I seem to remember that the word 'nostalgia' was invented in the seventeenth century by an Alsatian student in a medical thesis to describe the malady that afflicted Swiss soldiers when far from their native mountains.
For me nostalgia is the opposite: it's the pain of missing places that I have never seen before and that, now that I'm in my late seventies and no longer of an age to go exploring, I will never get the chance to see.
While others were already choosing a sofa for their living room and spending money on a Wedgwood tea pot, I, perhaps fired up by Novalis's 'Blaue Blume' which was so much talked and sung about around campfires while I was still a youngster with the "Fahrenden Gesellen", continued to move from one exotic location to another, hoping to be changed by what I found. And change me it did because I still quite often feel unsuited to the conventional, predictable life I now live.
Goethe understood this, allowing his character, Ottilie, to explain: "Palm trees will not allow a man to wander among them with impunity; and doubtless his tone of thinking becomes very different in a land where elephants and tigers are at home", or, as another translator put it more succinctly, "No one wanders under palm trees unpunished."
