Anemoia
Nostalgia for a time you never lived through.
Context
John Koenig coined anemoia for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. The feeling can come from encountering traces of another era, such as home movies, old radio recordings, or photographs of a neighborhood before it changed.
In my liminal spaces essay, I use the word for the sense of longing a familiar-looking scene can evoke even when the scene belongs to someone else’s past.
Examples
- “Watching footage of a mall in the 1980s, I felt a wave of anemoia for a place I’d only seen on video.”