There should well be a word to describe a feeling of homesickness for somewhere never visited, that never existed or that is assumed to have existed in someone else’s past.
A utopia, from Thomas More’s Utopia stems from the greek ‘U’ (not/nowhere) and ‘topos’, a place. It is a description of a fictional communal society and has come to mean any ideal, if unachievable society, real or fictional.
Nostalgia is a feeling of possibly contented or rueful reflection on your own past or the social or cultural situation in which you resided in the past. The word stems from the greek ‘nostos’, meaning ‘a return home’ and algia, meaning pain, literally giving us a pain or sickness on returning home, possibly a homesickness, but with a subtly different inflection.
You have several human states with these two words:
- Idealism
- A yearning or striving for an ideal society or situation
- Reflection on the past
- Pain or sickness on that reflection
- Conversely, pleasure, or contentment on that relfection
- Sickness or pain caused by a return home
- Homesickness
In combination, the two words as
Utopalgia allow for a very common condition, that of being homesick, or contented with reflection on a past or place that was never yours, or never existed.
I think this is slightly different to harking back to a golden age; thinking it was better ‘in the good old days’, given that things may never have been better then, but has more in common with Baudrillard’s simulacrum.
The simulacrum is, simply put, a copy without an original (this is a paraphrase of Baudrillard
Simulacra and Simulations and the word has, as with all words moved from Baudrillard’s text’s control, to the domain of those who use it).
A Utopalgia is similarly a homesickness for a state that never existed, a place in the mind comprised of several images, states, memories of places seen and never seen, the place you wish to go to to escape everything. It is also, a happiness in reflecting on this simulacrum of a place - the unvisited country before the visit, the rural idyll before selling up and downsizing.
Interestingly, utopalgia as a word has been coined previously with a differing but significant meaning on the Spanish language site
Exonario (Definitions and terms that do not appear in the dictionary).
In the translation available, utopalgia in this instance is “pain in nonphysical places,” or pain from a severed limb - known as
‘Phantom limb’ (which incidentally, seems to be much more than just an aching from where a severed body part should be).
