It is the disorienting homesickness we experience without leaving home, when home has altered beyond recognition. It reminded her of a word coined by the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, solastalgia, which combines solace, desolation and nostalgia to convey the distress of seeing a familiar environment bitterly transformed by drought, fire and flood. “This is that uncanniness that’s starting to happen now, with the seasons changing,” she told me - our longing for a world we once knew. When she became interested in historical accounts of scurvy, she felt a flash of strange recognition. Offill is a rangy, obsessional reader, a rover of archives and libraries. “They felt like they would die from the bite of a piece of fruit,” the novelist Jenny Offill told me, “the voluptuous luxury of it was so overwhelming.” Their senses became so scrambled, their yearning so pitched, that when they disembarked, flowers smelled almost oppressive. They would dream of food and weep upon waking. With their brains parched for vitamin C, sailors would find their perceptions muddled and emotions heightened. Scurvy, the great scourge of maritime exploration, the killer of some two million people between the late 1400s and 1800, was once understood as a disease of longing.
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