Nostalgia, so characteristic of conservatives, can
be understood not in
time but in space instead.
This nostalgia originates from Odysseus’s desire
to return home (νόστος) and means the suffering
of man away from his home that motivates his return.
Modern societies that work well are conservative in that they have a strong sense of homeostasis. This is the sense of continually returning to a point of equilibrium. Upsets, changes, drives, and tensions occur along the way.
The film’s (The English Patient) main protagonist is the Hungarian desert explorer László Almásy. Who was this mysterious person looking for happiness so far from home, in the barren, sandy world of the Libyan Desert?
This is Budapest: a big city that dreamed and then built for itself a colourful past during the last decades of the old world, in those final moments before the dawn of modernism.
The revival and reinstatement of tradition, its restoration if you like, is by no means self-contradictory, and constancy is a more important element of tradition than change.
