Matt’s history of homesickness in America, Jessa Crispin uses the subject as a springboard for her own travels and nostalgia. For they are not the thing itself they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.A recent article in Smart Set caught my attention. These things-the beauty, the memory of our own past-are good images of what we really desire but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you-the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. “In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. It might help you too :)Īnd your comment made me think of CS Lewis talking about the idea of ‘sehnsucht’: It helps me to know that there are words to describe things that I feel. It can also include grief or sadness for who or what you have lost, losses which make your “home” not the same as the one you remember.” This kind of homesickness is like a combination of the homesickness, longing, nostalgia, and yearning, for a home that you cannot return to, no longer exists, or maybe never was. It seems to be a rather multi-layered word, which includes a different variety of homesickness than what is generally referred to. However, there is more depth to hiraeth than in any of those words on their own. Some words often used to try to explain it are homesickness, yearning, and longing. “Hiraeth is a Welsh word that is somewhat difficult to describe in English, for the reason that there is no single English word that expresses all that it does. This is the definition from a website called ‘words of the week- sites at penn state’ Hey, your story reminded me of one of my favourite words “Hiraeth” which (as it turns out) is actually a welsh word. I feel a little ridiculous asking, but is this a common thing with reincarnation? I genuinely feel like I lived there or called it home at some point, but I have only ever lived in London. I get very brief snippets of life in the Valleys, from the looks of it about 1970's-1980's. When in one of the more intense bouts, I listen to Welsh music, research Welsh history, and its the most bizarre thing, but I feel like I already *know* it.? I've started learning Welsh, and as someone who is awful at languages, I'm picking it up surprisingly quickly. Ever since, I've felt this lingering sort of homesickness that I can't explain. It came back about two days after we returned to England, but for that entire month I felt like I was in a really beautiful trance. I have pretty severe depression, so I'm used to feeling kind of numb, but that almost completely "healed" the second we got there. I spent the entire month more connected with myself and my surroundings than I have ever been, since I was about four. My dad and grandpa dragged me on a month-long trip there in the summer of 2018, and I wasn't excited at all, until we crossed the bridge (for non-Brits, theres a long bridge connecting Wales and England.) Literally the second we touched the other side, I felt like I might cry. I have never lived in Wales, I don't speak Welsh, and, until about two years ago, I had never actually been there before. I'm mostly Welsh by blood, but it has never been much of a part of my life.
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