nostalgia: the bittersweet

08 Jul, 2026

The word nostalgia is a neoclassical compound derived from Greek, consisting of νόστος (nóstos), a Homeric word meaning "homecoming", and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning "pain" (from Wikipedia).

above, a photo of mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and the mother of the muses.

the first time i read the odyssey i was in 9th grade. i had gotten my first D ever--i think my only D ever--on my first reading quiz in mr. r's english 9 honors class. for summer reading, we had been assigned excerpts from the odyssey and what i thought qualified as a "close" reading, was in fact not even...close (hah).

i think this is a pretty typical experience for the 14/15-year-olds who have taken that class. i suspect mr. r does this intentionally. i grew up in a suburb with a high median household income and a reputation for "academic rigor" and "college-readiness." the kids are about as arrogant and insecure as you would expect. and with all the fear-mongering you get before leaving one academic institution for the next ("this kind of stuff won't work in high school," "in college, this would be unacceptable"), i'd never really found it to be true until then. we had all gone through that first transition from elementary to middle school unchecked. that first quiz was a message, an alarm bell: no more skating by, no fooling around, not in this class.

my notebook for eng 9 hon (and proof that i have always been a 원숭이상 enjoyer and big bang fan)¹.

after that quiz, mr. r assigned us more excerpts from the odyssey, saying there would be another quiz on it--as there would be a quiz on every reading. i was determined for the sake of my ego and my grade, to get an A. so i pulled my first all-nighter. overcome with something like obsession, i read all the assigned selections twice, then a third time, then annotated (for extra credit), and by the time i had finished it was so late that i figured i may as well begin to read the things in between the assigned excerpts.

something like obsession--it was something more than obsession really. some time that night, the engine of my attention switched from indignation to curiosity. i wanted to read more because i was interested in what was happening, because i understood what was happening, because i had been actually reading the poem.

i didn't realize it until much later, but that class was my first encounter with a demand for intellect.

the way the quizzes were structured, the lecture followed by socratic method, mr. r's insistence on us identifying the elements of campbell's hero and their journey for every single text, the annotated bibliography and final project on a historical figure before 1900 (i chose karl marx²), these assignments were all created with the intent to produce thought and awaken reason. i took notes, like actual decipherable notes. i learned how to read beyond comprehension and into understanding. i was asked to do more than learn, i was asked to think.

my favorite part of this page of notes where everything is directly from the slides is where i wrote "peter petrelli" above the list of heroes he named in class. i must have been going through my heroes phase at the time. also, i am glad to say my handwriting no longer looks like this.

the second time i read the odyssey was in my first year at hopkins. it was for a class in the humanities department titled "great books"³. the beginning of the syllabus was similar if not identical to that of mr. r's class. we read the odyssey, followed by exodus, then the inferno (we moved on then to frederick douglass, journey to the west, etc., etc.). it was in this classroom where i was first introduced to this concept of nostos.

nostos. a homecoming. these days, a and i finally feel like we're putting down roots in dc. both figuratively and literally, the garden upstairs is in its second year. two turns of this soil. and we've lived in this apartment for even longer. we are building our home together. i feel like i know people here, i have friends, a pottery studio, a CSA, a community. it's kind of ironic because we are thinking of moving in the next year or two.

But DC is not my Ithaca. While we told our NYC friends three years ago that this was a homecoming, that we were moving back to the area because it was closer to our families (true), both our hearts called and still call to a different, smaller, city in the dmv: baltimore.

A grew up on east curley street, later worked for years on aliceanna, and while my four-year stint at hopkins may seem relatively short, it was a formative time. if mr. r's class was my first demand for intellect, college was my first brush with consciousness, and my first time creating a home by myself, finding a community for myself. i miss going to movies at the charles and the senator, i miss wandering around hampden on lazy saturdays, or walking to waverly farmer's market early in the morning, i miss enoch pratt, and artscape, i miss sofi's crepes, ekiben, clavel, jong-gak and kong pocha, the rice cake place that's since closed down, i even miss cheap growlers of bo, i miss the quiet mornings, which lacan once described as "the best image to sum up the unconscious,". but most of all i miss being a place full of weirdos, little freaks like myself. like john waters said: "it's as if every eccentric in the south decided to move north, ran out of gas in baltimore, and decided to stay."

it is not lost on me that if we move to baltimore next year, i will be returning after 10 years of living elsewhere. 10 years roaming the aegean⁴, 10 years on a journey that takes a literal hour on the MARC train.

these days, our culture seems to be obsessed with nostalgia. and companies are trying to capitalize on it. we yearn for a time when things were simpler, happier, when the world did not seem on the verge of apocalypse at every turn of the news cycle. we want to play our old gameboy games, we want to collect vinyl records, we want to bring back y2k, we want to see zoey 101 and iCarly and phineas and ferb on the air again. we want the old stories, the old fashion, the good stuff. "The classics can console. But not enough."

still from the legend of zelda: wind waker. gamecube games online are only available on the switch 2, a new console that sells for about $500, and only if you have a membership, which is $50 a year.

I am guilty of it even in the little things: i've been trying to read the odyssey for a third time in anticipation of the nolan film. I also have dusted off my old game cube and tried to play wind waker on the flat screen A bought at the atlantic ave best buy. i own a record player.

of course nostalgia has a psychological function⁵. the mind seeks the comfort of the familiar when it is pushed to the unfamiliar. but of course (as i have mentioned before) the stories we tell ourselves can be dangerous. was the past so great anyways? it’s hard to tell. heroclitus (another greek!) famously said "no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man". so if i go back, if we buy a house in hampden or otterbein, our hearts could still be left yearning.

in the legend of zelda: wind waker. you play as link (though this is one of the games where you can change the name of the hero to be whatever you want) and sail across a vast sea in your talking red lion/dragon ship to save your sister and friends from at first an evil bird, but then eventually...well, spoilers ahead, but it turns out your ship is daphnes hyrule, the last king of hyrule, and it is up to you to bring him back to hyrule, defeat the evil nested there, and restore the kingdom to its former glory ⁶.

in my original save file of wind waker, i encountered a bug, one that made me rage quit and prevented me from ever seeing the story to its right end. in a cutscene where the red lion boat turns to speak to me, i would click through the conversation then at the end, link would fall out of the boat and immediately drown. like elpenor, instant death. i would load the last save file and start again, but each time, the cutscene would happen normally and link would drown at the end of it. i wasn't even given a chance to return to hyrule.

it's strange that nostalgia has become a place that our social media-pilled minds go for comfort, when 50% of its etymology is literally pain. when odysseus arrives on the shores of ithaca, he's a stranger--as heraclitus put so succinctly, he is not the same man, and ithaca of course is not the same city. his nurse, his slaves, his son, his wife do not recognize him. in fact, the only one who does recognize him immediately is his dog⁷. what could he feel in that moment but pain? pain for the years lost, pain to be strange in your kingdom, your house, your body (re: athena's transformation), pain that we can never return to ithaca.

it is stranger still that nostalgia is an act of remembering that has such a grip on our future. perhaps this is a facile or obvious observation⁸, the people we were inform the people we are inform the people we become, nothing too revolutionary about that thought. and in some ways the notion of the future is built into the word. nostos, homecoming, though a noun, has the suggestion of a verb, a gerund.

"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

from Tennyson's "Ulysses"

i guess what i'm trying to get at is that there are tensions inherent in nostalgia, like anne carson's eros, it is both bitter and sweet. the engine of our bodies, propelling us to our unknown futures, is our memory of the past. we come home and we feel pain. and still we must come home. we want to come home. we. yearn to come home.

and of course we do. after a long day of work, after braving cold and dark stormy seas, after adventures in new york, charlottesville, aeaea, or ogygia, there is nothing i would not give for that future: my mom's kimchi jjigae on the stove, A on our couch scrolling his phone, an old dog sitting in a corner by the fire.