Khue-reyen is a wistful ditty, sung originally by Swiss milkmaids and capable of provoking such paroxysms of longing in mercenary soldiers during the thirty years’ war that it was banned. The penalty for playing it, sapping morale and inciting desertion, was death.
The depressive malaise of 17th-century soldiers led to the first diagnosis by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss doctor, of a condition he called nostalgia. The word is assembled from Greek – nostos, meaning home; algos, meaning pain. The meaning has changed over time. Only relatively recently has it shed the connotation of neurosis to become a cultural balm – a perfumed distillation of the past applied to bruises inflicted by the present. The home we pine for is attainable only on hallucinatory voyages of time travel.
