In the morning, I went to the airport and left for Spain. I stayed in a small town for a month, and in this place where I’d never been before, I began to feel nostalgia again, in occasional, unpredictable attacks. But I seemed to be nostalgic for other people’s memories: random strains of music I couldn’t possibly have heard before, unidentified smells from a neighbour’s kitchen, a door with cracked brown paint. I was filled with longing — fierce, sorrowful and sublime. These experiences were not a backslide in my recovery, not a relapse into memory’s propagandistic traps. Rather, they showed me that a sensory experience can be an occasion for pain, but looked at another way, the experience is only a sound, or only food cooking, or only paint peeling on a door. Everywhere is home; everywhere is nowhere in particular. Baruch Spinoza writes that “one and the same thing can at the same time be good and bad, and also indifferent. For example, music is good for one who is melancholy, bad for one who is in mourning, and neither good nor bad for the deaf.”
