Longing: Rumi's Reed and Odysseus's Ithaca

Longing

In 1688, a young medical student in Basel went looking for a name to give a strange disease. Johannes Hofer had noticed that Swiss mercenaries on distant battlefields were wasting away from an ailment no one could explain. Their fevers rose, their sleep vanished, and some of these soldiers actually died. The cause was not a germ. The cause was the mountains they had left behind — the cowbells of their own villages, the scent of their own valleys, killing them slowly, and sometimes doing something worse than killing.

Hofer gave the condition a name by joining two Greek words: nostos (νόστος — homecoming) and algos (ἄλγος — pain). And so “nostalgia” was born. At first the word was not meant to describe a feeling at all. It was a diagnosis.

Here is the strange part. While the West was laying this emotion out on the operating table like a disease, the East was lifting the very same emotion up like an act of worship. The Turkish word hasret and the Greek-rooted word nostalgia touch the same nerve — yet they look at it from opposite directions.

One wants to go home. The other questions what home even is. Let us follow the thread.

---

The Sound Torn From the Reed

Rumi’s Masnavi opens with a single command: “Listen.” Then the reed begins to speak. “Hear how this reed complains, how it tells the tale of separations.”

The ney is a reed flute. It has been cut from the reed-bed, torn away, and it can never return to those wet, green marshes. Yet this severing does not silence it. It does the opposite — it turns the reed into something that can sing. Because the reed is now hollow inside, it is finally able to give voice. Had it never been cut, it would have stayed a mute stalk of grass in the marsh.

In the Turkish Sufi tradition, it is the ney that gives longing its shape. The echo of the soul torn from its divine source resounds within a person just as the reed’s cry resounds in the flute. Man is kneaded from earth yet quickened by a divine breath, and the tension between these two origins produces a longing that never falls quiet. The one who longs, in truth, is not you — it is the breath within you, aching for the source from which it came.

A small detail sharpens the point further. Rumi does not say “separation” in the singular. He says separations. As if the severing were not a single event that happened once and was over, but a state relived in every passing moment.

The reed remembers, with every breath, that it was cut — and with every note it is played, it longs again.

Yunus Emre voices the same fire in plainer words: “I walk on, burning, burning; love has dyed me the colour of blood.” For Yunus, longing is not an illness. It is the moment the soul remembers its own truth. Without ever reaching for the reed-flute metaphor, Yunus arrives at the very same core.

Tellingly, Yunus says this not in the courtly Persian of Rumi but in the Turkish of the Anatolian villager — and so longing comes down to the people and settles into everyone’s tongue. Rumi, for all that he lived and became Rumi on the soil of present-day Turkey, wrote in Persian.

What emerges here is a quiet reversal. The Sufi tradition does not try to cure longing; it guards it. Because if the longing passes, the bond breaks with it. The Swiss soldier aching for his own mountains wanted to get better. The dervish breathing into the ney is not after a cure — he is after the return to the source.

---

The Stones of Ithaca

Ancient Greece grows its longing in wholly different soil. Not in the heavens, but on the ground.

Odysseus defeated Troy and won the war — yet victory gave him nothing. He was cast across the seas for ten more years just to reach his homeland. The wrath of the gods, monsters, sorceresses, storms. Through all of it Odysseus held a single desire: his home, Ithaca. His wife, his son, his own rocky island. Homer’s Odyssey is, at its heart, a nostos story — an epic of return.

The longing here is concrete. It is a longing for a face, a doorway, an olive tree. Odysseus is not searching for some abstract source but for a home he can touch with his hands. In his mind live the stones of Ithaca, its water, its scent.

And here is one of history’s little ironies. Odysseus’s longing-filled spirit comes to us from ancient Greece, but the word “nostalgia” does not. That word appears three thousand years later, from the pen of a physician in Basel. The Greeks lived the feeling; Western medicine gave it its name. The soul of the word is ancient, but its name is modern.

There is also this. In Greek culture nostos was a sacred desire. The hero who could not return home was the most tragic hero of all. Odysseus’s journey was not a punishment but a trial — and its reward was the touch of his own soil beneath his feet.

---

Why Does One Turn Inward and the Other Outward?

So why do these two longings look in such opposite directions? The answer is hidden in religion and cosmology.

In Sufi thought, this world is a temporary lodging. The true home is not here but in the source the soul came from and will return to. This is why the longing turns inward. It points not to where you are going but to where you came from. Hasret is not a compass; it is a remembering.

In ancient Greek myth, by contrast, gods and mortals share the same world. Olympus sits on the peak of a mountain, not beyond the sky. What Odysseus longs for is not a sacred source but an Ithaca of definite stone and soil. This is why the longing turns outward — tied to a map, a bearing, a concrete destination.

The East tells you: remember where you came from. The West tells you: find where you are going. Two longings, forever trying to fill the same emptiness from two opposite sides.

The striking thing is that both may be right. A person can be torn from a place, or aching to reach one. Perhaps hasret and nostalgia are the two eyes of a single face — one looking to the past, the other to the future.

The end of longing — whether it means arriving at Ithaca or returning to the reed-bed — is also the death of the very thing that gave it life. And perhaps the quietest courage a person has is to keep walking the road, knowing this full well.

Whoever knows their own longing knows, too, where they are going.