Anemoia: A Distant Nostalgia

-

 

     The other day I was playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a video game that had a beautiful part in mine and many others’ childhood. For those who doesn’t know it’s a first-person game where you go around completing criminal activities for shady men while you try to uncover who betrayed you in the beginning, in an 80s themed city.

 



     Now I find myself in this sudden love for everything that is 80s, Michael Jackson, Gung ho action flicks, Miami Vice, colorful people and cars, box computers and whatnot. It cannot be considered nostalgia, since I was born nowhere close to that time. However a feeling came about that made me wish I lived back then, a different era, where things seemed hopeful and beautiful than it is right now.

 

      And I found the right word for it, Anemoia, a fairy new term, coined by John Koeing in 2012 in his project The Dictionary of Obscure Shadows. Nostalgia for a time or a place one has never known. Fairy recently the word has attained a pretty decent popularity among us poets, well because don’t we all wish we lived in a different era?

https://youtu.be/wH6ZCIRjI14?si=ISoYA4FlHV2izMEs

     All of us at some point would have looked up at the moon and thought, someone else is probably looking at the moon too with me, perhaps all of our ancestors would have looked at the same moon from the dawn of time and thought the same. What if we could be in their shoes, live life as they would have at their time, maybe a simpler life without any stress and worries of the modern life?

 

     What if you could live a life of fantasy? Became a royal pirate like Francis Drake, become one of Ceasar’s legionnaires or live along Beowulf as he kills the monster Grendel, writing down history as you explore the bleak world. Or perhaps a more modern take, maybe a hippie spreading the word of love during the Vietnam War.

     It is funny when you think about it. We are bound by invisible walls to do what we actually love doing at the present, that we yearn for a distant past, where things appear to be simple and easier. Sadly, we do seem to have a privilege of watching our time from a distant future to know whether we are right or wrong.

      Let me know your thoughts dear reader! What are your thoughts on anemoia? What distant timeline sparks your anemoia?

Until next time...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Did The Salesman Deserve To Die?

-
Image
                     I’ve heard about this play ever since I’ve read the play The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams. Now that I have watched the Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman (1966) starring Lee J. Cobb, I cannot wait to share my thoughts. Firstly, I would like to comment on the stunning performance by Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman, the protagonist, the delusional salesman. I had previously watched him in the film 12 Angry Men (please watch it, you’ll thank me later) and here too he does a great job in depicting emotions that I feel I would have never realized had I read the play.  The link to the play on YouTube:   https://youtu.be/Y7lGIUzUKOE?si=wmecuYXAsknxNt8X        I shall try not to spoil it too much for you as I give you a brief summary of the play. The play introduces us to an ageing salesman, Willy Loman who has just returned from New York to his middle-class apartment in Boston. His two sons haven’t found much success in business as he hoped for, and
Read more

The Little Prince and his Little Rose

-
Image
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly: what is essential is invisible to the eye.” -       -  The Fox, The Little Prince         A beautiful absolute charm of a novel, The Little Prince by French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry goes way up top of my most favourite reads. The nature of the supposedly ‘children’s fable’ would leave you thinking for weeks at least, with its little yet deeply thoughtful musings about childhood and the hard parts of growing up.         Now although there are many lovely stories told by our Little Prince from the alien asteroid planet B612, I would like to bring you to the attention of the lonely rose that sprouted up out all of a sudden in the garden of the Prince. Although there were other flowers in the small garden, the rose stood unique with its special arrangement of flowers The Prince had never seen in other plants.         As the Little Prince talked to the proud rose, he was more and more curious about it nurturing with h
Read more

Dawn At Central

-
Image
  Dear Reader, I was looking at my previous entries and realized that I had never written one on trains. Being one who likes holding onto tickets for some funny reason, this blog was long overdue. I remember once a ticket collector jokingly asking me if I was stuffing tickets in my wallet to add weight for the money I didn’t have.   Having to travel home for the weekend for an occasion, it was the perfect time for this blog. Hope you will like it!   I woke up right before the alarm at 5. The train had reached before time. It was still dark outside when I looked outside the door as the train was inching towards the station. It was peaceful; the chirping of the morning birds, the slow winds amidst the clacking of metal wheels and the drone of the engine which had soldiered on all night. Getting off at the station, I was greeted to an unexpected number of commuters and passengers all moving towards the next part of their journeys, to be served perhaps by the insistent auto drivers
Read more