Nostalgia

Nostalgia is commonly understood to be a condition of mourning or yearning for a past when things were better or more certain or simpler: when, in short, today's nostalgic person would not have been beset by the troubles of the present and would have been all the more content for it. Nostalgia, as a human condition, presupposes that the past has gone, along with those times and particulars, people and places, mourned and missed. To live in the present as if in the past would be better termed as anachronistic and gives rise to a melancholy or sentimental disposition; one experiences nostalgia, for better or worse, freely or otherwise, from a later point of one's own narrative. One “looks back” and revisits the past so ...