Rain, Nostalgia, Spain, and More Philosophizing

Sometimes the rain makes me nostalgic. I'm not entirely sure why this is. It's just that when I'm sitting on my bed listening to the cars splashing through the puddles in the street outside, and to the dripping of water off my balcony, I have a tendency to start reflecting on all the places I have been in my life that are not here.

Last night I was remembering Spain. I had my iPod randomply playing from the 675 or so classical songs I have loaded, and for some reason the second movement of Respighi's Fountains of Rome transported me back to my lower bunk in the tiny apartment I lived in for two months a few years back. I remembered struggling to get to sleep on a hard mattress and a flat pillow, in a rather claustrophobic space, plugged into my discman in an attempt to drown out the sounds of late-night Spanish television in the kitchen.

Somehow this felt like a good memory.

Or maybe not good. Nostalgia is an interesting feeling, a sort of pleasant sadness that gets attached to both generally positive and generally negative memories without discrimination. I am beyond content sleeping in my own bed with my own pillow, plenty of personal space, and very few late night noises (and a white noise maker to compensate for the occasional disturbance). And yet I can think back on that cramped, uncomfortable Madrid high-rise apartment with something akin to...yearning, I guess. Why is that?

Spain was miserable at times...rather a lot of the time in fact. I was homesick and cold (I packed well for a hot summer, but not for an erratic spring), I hated living in the city, the food was unfamiliar, I couldn't communicate well in the local language, the shower had a severely limited supply of hot water, the lightbulbs made everything look dull and sickly, the apartment smelled like the deep fryer, the milk was only refrigerated after opening (and tasted funny even then) - for the first month and a half of my two-month stay I just wanted to go home.

But despite all of this, my entire trip was just rich with feeling and experience, and I think that's why the nostalgia is so strong. I felt so much while I was there, and this tapestry of emotion combined with so many new and vibrant images has seared that time of my life permanently into my consciousness. That nostalgia, that yearning, is not for the experience per se, but for the richness of the experience.