Milan Kundera Ignorance
The Creek word for "return" is nostos. Algos
.....;nis "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering
mused by an unappeased yearning to return. To express thai fundamental notion most Europeans run utilize a word derived from the Greek (nostalgia, nostalgie) as well as in her wools with roots in ilieir national languages: anomnza, say the Spaniards; suudade, say the Portuguese. In each language these words have a different semantic nuance. Often they mean only the sadness caused by the impossibility of returning to one's country: a longing for country, for home. What in English is called "homesickness." Or in German: Heumveh. In Dutch: keimwee. But this reduces that great notion to just its spatial element. One of the oldest Kuropeaii languages, Icelandic (like English) makes a distinction between two terms: siikntidnr: nostalgia in its general sense: and lieim/nd: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgic as well as iheir own noun, ste.sk. and their own verb; the most moving Czech expression of love: slyska se mipo lobe ("I yearn for you." 'Tin nostalgic for you": "I cannot hear the pain of your absence"). In Spanish tinoranzn comes from the verb anorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyomr. itself derived from the Latin word ignomre (lo be unaware of. not know, nol experience: lo lack or miss). In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of nol knowing. Von are far away, and I don't know what has become of vou. Mv country is faraway, and I don t know what is happening there. Certain languages have problems will] nostalgia: die Flench can onlv express 11 l>\ the noun from die Creek root, anil have no verb lor il: (hey can sa\ Je m'eimnie ill' ha (I miss miii). but die word s'ennnyer is weak, cold—anvhnw Inn light for so grave a feel-ill!;. Thi' Crrinnns rarely use die Greek-derived term Nottalgie. and tend i<> say Sehntucht in speaking of die desire  for an absent thing. Bui Selinsneht can refer both to something that has exisled and to something that has never existed (a new adventure), and therefore il does not necessarily imply the nostos idea: to include in Sehntucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Selinsnrht naeh iter I ergaiigenlieit. nacli o'er rerlorenen Kindheil. narh der piston Liebe (longing for the past, for Inst childhood, for a first love).
file dawn of ancient Creek culture brought the birlh of the Odyssey, the founding epic of nostalgia. I.el us emphasize: Odysseus, the greatest adventurer of all time, is also the greatest nostalgic I Ic went off (not very happily) to the Trojan War and stayed for ten years. Then he tried to reiiirn to his native Ithaca, but the gods' intrigues prolonged his journey, first by three years jammed « ith (he most uncanny happenings, then by seven more years that he spent as hostage and lover wilb Calypso, who in her passion for him would nol lei him leave her island.
In Book Five of the Odyssey. Odysseus tells ( lalvpso: "'As wise as she is. I know that Penelope cannot compare lo vou in stature or in beauty. . . . And yet the only wish I wish each day is to be back there, lo sec in mv own house the day of my return!r And Homer goes on: "As Odysseus spoke, the sun sank: the dusk came: and benealb (he vault deep within the cavern, (hey withdrew to lie and love in each others arms.
A far cry from the life of the poor emigre that Irena bail been for a long while now. Odysseus lived a real dolee rita there in Calypso's land, a life of ease, a life of delights. And yet. between the dolee vita in a foreign place and the risky return lo his home, be chose the return. Rather than anient exploration of die unknown (adventure), he chose the apotheosis of the known (return). Mather than the infinite (for adventure never intends to finish), be chose the finite (for the return is a reconciliation with the finitiidc of life).
Without waking him. the Phaeaeian seamen laid Odysseus, slill wrapped in his bedding, near an olive tree on Ithaca s shore, anil then departed. Such was his journey s end. lie slept on. exhausted. W hen be awoke, he could not tell where be was. I hen Athena wiped the mist from bis eyes and il was rapture: the rapture of the (ireal Return: ibe ecstasy of the known: the music I hat sets l he 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 slill the same as it had been twenty years earlier.
In 1950. when Arnold Schoenberg had been in the Lnited States for seventeen years, a journalist asked him a few treacherously innocent ques-lions: Is it true that emigration causes artists to lose their creativity? That their inspiration withers when it no longer has the roots of their native laud to nourish it?
Imagine! Five years after the Holocaust! And an American journalist won't forgive Schoenberg his lack of attachment to that chunk of earth where, before his very eyes, the horror of horrors stalled! Mi; it's a lost cause. Homer glorified nostalgia wilb a laurel wreath and thereby laid out a moral hierarchy of emotions. Penelope slands al ils summit, very high above Calypso.
Calypso, ah. Calypso! I often think about her. She loved Odysseus. They lived together for seven \ ears. We do not know how long Odysseus shared Penelope's bed, but certainly not so long as that. Anil yet we extol Penelope's pain and sneer at (lalypso's tears.