Those Were the Days

On nostalgia, emotional time-travel, and the dangers of comparing yesterday to today.

Last month, I read a book on Steven Spielberg’s filmography, and I experienced a kind of emotional time-travel. The book – an atlas-sized paperback from the mid-nineties – took me back to my childhood. This was exactly the sort of thing I used to borrow from the library to spend slow Saturdays and drizzly Sundays flipping through. And Spielberg’s films are full of the settings, symbols, and mundane items like kitchen utensils and children’s toys that many of us – born between the fifties and late-eighties in North America – associate with our own youth. I was briefly a twelve-year-old again.

In the back of the Spielberg book were instructions for filling out a form at the bottom of the page – delineated by a dashed line with the symbol for scissors halfway through the action of cutting it – so I could receive in the post a catalogue of the publisher’s other titles. This simple and obsolete marketing strategy made me think, unexpectedly and joyously, of the Hardy Boys, of treehouses mad…