Anemoia: A Distant Nostalgia

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     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...

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