Wordsmiths

[Thunderbird]

There's been a concept on my mind of late that lacks for proper verbiage and trawling through thesauri seems less than savory. Better to discuss the idea and see what comes of it, if anything.

Looking back on the past fondly is called nostalgia while looking forward is anticipation. What would you call looking off sides? For reference, I've lived a lot of places and sometimes wonder how they're doing in the present, rather than what it was like living there way back when. My interests steer me into the present-progressive just about always, so what might I call a fond sense of wonder about what is or may be going on somewhere removed from my own personal experience?

Also, feel free to ask your own such questions as they arise.

[Hephaestus]

What would you call looking off sides?

Perspective. If you're any good at it, you have perspicacity.

[kuranes]

Most folks here know that I enjoy a good tangent...

[Blorg]

This quote is about Joseph Cornell but I think it relates to your question (the "sadness of life passing" part especially).

"Nostalgia ok for Wyeth in isolated New England," he complained once. "What is the answer for New York City." The nostalgia he felt, though, was not nostalgia for a particular place or person but a generalized nostalgia for what he called "time passing." Cornell sensed, and in his art dramatized, the difference between two opposed kinds of nostalgia. What's nostalgic in Cornell's art is not that it's made of old things; a lot of the things are so new that no one would have yet thought of them as potential art—Hollywood stills and penny-arcade chutes. What's nostalgic is that, behind glass, fixed in place, the new things become old even as we look at them: it is the fate of everything, each box proposes, to become part of a vivid and longed-for past, as real and yet as remote from us as the Paris hotel we never got to. There is, he saw, a kind of nostalgia that posits a world that never existed and a set of virtues never put into practice—the kind that idealizes the heroic forties, or the roaring twenties, or the fabulous fifties—and a kind that finds a bottomless melancholy in the simple desolation of life by time. The false kind of nostalgia promotes the superiority of life past; the true kind captures the sadness of life passing.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...urrentPage=all

based on this definition, I'd call "looking off to the sides" straightforward genuine nostalgia.

[Starjots]

Looking back on the past fondly is called nostalgia while looking forward is anticipation. What would you call looking off sides? For reference, I've lived a lot of places and sometimes wonder how they're doing in the present, rather than what it was like living there way back when. My interests steer me into the present-progressive just about always, so what might I call a fond sense of wonder about what is or may be going on somewhere removed from my own personal experience?

Nostalgia comes from nostos (homecoming) and algos (ache, pain)

Crafting a word with these types of roots to capture part of your idea:

amphi - greek, 'on both sides' + algos (ache, pain) = amphalgia

[Thunderbird]

Perspective. If you're any good at it, you have perspicacity.

Solid opening volley. Clever.

Most folks here know that I enjoy a good tangent...

Who doesn't?

This quote is about Joseph Cornell but I think it relates to your question (the "sadness of life passing" part especially).

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/200...urrentPage=all

based on this definition, I'd call "looking off to the sides" straightforward genuine nostalgia.

Ah, but oh so loaded with vernacular usage.

Nostalgia comes from nostos (homecoming) and algos (ache, pain)

Crafting a word with these types of roots to capture part of your idea:

amphi - greek, 'on both sides' + algos (ache, pain) = amphalgia

I think we have a winner, folks. Unless someone sees holes that need poking.