What Do You Mean by Home?

On nostalgia and the words we think we know

An old song begins to play. I recognise the opening notes before I remember the title. Then comes the kitchen table, the light through the window, a voice from another room. None of this is here, yet it changes the room I am sitting in.

I let the song play to the end. It is good to hear it again, but something in it also hurts. The voice from the other room can no longer answer me.

Nostalgia, we call it. A familiar word for an experience many of us value: feeling the past draw close, bringing both warmth and sadness.

But the word has not always sounded so gentle. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, it was introduced as the name of a disease.

When Longing Could Take a Life

In 1688, Johannes Hofer, a medical student in Basel, introduced the term nostalgia in his dissertation Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe. The word combined Greek terms for homecoming and pain. It was intended to describe severe homesickness.

Among the people Hofer described, thoughts of home could become so persistent that the rest of life lost its hold on them. They slept poorly, lost their appetite and grew weak. He also recorded physical symptoms such as fever and heart palpitations. Homesickness was considered dangerous enough to take a life, although today we cannot establish that longing alone explained these courses of illness.

Those described as suffering from the condition included soldiers far from home. Home was a place from which they had been separated and to which they longed to return.

In ordinary usage today, nostalgia often looks towards an earlier time. I can be sitting at home and still feel nostalgic. The house I remember is still standing. The street has the same name. But the people are gone, and childhood cannot be recovered by travelling there. This longing for a lost time differs from the medical homesickness that gave the concept its name.

The same word thus leads us to different experiences. To understand them, we need to know more than what the word usually means to us.

When We Understand Too Quickly

If I read “nostalgia” in Hofer and picture a pleasant evening looking through old photographs, I have understood too quickly. I have brought my own use of the word into his text. What was supposed to help me understand has got in the way.

This is an experience Gadamer helps us think about. We read and listen with a prior understanding: experiences, expectations and habits of language that are already ours. They make understanding possible, but they can also cause us to overlook what does not fit. Understanding therefore requires us to allow what we encounter to correct what we took for granted.

In Hofer’s account, the medical meaning must be allowed to emerge. Sleeplessness and loss of appetite belong to the text. We cannot remove them because we associate nostalgia with something pleasant.

In turn, the old text can make us more attentive to language today. When someone says they feel nostalgic, we do not yet know how painful their longing is.

Concepts have a degree of stability. Otherwise, we could not speak to one another. But they acquire their meaning through use, and that use has a history. People live differently, encounter new circumstances and ask different questions. Words travel with them, often carrying older meanings beneath the newer ones.

A Home One Cannot Return To

Think of two people who say, “I long to go home.”

One has moved away to study. On their phone are photographs of the family kitchen. A ticket can be booked, and in a few weeks they can sit at the same table again.

The other has fled. On this person’s phone, too, are photographs of a kitchen. But the house may have been destroyed, the family scattered and the way back closed. A question about their next visit home can touch a wound the person asking did not know was there.

We hear the same sentence. Yet it calls for different responses.

The word “home” can also refer to different forms of belonging. In one life, its emphasis falls on the dwelling and one’s private space. In another, home encompasses an extended family, a language or a place where generations have lived. Such differences can exist between cultures, but also between people on the same street. We cannot infer an individual’s meaning directly from their cultural background.

When a word is translated, we must therefore continue listening to the story in which it appears. The dictionary can help us find the word. It does not tell us what the person has lost.

The Question That Makes Room

In social work and therapy, this is a practical challenge. We need concepts in order to understand and act, often when time is short. Yet a familiar word can give us the impression that we have understood more than we have.

Imagine a consultation room. A person sits in the chair nearest the door and says:

“I just want to go home.”

The listener immediately thinks of the address in the file. The conversation is moving towards transport, practical arrangements and who might be there to welcome them. Then comes a question:

“What do you mean by home?”

The answer is that the person wants to return to the time before their spouse died. The dwelling remains. It is the life within it that is gone.

The question does not resolve the grief. But it changes the conversation. The listener can now respond to the loss the person is trying to express.

Here lies the ethical heart of this essay. “What do you mean by that?” can be a form of care. The question gives another person an opportunity to describe their own life before our interpretation takes hold. It requires us to tolerate a moment in which we do not yet know.

What a Name Does

A name shapes both how we understand ourselves and how others respond to us.

When we describe an experience as an illness, we open the way to examination and treatment. That can be necessary and helpful. But the description can also become too narrow if we stop asking about the experience it is meant to describe.

When we call something a warm memory, we open the way to recognition and conversation. This description, too, can become too narrow. Someone who smiles when an old song plays may carry a longing that calls for more than a smile in return.

The history of nostalgia does not determine which description is right in every individual case. It reminds us to examine the words we use. What do they help us see? What do they make harder to hear?

The fact that concepts change meaning therefore brings a responsibility to be precise. We must ask when they were used, in what context and what they sought to capture. And when people use them to describe their own lives, we must make room for the meaning they have there.

The Song Once More

I play the old song again. The kitchen table returns, and the voice from the other room. But now I am more attentive to the silence after the voice. I hear both the closeness the memory brings and the absence it allows me to feel.

I still call it nostalgia. The word is useful, but it has not told the whole story.

If someone were sitting beside me and asked what I missed, I would have to begin telling them.

References

Dodman, T. (2018). What nostalgia was: War, empire, and the time of a deadly emotion. University of Chicago Press.

Gadamer, H.-G. (1960). Wahrheit und Methode: Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik. J. C. B. Mohr.

Hofer, J. (1688). Dissertatio medica de nostalgia, oder Heimwehe. J. Bertsch. Original dissertation in the Wellcome Collection.

Oskar Diethelm Library, Weill Cornell Medical College. (n.d.). Theories of the pathology of nostalgia. In Nostalgia: The rise and fall of a medical diagnosis. Historical online exhibition.