It’s easy to have nostalgia for real places. Off the top of my head, I can probably think of a dozen that I would visit again if I could somehow go back in time—and get back into the headspace of the time. Summer camp, my old soccer practice field, various portions of forest around my hometown. There are adult ones too. Parts of college campuses, or the route I used to walk to work when I lived in Washington DC. Old town Geneva is a big one, my home during an internship back when the Internet was young…
But I often wonder if anyone else gets nostalgic for imaginary places—because I can miss some of them just as much as bits of the real world. I’m not talking about my own creations, but the ones from favorite books in my childhood and adolescent years. Movies don’t quite count; I loved them too, but movies don’t allow you to travel the worlds they present the way books would. Books force you to create these worlds as you read, to live there for long stretches of time. I think that process imprints some of those places on the brain in a way that lasts the long haul.
The planet Arrakis comes to mind. I remember the dark passageways beneath the blinding deserts of Dune. Watching the Fremen harvest water in their windy caves, terraforming the sand while the rock whistled above them and static lighting lit the sky. My memory of that place—yes, memory—somehow has a sensory quality. It’s even sharper than my memory of some real-world places I’ve known.
I had Middle-Earth too, of course. But so did everyone else, so I’ll skip the details.
Like many pre-teens of the late 80s, I spent a fair amount of time in Terry Brooks’ worlds. Shanarra was a given, but I also lived in his fantasy world the stock trader bought off a classified ad in the newspaper.
If John DeChancie’s Castle Perilous appeared out of thin air right now, I could probably find my way to the kitchen with barely a wrong turn.
Sometimes I can’t remember the specific book or author, but I’ll have a flash memory of a single setting so clearly that it almost hurts.
I remember details about the Heart of Gold that Douglas Adams never gave the reader.
I stood in the lobby of the hotel where Heinlein’s genetically-engineered Friday waited for a lover that would never come. It was just a scene—just one scene—I read 25 years ago, but I can still see that lobby in detail. I could get a room there.
The quality of these memories astonishes me. My past is absolutely littered with chunks of worlds, cities, forests, glades, mountains, even kitchens and closets I can see with total clarity. And I miss visiting many of them.
You might wonder why I use the word “nostalgia,” as if I couldn’t go back to these places anytime I wanted. All these books still exist—couldn’t I just pick one up and go?
I wish it were so. I’m too analytical now. Maybe it’s the curse of being a writer myself—or just being an adult. I can still go to these words when I read, but there is always a part of me watching to see what the author does. Style and phrasing and world-building technique jump out at me. I think “oh, I like how she did this bit here…”
I still go mad over books and imaginary worlds, but I can’t quite live in them like I used to.
Do any of you have something like this? Extreme nostalgia not for a story or a character, but for the actual imaginary place they were set in? A setting? Does it feel like you lived there, even if for just a short time? Or am I just strange? I already know the answer to that last one, but surely I’m not the only one…
Walker, yes.
Yes I have whole worlds built in my mind with images some author provided decades ago. Some of which, as you mentioned, I cannot recall the book or author, but the flash of memory is as clear as if I had been there bodily once upon a time. For me, because of my genre of choice, it is usually a time long ago, not another world, but there is a little of that, too.
Perhaps there is still a little of the wonder left for me–for I can still visit other places if the writer is skilled enough to make me forget. And you post makes me long to visit those long-ago places now. Even if it’s impossible to go back, I would like to try. It is never the same, but maybe I will find something new to love that I didn’t appreciate before. Thank you for reminding me, and for awaking the nostalgia in me. 🙂
Lovely response and I’m glad you liked it and got nostalgic too 🙂
What a beautiful post! If any of these authors could see and feel what you do–how real you’ve made the worlds they created–how touched would they be? I think this is every writer’s dream…to have a reader believe so deeply in their imaginary world that it becomes real, in a sense. Who knows, maybe if enough believed like you do, these places really could come into being? 😉 It’s true that adulthood and knowledge take something from us…but on the other hand, you’re becoming someone who can create worlds. I sincerely wish for your writing to find readers like you.
Thanks 🙂
I think you hit it on the nose in the first paragraph, “and get back into the headspace”, which is different than the place, and I think why it feels like nostalgia. I miss the headspace. I have re-read the Silmarillion many times, but nothing quite compares to the first time watched Varda set the blue fires of Helluin above the circles of the world, or journeyed from Cuivienen to the Trees. My head is shaped differently now, but the memory is precious.
Yes! I’m amazed at how much many of these fictional worlds feel like memories of real places that I visited, so similar to real real memories of real places…