![]() That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. To get over the nostalgia he feels (in the strictest sense), he rejects the life spent doling out In the poem, the raging fireside common to Christmas stories is instead for Ulysses a “still hearth”. In his poem, Ulysses (1833), he questions whether the hero’s return home to Ithaca would have made him happy. The 19th century poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, also wondered about nostalgia. The true meaning of nostalgia, with its necessary pain, has been forgotten in our late capitalist society in which commodities overrule memories. The rose-tinted glasses demand ever-sweeter stories of times when Christmas brought our desires home for us. To counter the kind of sadness that Conroy feels, today’s stories on the big and small screens focus on memories we cherish from those days when we didn’t know the truth about Father Christmas. Neither a backward glance to the mythic Ireland with its Gaelic heritage, nor the reversion to the generation which is dying all around, can soothe Conroy’s Christmas. He is confused as to why Greta would not tell him everything about her past. This past and its intrusion into Conroy’s present-day Christmas throws him into disarray. Asked by Conroy why the man died, Greta replies simply, “I think he died for me”. ![]() On his journey to his hotel for the night, he learns of his wife Greta’s past when she tells her own story about a former lover who died. This pain holds true for Conroy on that Christmas party night. The word as a whole implies the “painful homecoming” – the difficult journey – the return home that’s not without trouble. But the second half of the word, algia, means “pain”. That epic poem charted Ulysses’ return to Ithaca after the Trojan War. The first part stems from nostos, meaning “homecoming” in ancient Greek, which was a heroic quality desired by Ulysses in The Odyssey. The spirit of the season? Pozynakov/Shutterstock
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