Those Were the Days
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 made with friends, of my father’s moustache, and of other mental artefacts of my personal history. It was as if some magic had been added to what was once banal by the mere passing of time.
In Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, Lawrence Durrell quotes Rose MacCaulay asking:
“Have you ever wondered how it is that the utilitarian objects of one period become objects of aesthetic value to succeeding ones? ... Does time itself confer something on relics and ruins which isn’t inherent in the design of the builder?”
To this question, we find an indirect response from Thomas Pynchon in V., when Old Mendoza dons a suit from his past and decides that “we suffer from great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in”. The relics and ruins, the once-fashionable suits and bygone tunes, tie now to then and in doing so make us homesick for what was. But, I wonder as I write, is homesickness the same as nostalgia?
I feel homesick when I think of Guanajuato, the Mexican city I lived in some years ago. It’s a feeling that sits heavily in the gut, like stage-fright or discovering a betrayal. It’s the same feeling of unevenness you might feel on learning that an ex-lover is with someone new or has moved to a different town, the Dutch angle sensation of slipping into an unreality because you’re not part of their life anymore. It takes a moment to adjust to the reminder that those previously entwined lives have been unwoven and, in places, ripped apart. Guanajuato was briefly my home and is now an ex-lover; I’m bereft at missing out on what it’s up to right now.
Nostalgia, meanwhile, is sweet and sickly, a little too much in a moreish kind of way, like a rich dessert when you’re past the point of feeling full but still want another mouthful. It’s discomforting, yet we seek it out, like a noxious smell winced from and then sniffed again – I think of gasoline while my father filled up the car, or manure from nearby farms when driving down country lanes. Nostalgia comes on with an ease and a strange familiarity that convinces me I’m perpetually on the cusp of feeling it, as if the present is merely distracting me from the past. All it takes for that distraction to break is an item, taste, or smell that reveals the long-gone beneath the here-and-now.
It’s when I read again the favourite book from childhood, see a photo of someone I once loved, or revisit a place that held significance, that I experience that painful-yet-somehow-desirable drop in the stomach that I immediately want to feel again in lieu of the lost thing itself. I can’t experience being the child I was complete with innocence and ignorance and the links between the two – but I can feel the wistful pang, which is better than feeling nothing.
If homesickness comes from being away from the familiar, nostalgia is the wistful nausea brought on by re-encountering things we once held close. It might be the tacky surface of a photograph developed years ago at the local pharmacist’s; the grumbling whoosh of a skateboard rolling along concrete down the middle of a quiet road; the suddenly discovered and just-as-quickly-lost scent of lavender slid between pinched thumb and middle finger, my grandmother never again and always holding my wrist to guide my hand to my nose, so I can learn this smell for myself. If homesickness is the desire for that which is distant, then nostalgia is the pain caused, at least momentarily, by rediscovering what was lost. It’s the agony of returning.
I think this is revealed in the word’s etymology. I want to be sure that I’m correctly remembering the linguistic roots of nostalgia, so I run a cursory Google search. It gives me a definition with syllabic pro/nun/ci/a/tion, a formal structure that exists only in dictionaries, and which smells (because memory is synesthetic) like pencil shavings. This smell is inextricably tied to the perfectly distanced black lines along the worn edge of a ruler. Wanting to feel these classroom associations a little more acutely, I leave the screen and consult a large, infrequently hassled dictionary. I flick past the tantalising treats of unknown words – I could so easily forget my mission, like homework discarded for the lure of toys and television – and I find:
Nostalgia [noun] From the Greek nostos (“homecoming”) + algos (“pain”, “distress”).
In a literal rendering, nostalgia is the pain of returning to one’s home. We often think of nostalgia as being linked to being away from that source of the familiar, but the awful ache sets in only when we’re brought back, however fleetingly or tenuously, to that place, person, or thing we miss.
Although nostalgia causes this initial melancholic pang, it also acts as a balm – an anaesthetic against existential suffering. It grants blissful ignorance, the kind that’s widespread in contemporary pop-culture. In almost all of the re-boots of television series, movies, and franchises that come out with increasing regularity, nostalgia is sold to us for its own sake. Stranger Things doesn’t seem concerned with asking any hard questions of our time through the prism of the eighties, or with evaluating our position towards that decade with anything like nuance or complexity. The nostalgia of these re-boots and re-hashes is a form of indulgence.
I don’t mean to pick on Stranger Things, but its particular emphasis on thematically hollow nostalgia has some interesting ironies. In its endless effort to fetishize the eighties, Stranger Things regularly references Back to the Future. But these are passing nods at the surface of the film, failing to notice that Back to the Future is itself trading in nostalgia for a decade thirty years gone. Marty McFly travels from the mid-eighties to the mid-fifties, where the music, cars, and slang of that period dominate the story. For a generation of filmgoers in the eighties, Back to the Future allowed them to relive their youth in the fifties. Meanwhile, in the fifties of the movie, Marty notices a poster for Cattle Queen of Montana, a Western that nostalgically peers back to the end of the previous century. Like a nest of Russian dolls with no final doll, every period has its mythical Eden, a golden era of yesteryear.
This is also the message of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which self-consciously swims in nostalgia. Gill is an inadvertent time-traveller seduced by the romance of Paris in the 1930s. There’s no shortage here of the tropes that draw sentimental tourists to Paris: ex-pat writers, wine, sexual politics, the music of Cole Porter, the fashion sense of the flappers. However, Midnight in Paris then suggests a relatively balanced view of the apparent competition between “then” and “now”. When Gill tells his lover (who’s from the thirties) that there’s no better time to be alive, she looks at him aghast. Doesn’t he realise that her present, the nineteen-thirties, is a dismal time compared to the golden age of La Belle Époque of forty years earlier?
It’s in this moment that Gill realises no one is ever perfectly content with their own time. He’s become obsessed with the past for the same reason others do – because they’re disillusioned with the “painful present”. But Gill realises that this is what the present is: “It’s a little unsatisfying because life’s a little unsatisfying.” The film suggests that there’s nothing inherently wrong with some nostalgic indulgence. To escape temporarily is no bad thing, like taking a walk to get distance from a lover’s spat before returning calmer to make amends. Escaping from a troubling “now” to a soothing “then” can be invaluable – but the return is essential. In the end, Gill must let go of his naïve belief in the perfection of the past, taking into his present some lessons from yesterday and some excitement for tomorrow. Rather than a panacea for the pain of the present, nostalgia can bring some of the charm of yesterday into today.
All that said, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing, so after a week of revisiting Spielberg movies and recapturing something of my childhood, I re-entered the present day. The political scene was predictably insane. The loudest voices online and in the press insisted that no matter where I stood politically, I’d be anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim, anti-Britain or anti-immigrant, and – no matter what I supported – anti-democracy. There was also a brand-new book by a favourite author published that week, and an album from a band who continue to push the bounds of genre in their music. My podcast app held half a dozen new episodes of long-form conversations between people who constructively disagree. Cause for optimism and cause for concern. That’s what today always is.
Further Reading:
• Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, Lawrence Durrell (1957)
• V., Thomas Pynchon (1963)
• Midnight in Paris, dir. Woody Allen (2011)