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, nostalgic) as well as in her wools with roots in ilieir national languages: anomnza, 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 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: sbknndnr: nostalgia in its general sense: and heimbra: longing for the homeland. Czechs have the Greek-derived nostalgic as well as I heir 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 enyorar. itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of. not know, not experience: lo lack or miss). In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. Von are faraway, and I don't know what has become of von. Mv country is faraway, and I don t know w hat i> happening there. (iertain languages have problems will] nostalgia: the French can onlv express 11 In the noun from die Greek root, anil have no verb for it: ihey can sa\ Je m'ennnie ill' ha (I miss von), but the word s'eniinsvr is weak, cold—anvhow loo light for so grave a feeling. The Crrinnns rarely use die Greek-derived term Nottalgie. and lend to say Sehntucht in speaking of die desire  for an absenl thing. Bui Sehntucht 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 Sehn-sucht the obsession with returning would require adding a complementary phrase: Selinsnrht nach tier I crgaiigenlieit. nach o'er retiorcnen Kindheil. nach der piston Liebe (longing for the past, for lost childhood, for a first love).
The 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 le 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 mure years that he spent as hostage and lover with Calypso, who in her passion for him would not let llitll 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 see in mv own house the day of my return!r And Homer goes on: "As Odysseus spoke, the sun sank: the dusk came: and beneath (he vault deep within the cavern, they withdrew to lie and love in each others arms.
A far cry front the life of the poor emigre that Ireiia bad 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. Ami yet, between the dolee rilti in a foreign place and the risky return lo his home, lie chose the return. Rather than ardent exploration of the unknown (adventure), be chose lite apotheosis of the known (return). Mather than the infinite (for adventure never intends to finish), he chose the finite (for the return is a reconciliation with the finitudc of life).
Without waking bint, the Phaeaeian seamen laid Odysseus, still 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 he was. I hen Athena wiped the mist front his eyes and il was rapture: the rapture of the Great Return: the ecstasy of the known: the music I bat 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.
In 1950. when Arnold Schoenberg had been in the Lnited States for seventeen years, a journalist asked him a lew treacherously innocent questions: 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 w here, before his very eyes, the horror of horrors started! but it's a lost cause. 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 \ ears. 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 ( alypso's tears.