Nostalgia

今天很忙，睡意很濃，只記下近日的電台及讀書札記，都談到鄉愁：

Rule, Nostalgia的摘要：

- Nostalgia, as well as history, has often been the terrain in which political battles are fought in the present. The question of when the 'good old days' might have been is intimately bound up with the question of what the 'good life' looks like to people in their own day, and whether change is taking them closer or further way from it. p. 3 

- Nostalgia offers us protection from our anxieties: the chance to escape our worries about what the future holds and recall a story that might tell us who we are and where it is that we are going. p.4 - In the seventeenth century, homesickness could be deadly, and physicians warned that people could succumb to nostalgia as if to a disease. p. 4 

- In 1688, a Swiss physician, Johannes Hofer, published a medical treatise on a mysterious new disease that seemed to be affecting Swiss soldiers fighting abroad, b combining the Greek word nostos - homecoming - and - algia - pain. Separated from their homeland, soldiers seemed to be sick with longing; from 'the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one's native land.' Homesick soldiers were losing touch with the present, fixating on their faraway object of desire with single-minded obsession. They were confusing now with then, real and imaginary events, hearing voices of loved ones that weren't there; some were even wasting away, falling deeper into depression as their 'vital spirits' were progressively extinguished. p. 4-5

近日很喜歡聽的Start of the Week節目，其中一集講到鄉愁，今朝邊工作邊聽：

Start the Week - Time passing: ageing, memory and nostalgia - BBC Sounds

兩年前，仰望林村的彎月，遙想天際的另一方。