of piety and religion. In this way he becomes, in the words of Marcus Tullius Cicero, "better suited to fulfill his duties towards the fatherland, the parents, and the gods". Just as Odysseus is characterized by his not one hundred percent love for Penelope, Æneas has his Dido (among others).

However, he abandons her to her fate (suicide) in his search for something he does not yet know what it is. However, he must also make a sacrifice. He must renounce his origin through language. He must forget Greek and instead speak Latin. The physical and cultural transplant takes root in the language of the new civilization. A new identity and a new hegemony have established themselves, culturally and politically.

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt

Through this sorting of origin, identity and language, Cassin chooses a third famous exile – the philosopher Hannah Arendt. She fled Germany in 1933, when Hitler came to power, lived as a refugee in France and made her way via Lisbon to the USA in 1941 with the status of stateless.

Ten years later she became an American citizen. She is quoted as saying: "Europe before Hitler? I don't feel any nostalgia, I can't say that. What is left? What is left is the language.” The mother tongue, not the fatherland, has become Arendt's home, "everything else is exile". She points out that identity for her is neither a national nor an ethnic category. This clarification is of course not least consistent with Arendt's relationship to being Jewish, and to that extent also to being a woman. An identity that is learned, incorporated and reflected in the environment. Which are also invariable facts. And the philosopher is liberatingly concrete when she distinguishes between love and politics: "In my entire life I have never had 'love' for any people or collective [...] I actually only have love for the friends mine, and I am absolutely incapable of any other form of love.”

The mother tongue, not the fatherland, has become Arendt's home, "everything else is exile".

What Arendt lost is what characterized her exile. As she wrote in 1943: "We refugees have lost our home, that is, our natural reactions, the naturalness of our manners and the spontaneous expression of our feelings."

Today, this statement probably resonates much more than she thought at the time.



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Ranveig Eckhoff
Ranveig Eckhoff
Eckhoff is a regular reviewer for Ny Tid.

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