Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.
The fiending for a state of stasis, for the safety of childhood and the nostalgia of the madeleine in the tea or an eternal library is not too far removed from the desire for death. The idealizing of the past is a kind of death.
Ultra Short Term Nostalgia: Homesickness for the extremely recent past: "God, things seemed so much better in the world last week." -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"
Legislated Nostalgia: To force a body of people to have memories they do not actually possess: "How can I be a part of the 1960s generation when I don't even remember any of it?" -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"
Revenge is a form of nostalgia.
Nutritional Slumming: Food whose enjoyment stems not from flavor but from a complex mixture of class connotations, nostalgia signals, and packaging semiotics: Katie and I bought this tub of Multi-Whip instead of real whip cream because we thought petroleum distillate whip topping seemed like the sort of food that air force wives stationed in Pensacola back in the early sixties would feed their husbands to celebrate a career promotion. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"
I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding. If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
About this time du Bellay had a serious illness of two years' duration, from which dates the beginning of his deafness. He had further anxieties in the guardianship of his nephew. The boy died in 1553, and Joachim, who had up to this time borne the title of sieur de Liré, became seigneur of Gonnor. In 1549 he had published a _Recueil de poësies_ dedicated to the Princess Marguerite. This was followed in 1552 by a version of the fourth book of the _Aeneid_, with other translations and some occasional poems. In the next year he went to Rome as one of the secretaries of Cardinal du Bellay. To the beginning of his four and a half years' residence in Italy belong the forty-seven sonnets of his _Antiquités de Rome_, which were rendered into English by Edmund Spenser (_The Ruins of Rome_, 1591). These sonnets were more personal and less imitative than the _Olive_ sequence, and struck a note which was revived in later French literature by Volney and Chateaubriand. His stay in Rome was, however, a real exile. His duties were those of an intendant. He had to meet the cardinal's creditors and to find money for the expenses of the household. Nevertheless he found many friends among Italian scholars, and formed a close friendship with another exiled poet whose circumstances were similar to his own, Olivier de Magny. Towards the end of his sojourn in Rome he fell violently in love with a Roman lady called Faustine, who appears in his poetry as Columba and Columbelle. This passion finds its clearest expression in the Latin poems. Faustine was guarded by an old and jealous husband, and du Bellay's eventual conquest may have had something to do with his departure for Paris at the end of August 1557. In the next year he published the poems he had brought back with him from Rome, the Latin _Poemata_, the _Antiquités de Rome_, the _Jeux rustiques_, and the 191 sonnets of the _Regrets_, the greater number of which were written in Italy. The _Regrets_ show that he had advanced far beyond the theories of the _Deffence_. The simplicity and tenderness specially characteristic of du Bellay appear in the sonnets telling of his unlucky passion for Faustine, and of his nostalgia for the banks of the Loire. Among them are some satirical sonnets describing Roman manners, and the later ones written after his return to Paris are often appeals for patronage. His intimate relations with Ronsard were not renewed; but he formed a close friendship with the scholar Jean de Morel, whose house was the centre of a learned society. In 1559 du Bellay published at Poitiers _La Nouvelle Manière de faire son profit des lettres_, a satirical epistle translated from the Latin of Adrien Turnèbe, and with it _Le Poète courtisan_, which introduced the formal satire into French poetry. These were published under the pseudonym of J. Quintil du Troussay, and the courtier-poet was generally supposed to be Melin de Saint-Gelais, with whom du Bellay had always, however, been on friendly terms. Entry: DU