Wounded Nostalgia

With La nostalgia ferita [Wounded Nostalgia], Eugenio Borgna develops another term in his personal lexicon of emotion. Here he describes wounded nostalgia, with its constellation of keywords: memory, time, homesickness, childhood.

But there is also nostalgia for death, for a face that, as Rilke wrote, haunts us, sometimes impossible to find, as well as nostalgia for life when we are afflicted by illness. Nostalgia that is open to hope is different from nostalgia that remains frozen in the past.

These are some of the words thematized in this book. There is nostalgia wounded by pain, and nostalgia spared from it.

Naturally, Borgna refers to Leopardi and Proust, but also to Emily Dickinson and Guido Gozzano. Ultimately, nostalgia can be understood as a salvaging of the past, as its gift of meaning; and as an antithesis, too, to the dragon of indifference that leads to an emotional wasteland.

With a preface by Michele Dantini.