It's been quite awhile. Too long in some respects.

So let's see...when did I post last? Ah, February. Goodness.

I've grown so much in the past 7 months. For one, I'm much more comfortable in this world than I was. No longer am I eternally pessimistic. And I owe that to one individual who shall remain nameless, whose impact upon my life has been more obvious than anyone else.

I've written a lot. A whole lot. I'm back to poetry, and I wrote three or four just last night, almost simultaneously. And I wrote a short story in June, the events of which have oddly superimposed themselves upon my life as it is right now. Once I get around to re-editing it and perhaps extending it, I may be courageous enough to post it.

I really cannot believe that I'm the same person who was writing in here back in February. My life has evolved and I am no longer the naïve, immature teenager I was then. Obviously, I've still got lots of room to grow further, to become even more mature, but as it stands right now, I'm happy with who I am.

For some reason I'm not in a poetic mood, which is oddly strange, because I'm always in a poetic mood. But these posts are devoid of descriptors, of prepositional phrases, of imagery and personification and all those other literary words that I generally manage to have in whatever I write.

Je t'aime.

I guess this is some strange free-writing exercise which I've inadvertently put myself into perpetuating. It's rather strange, to reminisce over all that's happened. I've been led into a rather complicated situation regarding love and relationships and all that jazz. It was so amazing, so wonderful, so perfect...and so fleeting. Thinking about the time we spent together......it's rather nostalgic.

The Greek word for 'return' is nostos. Algos means 'suffering.' So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express that fundamental notion most people can utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as other words with roots in their national languages: añoranza, say the Spaniards; saudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of return; a longing for home. What in English is called 'homesickness.' Or in German: Heimweh. In Dutch: heimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest European languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: söknudur: nostalgia in its general sense; and heimprá: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgie as well as their own noun, stesk, and their own verb; the most moving Czech expression of love: styska se mi po tobe ('I yearn for you,' 'I'm nostalgic for you'; 'I cannot bear the pain of your absence'). In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss). In that etymological light nostalgia seems like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don't know what has become of you. Certain languages have problems with nostalgia: the French can only express it by the noun from the Greek root, and have no verb for it; they can say Je m'ennuie de toi (I miss you), but the word s'ennuyer is weak, cold--anyhow too light for so grave a feeling. The Germans rarely use the Greek-derived term Nostalgie, and thend to say Sehnsucht in speaking of the desire for an absent thing. But Sehnsucht can refer both to something that has existed and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore it does not necessarily imply the nostos idea; to include in Sehnsucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit, nach der verlorenen Kindheit, nach der ersten Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).

The dawn of ancient Greek culture brought the birth of the Odyssey, the founding epic for nostalgia. Let us emphasize: Odysseus, the greatest adventurer of all time, is also the greatest nostalgic. He went off (not very happily) to the Trojan War and stayed for ten years. Then he tried to return to his native Ithaca, but the gods' intrigues prolonged his journey, first by three years jammed with the most uncanny happenings, then by seven more years that he spent as hostage and lover with Calypso, who in her passion for him would not let him leave her island.

In Book Five of the Odyssey Odysseus tells Calypso: 'As wise as she is, I know that Penelope cannot compare to you in stature or beauty. . . And yet the only wish I wish each day is to be back there, to see in my own house the day of my return!' And Homer goes on: 'As Odysseus spoke, the sun sank; the dusk came: and beneath the vault deep within the cavern, they withdrew to lie and love in each other's arms.'

Odysseus lived a real dolce vita there in Calypso's land, a life of ease, a life of delight. And yet, between the dolce vita in a foreign place and the risky return to his home, he chose to return. Rather than ardent exploration of the unknown (adventure), he chose the apotheosis of the known (return). Rather than the infinite (for adventure never intends to finish), he chose the finite (for the return is a reconciliation with the finitude of life.

Without waking him, the Phaeacian seamen laid Odysseus, still wrapped in his bedding, near an olive tree on Ithaca's shore, and then departed. Such was his journey's end. He slept on, exhausted. When he awoke, he could not tell where he was. Then Athena wiped the mist from his eyes and it was rapture; the rapture of the Great Return; the ecstasy of the known; the music that sets the air vibrating between earth and heaven: he saw the harbor he had known since childhood, the mountain overlooking it, and he fondled the old olive tree to confirm that it was still the same as it had been twenty years earlier.

Homer glorified nostalgia with a laurel wreath and thereby laid out a moral hierarchy of emotions. Penelope stands at its summit, very high above Calypso.

Calypso, ah, Calypso! I often think about her. She loved Odysseus. They lived together for seven years. We do not know how long Odysseus shared Penelope's bed, but certainly not so long as that. And yet we extol Penelope's pain and sneer at Calypso's tears.

During the twenty years of Odysseus' absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.

We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realize that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot. For nostalgia does not heighten memory's activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else.

After killing off the brazen fellows who hoped to marry Penelope and rule Ithaca, Odysseus was obliged to live with people he knew nothing about. To flatter him they would go over and over everything they could recall about him before he left for the war. And because they believed that all he was interested in was his Ithaca (how could they think otherwise, since he had journeyed over the immensity of the seas to get back to the place?), they nattered on and on about things that had happened during his absence, eager to answer any question he might have. Nothing bored him more. He was waiting for just one thing: for them finally to say 'Tell us!' And that is the one thing they never said.

For twenty years he had thought about nothing but his return. But once he was back, he was amazed to realize that his life, the very essence of his life, its center, its treasure, lay outside Ithaca, in the twenty years of his wanderings. And this treasure he had lost, and could retrieve only by telling about it.

After leaving Calypso, during his return journey, he was shipwrecked in Phaeacia, whose king welcomed him to his court. There he was a foreigner, a mysterious stranger. A stranger gets asked 'Who are you? Where do you come from? Tell us! and he had told. For four long books of the Odyssey he had retraced in detail his adventures before the dazzled Phaeacians. But in Ithaca he was not a stranger, he was one of their own, so it never occurred to anyone to say 'Tell us!'
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A human lifetime is 80 years long on average. A person imagines and organizes his life with that span in mind. What I have just said everyone knows, but only rarely do we realize that the number of years granted us is not merely a quantitative fact, an external feature (like nose length or eye color), but is part of the very definition of the human. A person who might live, with all his faculties, twice as long, say 160 years, would not belong to our species. Nothing about his life would be like ours--not love, or ambitions, or feelings,or nostalgia; nothing.

The very notion of return, with all its emotional power, is bound up with the brevity of our life, which allows us to little time to become attached to something, to someone.

Sexual relations can take up the whole of adult life. But if that life were a lot longer, might not staleness stifle the capacity for arousal well before one's physical powers declined? For there is an enormous difference between the first and the tenth, the hundredth, the thousandth, or the ten-thousandth. Where lies the boundary line beyond which repetition becomes stereotyped, if not comical or even impossible? And once that boundary is crossed, what would become of the erotic relationship between two people? Would it vanish? Or on the contrary, would lovers consider the sexual phase of their lives to be the barbaric prehistory of real love? Answering these questions is as easy s the imagining of the psychology of the inhabitants of an unknown planet.

The notion of love (of great love, of one-and-only love) itself also derives, probably, from the narrow bounds of time we are granted. If that time were boundless, would lovers be so attached to one another? We who must die so soon, we just don't know.