Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World

by Anthony Esolen

"A true master of the moral imagination, Esolen breaks through the sentimental surface of nostalgia to reveal its hidden metaphysical depths in the human heart.  Homesickness is the illness of our age, and Esolen shows us the way home." -- Nathan Schlueter, Professor of Philosophy and Religion, Hillsdale College Alone among the creatures of the world, man suffers a pang both bitter and sweet. It is an ache for the homecoming. The Greeks called it nostalgia.  Post-modern man, homeless almost by definition, cannot understand nostalgia. If he is a progressive, dreaming of a utopia to come, he dismisses it contemptuously, eager to bury a past he despises. If he is a reactionary, he sentimentalizes it, dreaming of a lost golden age.In this profound reflection, Anthony Esolen explores the true meaning of nostalgia and its place in the human heart. Drawing on the great works of Western literature from the Odyssey to Flannery O'Connor, he traces the development of this fundamental longing from the pagan's desire for his earthly home, which most famously inspired Odysseys' heroic return to Ithaca, to its transformation under Christianity. The doctrine of the fall of man forestalls sentimental traditionalism by insisting that there has been no Eden since Eden. And the revelation of heaven as our true and final home, directing man's longing to the next world, paradoxically strengthens and ennobles the pilgrim's devotion to his home in this world.In our own day, Christian nostalgia stands in frank opposition to the secular usurpation of this longing. Looking for a city that does not exist, the progressive treats original sin, which afflicts everyone, as mere political error, which afflicts only his opponents. To him, history is a long tale of misery with nothing to teach us. Despising his fathers, he lives in a world without piety. Only the future, which no one can know, is real to him. It is an idol that justifies all manner of evil and folly.Nostalgia rightly understood is not an invitation to repeat the sins of the past or to repudiate what experience and reflection have taught us, but to hear the call of sanity and sweetness again. Perhaps we will shake our heads as if awaking from a bad and feverish dream and, coming to ourselves, resolve, like the Prodigal, to "arise and go to my father's house."

Genres: Philosophy, Theology, Nonfiction, Christianity, Christian, Education, Catholic

274 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 30, 2018

About the author

Anthony Esolen is the author of over twenty-five books and over 1,000 articles in both scholarly and general interest journals. A senior editor of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, Esolen is known for his elegant essays on the faith and for his clear social commentaries. His articles appear regularly in Touchstone, Crisis, First Things, Public Discourse, The Catholic Thing, Chronicles, Inside the Vatican, and Magnificat, among others. An accomplished poet in his own right, Esolen is known for his widely acclaimed three-volume verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Modern Library). His Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child has been described as "a worthy successor to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man." And its sequel, Life Under Compulsion, has been called "essential reading for parents, educators, and anyone who is concerned to rescue children from the tedious and vacuous thing childhood has become." His recent books of social commentary include Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, and the forthcoming, No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends upon the Strength of Men.

Anthony Esolen has been writing his own poetry for decades, but until recently most of his published poetry has appeared in his verse translations of the great poets, Dante, Tasso, and Lucretius. More than a hundred of his own poems have appeared in such venues as Fine Madness, The Plains Poetry Journal, and Modern Age. After studying and teaching great poetry for nearly thirty years, Professor Esolen set out to write a book-length unified poem of his own, a project which he hopes will show that serious and significant long poetic works can still be written in our time. The result of his effort is The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord, a book-length single poem composed of 100 parts -- short lyrics, dramatic monologues, and hymns -- centered on the life of Christ. He is working now on a second such long poem, The Twelve-Gated City, a collection of 144 interrelated poems centered on the parable of the prodigal son.

The grandson of Italian immigrants to America, Anthony Esolen was born and raised in the coal-mining country of Northeastern Pennsylvania. He received his B.A. from Princeton University, and his Ph. D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead Fellow. He is the 2020 recipient of the CIRCE Institute's Russel Kirk Prize, awarded each year to a writer and scholar "in honor of a lifetime dedicated to the cultivation of wisdom and virtue." He is writer-in-residence at Magdalen College in Warner, NH.

For more from the mind and pen of Anthony Esolen, visit his online magazine called Word and Song, at https://anthonyesolen.substack.com

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is just excellent. Esolen, with his extensive knowledge of literature and poetry, weaves a case for home in a homeless world. An orthodox Roman Catholic, Prof. Esolen has written a book that all Christians can appreciate.

[Thomas Upjohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really beautifully written, with lots of anecdotes taken from both Esolen's personal experiences in the modern world, and great literary texts. The basic idea of the book is a Christian nostalgia with the mindset of a pilgrim, looking back at a home he cannot return to and traveling forward to an eternal home.

[Susannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always enjoy books by Anthony Esolen and this was no exception. I love the way he weaves classical, literary and scriptural references into his cultural critique. His view of what it means to be human is crystal clear; reading it refreshes the soul like a drink of clean spring water.

Some favorite snippets:

"John Henry Newman warned against wishing that you were born in another time or place, because the providence of God has willed us to be here, now; these are the neighbors we are to love as ourselves, this is the land which we honor as we honor our mother and father, these are the times that try our souls. That does not mean that we accept everything that happens about us. Newman certainly did not. Nor does it mean that we ignore the wisdom of the past."

"The progressive has turned original sin, which afflicts all mankind, into political error, which conveniently afflicts his opponents and not himself. To be saved, in his mind, is not to be transformed by God into newness of life. It is to vote for the right program."

"What we love we want to endure."

"There is a confusion worse than death, and it is the confusion of moral disorder, the man-made desert of passions that drag Reason from her throne and beat her senseless with her own scepter or stupefy her with drugs; perhaps the nepenthe that Helen, ever the sly woman, slips into the drink of Menelaus and Telemachus, to still their weeping for a real friend and a real father lost."

"It is the duty of a man to fight for his home, even when the enemy has overrun it like locusts. It is also his duty to love that home and to want to protect it, and if it has been reduced to rubble, it is his duty to build it up again. In doing so he does not pretend that it was perfect. It was not. I will speak in its place about the heaven toward which we turn our gaze. But the reason we love our home is because it simply is."

"Central to a healthy attitude of reverence is an insight that the self-named progressive is ever in danger of missing, which is that man can no more discover a new moral truth than he can invent a new color of the spectrum."

"I claim, again, that human nature does not change, and that therefore we do well to look to our forebears for wisdom, because they have experienced far more than we in our individual lives ever can, and because their mistakes are rarely going to be the same as ours. Where they erred, we can see and forgive; where they were right, and where we err—that is what is hard for modern man to see, and even harder for him to forgive. Modern man enjoys his sense of superiority to those who came before. That is almost the essence of modernity itself: and underneath the pride of it all there lurks a persistent fear that the pride is empty."

"We may take the materialist at his word. If he is correct, and all moral judgments are but camouflage for the powerful, then he invites us to apply his own reductive analysis to himself."

"Without the acknowledgment of a gift, there is no culture."

"Consider how great a crime it would be to infect someone with a disease that would cut his life short by five or ten years. But to deprive him of an entire dimension of his temporal being, the dimension that allows him to transcend his three score and ten, or that steeps those years in long years past and years to come—to cut him off from the wellsprings of culture and set him adrift in the river of time like a dead thing among the flotsam of what used to be rich and human—that is a crime that would undo the word of the Creator who said, 'Let us now make man in our image.'"

"We have a name for corporeal change that has no organizing and directing purpose, that is not rooted in what a creature is and has been and is not aimed at the creature’s perfection. We call it cancer."

"For the human being is a person, and to be a person is to have a face, that is, to be toward and for the rest of the created world, other persons, and God."

[Becky Pliego · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is always a treat to read Esolen. He stirs the mind and makes you look up to Christ.

As always, I must add that Dr. Esolen is as devoted Roman Catholic as I’m a Presbyterian; so there you go, I don’t always agree with him, but I’m super grateful for his writings.

[Wesley Schantz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nostalgia, by Anthony Esolen, runs athwart the liberal intellectual consensus and instead channels the likes of Lewis and Tennyson. The title is misleading, since it turns out to be a very circumscribed sort of nostalgia the author is interested in: conservative Christian, essentially, and this comes through increasingly baldly as you go along. For all his erudite references, Esolen is no Lewis, though. When he starts talking about abortion and homosexuality, or about how ignorant and pitiful his students are, you might start to wonder about the depth of his charity and humility a bit. Useful as a cautionary signpost for what happens if you don't dip into the contemporary, diverse discourse once in a while. And yet his basic argument is probably as sound, or more so, than anything you're likely to hear on Ezra Klein and the other purveyors of liberal prosperity, suitably tempered with serious social justice activism. The man has translated Dante, after all. He knows what's up.

[Sarah Cain · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gosh this was an incredible read. I wish it was longer so that I could keep going. Esolen writes with an emotive yearning that is felt and shared. It is full of both literary references and small segments taken therefrom, to make this such an immersive read and to remind us how disconnected we are now from the stories that joined our forebears. It's simply beautiful.

[Jared Mcnabb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Part literary criticism, part cultural criticism, part spiritual encouragement. Esolen is always excellent, and always lands his punches.

“Progress” is a dead bastardized version of Christian hope and the understanding of life as a pilgrimage to our eternal city.

[Andy T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could give it more stars, I would. Just excellent. His theme of nostalgia as a journey, a pilgrimage, to home past and a home future resonated with me in ways I haven't experienced with a book in quite a while. I paced myself because I didn't want it to end.

[T.]

Wilfred McClay's review in Fare Forward:

When Oscar Wilde proclaimed that sentimentality was “the bank holiday of cynicism,” a way of indulging in deep emotions without paying the price for them, he surely was taking aim at nostalgia as one of his targets. Nostalgia has acquired a thoroughly bad odor in our times, and is widely regarded as a synonym for delusionary bad faith, for the habit of averting one’s eyes from present-day ills by looking backward wistfully to an imagined past that never was, or at least never was what some fools today like to believe it was. We prefer to think of ourselves as clear-eyed, undeceived, and forward-looking moderns who live entirely in the present, and have disciplined ourselves not to seek consolation in wishful fictions about how wonderful things used to be. To wallow in nostalgia is to live neither wholly in the present nor wholly in the past, but suspended in a dreamy and self-serving twilight zone between the two.

There is undoubtedly something to this criticism, particularly at a time when nostalgia has become a veritable industry, as it has in ours, and love of the past threatens to degenerate into a shopping aisle of commercialized kitsch. Yet as the literary scholar Anthony Esolen points out in this extraordinarily beautiful and luminous study, nostalgia has a deeper and more substantive meaning that the anti-sentimentalists miss entirely—and we deny ourselves an incalculable gift by trying futilely to escape its power.

That deeper meaning is hinted at by the word nostalgia‘s etymological source, the Greek word that means “aching for home.” The gravitational pull of nostalgia, rightly understood, is one of the profoundest dispositions in our human nature, directing us back toward the place of our origins, the place where we belong, the place where we know who we are and what we are. The pull toward that place may lay dormant in us for many years. But when it comes, it comes in strength, and comes from something inside us that is denied at only a very great price.

This insistent pull of nostalgia is a universal and recurrent theme. For Odysseus, in what would be perhaps the great foundational epic of the pre-Christian West, it was an unconquerable longing for a return to the land of Ithaca from which he had come, and to his wife and son from whom he had been cruelly separated by two decades of wars and wanderings. It was a pull so strong that it caused Odysseus to reject the offer of immortal life with his lover-jailer, the ravishingly beautiful goddess Calypso, in preference for a return to mortal life lived with his aging Penelope. It drew him to sit every day on the shore of Calypso’s beautiful island, staring out at the sea, and weeping for what he had lost, what he yearned to regain. It was not a wistful feeling, but a searing and ceaseless source of existential pain.

For Christians, the pull is toward something even more fundamental and yet complex and harder to specify. For it is a pull not only toward an earthly home that nurtures and enfolds us, a natural affection for our forebears and our spouses and children and for our place in the world, but also toward our real home, the home we have not yet inhabited, toward the lost sense of who and what we really are and will be, but which we have not (yet) ever been. The pull of nostalgia on our hearts is a reminder of the persisting claims on our hearts of all these things, all tugging away at once.

As adherents of an incarnational faith, we love the world both for what it is and for what it betokens, for the myriad beauties it evinces even in its brokenness, and for all the ways those very beauties point beyond themselves. Like prodigal children, we are directed by Esolen to go back toward the recovery of “a heritage lost.” Nor is Esolen speaking here of “cultural literacy,” or anything as denatured and functional as a long list of books and authors and topics in which “the educated person” ought to be conversant. He is speaking of something different and higher, of culture as one of the chief means “by which man makes his dwelling in time and beyond time.” The longing to go home “is also a longing not to be alone anymore,” a longing for the company not just of our contemporaries, but of the men and women of all times and places, and finally for that cloud of witnesses whose company we yearn to join and in whose ways we wish to be more fully conversant. Compared to that glorious prospect, the condition of us moderns dwelling in the horizonless “immanent frame” seems very lonely indeed.

When modernity becomes pitted against this delicate but soul-sustaining web of longings, the modern project of deconstruction and disenchantment becomes not merely short-sighted, but suicidal—a directionless renunciation of the world we have inherited with all its imperfections, an empty naysaying that proves infinitely more demanding, and infinitely less rewarding, than the renunciations carried out by the ascetic saints. Esolen’s wonderful book is an antidote to that self-destructiveness, a counsel against such folly, a call to embrace nostalgia rightly understood as a gauge of our capacity for sorrow, and joy, and love. We would not be fully ourselves without it, even if it produces in us an ache for what we do not yet have. Blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted.

[Greg Whaley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tremendous...Another winner from Anthony Esolen

[Hyapatia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. As expected of Professor Esolen.

[Kiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book caught my eye in a list of Amazon generated recommendations, probably based on my diet of catholic philosophy and social thought. I hadn’t heard of Esolen before but everything I read about his books made me interested. This book was a skillful journey through culture, literature, paganism, and the Christian tradition with an emphasis how the Christian view of our earthly and heavenly homes inform one another. This accentuates a clear line between a Christian, a pagan, and a progressive view of the brokenness we experience in life, what hope there is to be had, and how to pursue it. As someone who lives far from home(s), often feels conflicted with much of what “home” is, and frequently wonders if he is a true pilgrim following his calling or merely an aimless wonderer, this was a timely read. I felt I gained some insight and guidance on how to process my own journey and I appreciate it. 10 hours or 256 pages of heady cultural thought, poetic literary analysis, and helpful spiritual guidance.

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall this book is a good book. The professor hits the nail on the head with social problems and controversies in our time. I agree with his hypothesis on the current cultural scene too. However, there are certain points where I felt like I needed to read things again just to make sure I understand what he was saying. As a man of literature, his knowledge is a double-edge sword for we all know that such high culture is a sign of health, however he refers to it a lot to make his point and those of my generation and younger may miss the point of certain things since we are that generation which has not been exposed to even a fraction of all the references he makes.

[Ietrio · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally, someone describing the destructive power of the Christian cult. There is no home, there is nothing material. Everything can and should be destroyed in the mad goal of getting into the promised Heavens. A good answer to those who would like you to believe that the various churches have ever supported any sort of research, science, medicine, anything but mad destruction: kill everybody that does not believe in our precise set of rules.

[Jeremy]

Review here.

Other nostalgia connections include the end of Brad Gregory's The Unintended Reformation ("Against Nostalgia"), the word heimweh, and this article.

[essie · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Nostalgia rightly understood is not an inviting to repeat the sins of the past or to repudiate what experience and reflection have taught us, but to hear the call of sanity and sweetness again. Perhaps we will shake our heads as if awakening from a bad and feverish dream, and, coming to ourselves, resolve, like the Prodigal, to “arise and go to my father’s house.””

[J Landon Light · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esolen at his best- weaving celebrations of the good, true, and beautiful with devastating critiques of modern banality and rootlessness and a call to recover the vitality of our forefathers. We need more Protestants willing to say what Esolen says about culture, family, and history.

[Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

A much needed, powerful critique and repudiation of our progressive (progress of death) culture. An intellectual call to the prodigal and homeless to get up, turn and begin the pilgrimage home.

[Christopher Raffa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal book. Going home in a homeless world is not what you might think it is.

[Matt Carpenter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great discussion of the idea of nostalgia, surveying how it is used in writers from the ancient Greeks to modernists. All the while it speaks to the longings of almost everyone to go home.