Hiraeth—That’s Welsh for Longing

“How would you feel if just before you die you learn that an asteroid would hit the earth and make all humans disappear like was the fate of dinosaurs? Would you have any regrets regarding your own life?”

I am very fortunate to use the Internet for maintaining my age-old friendships or sometimes rekindling them. Geography, time and mood do not have any effect on my desire to drop a note to someone light years away in his or her life experiences. And in return receive a philosophical, practical, romantic, or simply heart-warming response. While we have similar or different professional training, we never write about what puts food on our table or keeps our roof from leaking. That has been the unwritten rule for almost three decades now.

So I wrote back that I would have no regrets, because I am not sure how regret works. For me it is looking back with today’s optic and knowledge upon acts I had or would have carried out in the past. And then evaluate these. Put a value on them, often as “good” or “bad”. And then have feelings about doing bad things or for not doing good things. Or yet, feel bad just for not doing what I could have done.

It just does not make sense to me.

Therefore we jumped to another topic, that of retrocausality. Like all theories of philosophy and physics, I remain most interested in learning about them and keeping myself up-to-date with emerging ones.

Retrocausality.  It posits that the future affects the past which affects the present. That what we do had already been determined to be done. All this because it is not a sequential but a simultaneous universe, where as predicted by Einstein, our past, present and future exist at the same time. It is a very challenging new outlook by physicists who want to take Quantum Mechanics and Relativity Theory to the next level. Perhaps to more of a philosophical level than one of formulae and experimentation, because while quantum mechanics has uncertainty about position and movement, retrocausality brings forth the uncertainty about free will.

If what we do or did was determined by and in our future, then we cannot be held responsible for doing things by free will.

Thus, free will becomes an illusion. So does regret.

Yet, I think that in all of us there is a comfort with the Newtonian clockwork model where causality presupposes a sequence and an order: the cause comes before the effect, and we can trace it back to understand the “Why” of a “What”. After all, that is the basis of Karma, when we believe that what we do today will get back to us, in some other time or form, accordingly.

“Retrocausality and Karma—this is getting funky. Let’s go back to nostalgia.”

 “If you do not understand regret nor when you do not think your present is already determined by your future, would you still have nostalgia?”

That is a question worth pondering upon. As it was sub-zero outside, I put on warm socks, made green tea and sat down to think.

… I had always thought that nostalgia was a medical term, constructed to diagnose a psychological or emotional state. After all, “algia” is pain, but I was not sure of the word’s true origin. So I did some searching.

The word nostalgia was first coined as a medical term in 1688 by Johannes Hofer (1669-1752), a Swiss medical student. It uses the word νόστος along with another Greek root, άλγος or algos, meaning pain, to describe the psychological condition of longing for the past. In James Joyce's Ulysses, the final part, during which Leopold Bloom returns home, is called the Nostos.

Aha! Yet another medical pigeonhole for an ostensibly human reaction. The key term seems to be that of longing, not nostalgia.

But what is longing?

Again, as a disciplined academic, I went to definitions.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines longing as "a strong desire for something unattainable."  

I was immediately interested in noticing that the definition is not immediately about the past-- it seems to be about the future. It does not seem to coincide with nostalgia, which is defined by the same dictionary as "pleasure and sadness that is caused by remembering from the past and wishing that you could experience it again."

Now I was feeling comfortable with my skepticism about the interchangeable use of the terms “longing” and “nostalgia”. Clearly the former is about the future while the latter is about the past. Or is it so? Could the “unattainable” be our inability to go back in time and experience past pleasures again?

… And I went back to thinking about retrocausation, the future affecting the past, free will being an illusion, and the joy of debating such topics with a friend separated by space and time! Or is it IN space and time?

My feet were warm now, especially since my dog niched himself under the table and put his head on my right foot. It was snowing steady and in wet flakes.

And I wrote back:

“I may be longing for the unattainable but I do not suffer from the pains of wishing for what I have already experienced. Yet I keep the illusion of free will alive, because without it I will feel nothing when learning that an asteroid may hit our planet and kill all humans. Perhaps you will find it insensitive, but upon my death bed I would mourn the destruction of free will more than I would mourn the destruction of humans.”

March 4, 2014

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2014 

I took this picture when walking my dog in the snow. At some point his paw and my shoe made imprints next to one left by a deer. It made me think of a moment in time when harmony may have been the dominant force of all things living. The theme of this essay seems to accommodate this rather pretentious photograph.