Homo Irrealis

André Aciman’s Homo Irrealis leaves a strange feeling lingering long after I put down the book. The irrealis aspect of his essays comes across as an aggressive and rather depressing form of nostalgia, where the temporal context is heavily skewed towards the past. André describes it as follows: imagine a heartfelt moment with your lover, perhaps on a special occasion. Instead of savouring the moment, you imagine yourself well into the future, looking back at this moment with nostalgic feelings. That alone took a while for me to understand: you’re creating future moments of nostalgia with every significant moment, yes, but why would you be deliberately thinking about a future where you’re looking back at his moment instead of just being in the now? Exaggerating this further, a constant yearning for the past to the point that you attempt to retread your (or someone’s) exact steps will always result in disappointment. Aciman often tried to visit the New York he experienced when watching a…