How to remember homesickness

Nowadays, "Remember to be homesick" has become a buzzword. While promoting urbanization on a large scale, how to preserve the texture of the countryside and how to inherit people's memories is a very realistic problem for planners and ordinary people. Reminiscent of another popular sentence recently, "Where has all the time gone?" We can really feel the anxiety of the whole society, an anxiety that it is difficult to find a stable mentality in the great changes of the times and the fast pace of life.

Both Nostalgia and Where Has Time gone are expressing a kind of psychology, that is, anxiety about change and uncertainty about the future. However, the former points to the transformation of space, while the latter points to the passage of time. In other words, the former aims to return to hometown, while the latter aims to return to the past.

Nostalgia and nostalgia talk about the same thing, which can be clearly reflected in English expressions. The English word nostalgia means homesickness and nostalgia. This word consists of two Greek roots, nostos for "hometown" and algia for "nostalgia". But the root of Greek doesn't mean it comes from Greece. In fact, this word was coined by the Swiss doctor Hofer in a medical paper in 1688. Why a medical paper? Because at that time, it was generally believed that homesickness and homesickness were a kind of disease and must be treated by medical methods.

This understanding is not unreasonable. At that time, there were constant wars on the European continent, and many soldiers were unable to concentrate on fighting the enemy at the front because they missed their hometown, which greatly affected their combat effectiveness. So this homesickness has become the research object of doctors.

For more than 300 years, homesickness is no longer a disease. It has even become a way for poets and philosophers to express their romantic feelings. Homesickness not only stays in the space dimension, but also extends to the time dimension. Boim, a Russian-American scholar who wrote Nostalgic Future, said: With the acceleration of industrialization and modernization, people miss the slow-paced life in the past more and more, and they miss and need social cohesion and tradition more and more. Sociologist Davis also believes that the pursuit of a stable and sustained force in the process of uncertain changes and fractures is the main driving force for people's nostalgia.

Therefore, we have a clearer understanding of the origin of the matter: homesickness and nostalgic behavior are not diseases in themselves, but the environment that causes people's homesickness and nostalgia is the object of thinking. Do we overemphasize the value of development and ignore the tension of people's psychological identity caused by disorderly development? Have we described the prosperity of urban cement forests too much and neglected the rapidly disappearing hometown tradition? It is also in this kind of reflection and questioning that "Remember Homesickness" can quickly occupy the high ground of public opinion, and "Where has the time gone" can quickly trigger social condemnation.

Although this homesickness and nostalgia power is what we need, I think it will also lead to negative results if it is overused. Although a person's nostalgia is not a disease, a society is too addicted to nostalgia, which is a social disease.

Improper handling of homesickness and nostalgia will lead to two extreme behaviors. According to Boim's classification, nostalgia can be divided into restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia thinks that the old days are better than the present, so we should go back to the past. This kind of people go to extremes to restore historical sites that have been abandoned or disappeared for various reasons. We have seen too many examples of building antique buildings in the name of respecting the past, but "homesickness" is not remembered in this way.

Reflecting on nostalgia sounds more rational. This kind of people pay more attention to the old "nostalgia" and do not pursue the past, but pursue a sense of nostalgia for the past: "wandering on the ruins, wandering on the rust of time and history, wandering in the dreams of another place and another time." However, reflecting on the extreme of nostalgia is an abuse of history, which makes the whole society filled with a sense of loss and frustration. Such people will go to the opposite of progress and regard any reasonable change and development as enemies. They don't need to go back to the past, what they want is to stop time and freeze it.

Remember Homesickness is like opening a door, which shows us that there are more possibilities in the tide of social change in the future. However, people will worry about their hometown only when it becomes a past that cannot be returned. From this perspective, Remember to Be Homesick is the wrong choice. Because homesickness is an emotion of missing hometown, not an emotion we want to keep. Our goal is not to lament the scarcity of hometown in the city, but to actively preserve the beauty in the cultural context of hometown.

The so-called "where has all the time gone?" This is even more true. Time can neither go back nor stop. Romantic nostalgia can exist in poetry and philosophy. However, when nostalgia becomes a part of life, that kind of romantic sadness is no longer beautiful. Adapting to change is a quality that people should have, otherwise, as Boim said, "Missing my hometown shrinks into missing my childhood. It is not so much a lack of adaptation to progress as a' certain inadaptability to adult life'. "