Our word nostalgia comes from two words in Homer meaning ‘the return to home’ and ‘agonizing pain’.
When Helen of Troy in the famous scene on the walls of Troy where she points out all the Greek warriors she used to know to king Priam, she says repeatedly an untranslatable phrase that is so delicate and psychologically piercing, almost spoken under her breadth, but showing the break in her soul: “If ever it really was” but in Greek much more haunting and wispy because ‘ever’ and ‘really’ are not actual words but particles, like uh in English, so that it is more a sigh than a statement.
We all live in the shadow of our past that at the strangest times will launch armed flotillas to tear down the walls of our citadel.