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- Oct 29, 2002
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A bit of a ramble this, but there are a few associated thoughts floating around in the old bean--too much time on aeroplanes and waking up at all hours. Feel free to respond to any aspect of it that strikes a chord.
Nostalgia is a longing for the past: for a past that is idealised, crystalised and immutable: a longing tinged with the pang of realisation that the time and place can never be revisited, recovered or recreated as we are trapped in the relentless flow of time, and, besides, the object of our fondness probably never existed in the form that we would experience it. This, I think, forms part of my own close emotional affinity with the countryside and old buildings: they are instantiations of permanence--the hills, woods and churches of my childhood stand now as then; as they stood before me and as they will stand when I am dust.
Is this inevitable for a temporally-conscious and tolerably long-lived being or is it, perhaps, a product of a failure to interact fully with the present? Do dolphins reminisce? Would sentient extraterrestrials hanker for the the Martian sweeties of yesteryear?
Two factors make me suspicious of the legitimacy (and healthiness) of my own feelings of nostalgia:-
First, I think that everybody associates the period through which they lived their childhood with 'the end of an era' more generally. (Correct?) For me, it was the late 70s and early to mid 80s, when the modern world had begun to grip, with computers, consumer electronics and what have you, but traces of the older England were behind every door, and 'living memory' and 'popular culture' encompassed both World Wars and the Empire with ease. It was the time of yellows, creams and browns, genteel shabbiness and the shadow of the bomb. I view the societal atomisation of the 80s, 90s and beyond as probably inevitable given the demands and consequences of capitalism, but when I was young there seemed to be a lingering national spirit (beyond sport!) that has now largely vanished for reasons too varied to enumerate here.
Would you say there is any especial justification for my own particular claim, or could anybody make a comparably strong argument for their own childhood? Nothing is more likely to make me doubt myself than catching myself staking a claim to true originality. Nothing new under the sun, and all that.
Second, more seriously, I find myself extrapolating from those faded soon-to-be anachronisms of my childhood to a time before I was born, the generation of my grandparents' youth in the 30s & 40s. I don't buy Brylcreem or dress up in old suits, but I still find the music, films, literature, voices and photographs from that period to be achingly evocative--so much so that the experience is almost indistinguishable from that of 'genuine' nostalgia. I recently had a 45-min telephone conversation with a cockney in his late 80s and it felt like being back on my grandfather's knee, so to speak.
Last, what sparked this current train of thought, I sometimes find myself having nostalgic thoughts about things that I know I didn't really like in the first place. Just now, for instance, I saw a photograph of a band whose music I knew very well through friends but of which I was never much of a fan. After reading a lengthy discussion of their place in music and the state of the world when they 'hit it big', I felt faint stirrings of the same pseudo-nostalgic feelings, for the clubs and venues in which I'd heard their music, the shops where it was sold and the people (who have mostly passed out of my life) who loved it the most. It sneaks up on you, this stuff!
I think perhaps certain biographical factors of my own life may make me more susceptible to these feelings, but I'd like to compare notes with the rest of you without getting bogged down in the tedium of my own life story.
That's all for now.