anemoia

What it means

At an estate sale you buy a carousel of Kodachrome slides for two dollars. At home you project them on the wall: a family you will never meet, a station wagon, a lake in 1963, a woman laughing at someone off to the left. You miss it. Not the family, whom you never knew, but the summer, which you were not alive for. That is anemoia.

The feeling needs a gap you cannot close. It attaches to times before your birth, or to places you could never have been part of, and it feeds on artefacts: film grain, old typefaces, a radio jingle, a mall photographed in 1987. It does not survive much research. Learn what the lake town paid its workers in 1963, or who was kept off that beach, and the glow thins. Part of what is missed is the photograph’s own selection, the afternoon somebody chose to keep.

Where it comes from

John Koenig gave the word its video in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows series on YouTube, “Anemoia: Nostalgia For A Time You’ve Never Known”, uploaded on 21 December 2014. The date of first publication is disputed. The Tumblr post that hosts the video shows a date of 21 December 2012, and Wiktionary gives 2012. But the Internet Archive’s copy of the blog’s front page from 13 January 2013, which lists the posts of the previous weeks, does not include it. This entry uses 2014, the earliest date that can be checked. The book prints the entry on pages 167 and 168.

Koenig’s etymology joins Ancient Greek ánemos, “wind”, to nóos, “mind”. He compares anemosis, the bending of a tree by steady wind until it leans backward. Wiktionary reads the ending differently, as -oia taken from words like paranoia; both accounts agree on the wind.

How to use it

Half the comments under that 1986 mall footage are people in their twenties with anemoia. Casual; used as a diagnosis, slightly ironic.

Her paintings trade on a careful anemoia: bus shelters and gas stations from a decade she never saw. Literary; a critic’s word for a mood a work is built to produce.

What it is not

Hiraeth. Hiraeth is Welsh, and it is aimed at a home: a real place, often your own, that is gone or changed or was never quite what you remember. Anemoia is aimed at a time, and it never belonged to you. A Welsh emigrant feels hiraeth for the valley she grew up in. Her granddaughter in Ohio, looking at photographs of the same valley in 1950, feels anemoia.

Nostalgia. Nostalgia is a memory with the pain left in and the dull parts removed: your grandmother’s kitchen, your first car. It needs you to have been there. Anemoia uses the same equipment on someone else’s past. There is no memory under it, only images, so it is more easily set off by a song, a font or a film stock.

In the wild

• Anemoia (2024), an 11-minute short directed by Andreas Aicka Thomsen, filmed in Denmark, Lithuania and Norway. It opens on a title card defining the word.
• Simon Reynolds, music critic, wrote a 2020 post on his Retromania blog about anemoia as nostalgia for eras one never lived through.