The Idea of Nostalgia

In tracing the history of emotions and of mentalities, one is immediately confronted with a question of method resulting from the interplay of emotions and language. The emotions whose history we wish to retrace are accessible to us only from the time when they find expression, verbally or by other means. For the critic, for the historian, an emotion exists only beyond the point at which it attains a linguistic status. No facet of an emotion can be traced before it is named, before it is designated and expressed. It is not, then, the emotion itself which comes before us; only that part which has passed into a given form of expression can be of interest to the historian.