What happens when a life is transplanted? Some people flourish in their new surroundings. Some wither. Some take on new characteristics and may even give the appearance of being a different organism altogether, even though they still yearn for the soil in which they were first nourished.
But nostalgia, the longing to be connected to one’s former home — one’s former self — often fails to yield the bittersweet pleasure we associate with that word. Rather, living in the past usually entails a painful and obsessive return to foundational traumas. The result is a double displacement from the present: a literalising of LP Hartley’s formulation that “the past is a foreign country”...
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