I'm Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

Hundreds of years ago, nostalgia was a diagnosable medical condition.

Johannes Hofer, a 17th century Swiss physician, named the condition, which he identified in homesick soldiers.

The nost in nostalgia means homecoming.

The alja means pain.

Symptoms of nostalgia among Swiss soldiers included

melancholy, malnutrition, sleepiness, brain fever, and hallucinations.

Hofer's idea of nostalgia as an illness is the pain of not being able to go home,

but home can be a place or a time or a person. Home can even be a version

of yourself, a version you miss and would love to get back to. I joke that I can be nostalgic

about a moment while it's happening.

That might be the writer in me.

Part of me is in the moment, and part of me is already thinking about it from a distance

and seeking the language to write about it.

Thanks to technology, I have nostalgia at my fingertips at any moment of any day.

Shutterfly wants to show me what my life looked like 11 years ago today. Facebook wants to show me my

memories over the years. My photo library on my phone offers up highlights and algorithmically

selected moments from the past. My point is, if I wanted to forget about a time, a place,

or a person, my devices won't let me. Look, there are my children on their first day of school

several years ago. There's my son's grin with his front teeth missing. There's my daughter

learning how to ride a bike. Today's poem beautifully captures the pain of distance, of longing, of wanting to be somewhere or with someone when you can't be.

Nostalgia by Matthew Minicucci.

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