The privileged place of home: Place, memory and the disease of nostalgia

In the centuries prior to the advent of printing, scholars who practised the ars memorativa, often undertook travel specifically in order to expand their repertoires of backgrounds for their memory palaces. Thus the act of travelling became associated with not just the pursuit of knowledge and experience, but also with memory. However, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this association with memory and travel was tragically inverted with the rising incidence of a much feared disease, known as Nostalgia. Nostalgia was a sometimes fatal bout of homesickness, a form of melancholia, which was essentially a disease of both memory and place, which while now dismissed as psychosomatic, or merely ‘nervous humours’, was surrounded with such trepidation that impending travellers went so far as to avoid prolonged absences from home in fear of contracting the disease. This paper will investigate the relationship between travel and memory as expressed through the disease of nostalgia. Tracing the disease from its seventeenth century origins through to its twentieth century transformation from ‘disease’ to ‘sentiment’, this paper will draw from the thought of Gaston Bachelard and the films of Andrey Tarkovsky to argue that the disease of nostalgia was a pathological connection to place, which, through memory, idealised and problematised one’s connection to home