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Nostalgia: Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'be

Yithian

Parish Watch
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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.
 
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.
so much so that the experience is almost indistinguishable from that of 'genuine' nostalgia.


I get this and but for me it goes back to Late Victorian times*. I don't know whether it's because there were still lots of buildings and ephemera about from that period when I was growing up (born 1970) or if it has something to do with the late 1960's pop culture revival of Victoriana.
I'm thinking it has more to do with the latter yet also with the rise in popularity of photography and audio recording in the former which made it all the more tangible.

*I also think it helps that I have photos of three great-great grandparents dating from the late 1800's. It's also not exclusively Victorian, any decade of the 20thC can have this effect. Could also be down to watching too many costume dramas, of course.
 
A very thought provoking and well written post, Yith.

I myself have been pondering nostalgia quite a bit these last few years, but maybe from a more distrustful angle. I tend to view nostalgia as a deadly foe - and something to be challenged and overcome.

It always sickens me when friends of my sort of age, on social media, post memes along the lines of:`You know you were born in the sixties when,,,` Or: `Do you recognise THIS from the 70's` etc.There's a loss of dignity involved in such behaviour.

I think when you get to my age (dread phrase!) a bit of cultural nostalgia becomes inevitable: one clings to the tied and tested, and what you have tried and tested invariably belongs to your younger days. This personal nostalgia - with me its a hankering for films and music from the eighties or even nineties (and, yes, including stuff I had no time for when it came out), a hunger for simpler non-conspiracy based forteana, for novels with self-contained stories, for 'ponderous' well made films, for well constructed arguments, for actors with good enunciation...and that sort of malarkey -is more or less harmless for the most part and should probably even be indulged now and then for fear it might grow into something worse.

That something worse is what I call impersonal nostalgia - which is a fabricated longing for a time that you never knew yourself. For you it's the forties, for me it would be the Edwardian period that Wells wrote about - but in either case it's all phony. We weren't there and we're just stealing the pretty bits, like jackdaws, to amuse ourselves.Worse than that is the fact that it is quite commonplace, and can have dire political consequences (as far as Britain goes it has had dire political consequences - but let's not get into that now).

I think we owe it to the young to stay a bit young ourselves, and listen out for what they might be producing or saying that's good and worthwhile. We also owe it to ourselves too - so as not too petrify before our time (hell, we can do all that in our eighties, if we have to!) So down with nostalgia, I say!

Another thing occurred to me as I was enjoying your piece Yith - loved that line about yellows, creams and browns! -which is that, like me, you live an expat life. Now the Russian word for nostalgia is `nostalGia` (with a hard `g`) and carries with it connotations of homesickness.

Could you just be suffering from a bit of Russian nostaGia, Yith?
 
As a child back in the '60s I was already a big reader and knew a lot beyond what I was taught in school, and I thought a lot too. Frustratingly, if I tried to discuss my thoughts with adults I was told to stop talking rubbish and other kids just stared incomprehensibly.

So... what were these, for my age at least, rather well-informed thoughts?
Some were about the passing of time and the value of first-hand memory.

For a start, I could see that my town was being pulled down and rebuilt around me and that in future people would want to know how it looked before it changed. So someone should record it all for posterity, no matter how run-down and crummy parts of it looked, for future generations.

Was I right? I see a few old photos of my home town posted repeatedly on Facebook to great acclaim, with people commenting that they wished there were lots more. So yeah, I was right.

Then there was my idea that people who remembered significant events were dying off and should be grilled about their lives. I knew men who'd lived through WW2 and even 1 and they'd chat a bit if you listened respectfully, but nobody was much interested because back then, especially in the Vietnam era, war was very much out of fashion.

The women who'd kept things going at home while the men were away in both Wars also had great tales to tell but they were 'only' women and weren't seen as heroines as they are now. So who cared about their stories of hardship and exciting new freedoms?

In the '60s I was conscious that the 1860s were only just out of living memory. My two grandmothers remembered their own grandparents and great-grandparents, who'd've been born in the middle of the 19th century. One gran told me all about a forbear who'd lived from 1830 - seven years before Victoria was crowned! He'd have remembered it! - to 1929. He was a former agricultural worker who'd been made unemployed through mechanisation. That's real social history.

There was also, along with the reconstruction of the town, a sense for me that the new buildings too would be impermanent and would eventually give way to newer ones, during the construction of which we'd see traces of the old. This too came about and was discussed on the town's Facebook pages with much happy reminiscing about the archaic domestic sanitary arrangements that were unearthed and the progress they represented. There's a PhD in there somewhere!

So yeah, while I wouldn't call my thoughts necessarily 'nostalgic' I've always felt that ordinary people's personal experience of the past is undervalued and that we should record and treasure it. Because history, as we know, repeats itself, and we need to remind ourselves how fantastically well-off most of us are compared to our forbears; how hard fought-for our prosperity is; and how easily we could slip back into penury and ill-health.
 
A very thought provoking and well written post, Yith.

I myself have been pondering nostalgia quite a bit these last few years, but maybe from a more distrustful angle. I tend to view nostalgia as a deadly foe - and something to be challenged and overcome.

It always sickens me when friends of my sort of age, on social media, post memes along the lines of:`You know you were born in the sixties when,,,` Or: `Do you recognise THIS from the 70's` etc.There's a loss of dignity involved in such behaviour.

I think when you get to my age (dread phrase!) a bit of cultural nostalgia becomes inevitable: one clings to the tied and tested, and what you have tried and tested invariably belongs to your younger days. This personal nostalgia - with me its a hankering for films and music from the eighties or even nineties (and, yes, including stuff I had no time for when it came out), a hunger for simpler non-conspiracy based forteana, for novels with self-contained stories, for 'ponderous' well made films, for well constructed arguments, for actors with good enunciation...and that sort of malarkey -is more or less harmless for the most part and should probably even be indulged now and then for fear it might grow into something worse.

That something worse is what I call impersonal nostalgia - which is a fabricated longing for a time that you never knew yourself. For you it's the forties, for me it would be the Edwardian period that Wells wrote about - but in either case it's all phony. We weren't there and we're just stealing the pretty bits, like jackdaws, to amuse ourselves.Worse than that is the fact that it is quite commonplace, and can have dire political consequences (as far as Britain goes it has had dire political consequences - but let's not get into that now).

I think we owe it to the young to stay a bit young ourselves, and listen out for what they might be producing or saying that's good and worthwhile. We also owe it to ourselves too - so as not too petrify before our time (hell, we can do all that in our eighties, if we have to!) So down with nostalgia, I say!

Another thing occurred to me as I was enjoying your piece Yith - loved that line about yellows, creams and browns! -which is that, like me, you live an expat life. Now the Russian word for nostalgia is `nostalGia` (with a hard `g`) and carries with it connotations of homesickness.

Could you just be suffering from a bit of Russian nostaGia, Yith?

Interesting responses from Zeke and Escargot--Zeke's in particular is what I fear may be the truth: that strong and regular nostalgia is the enemy of contentment and indicative of a failure to adapt to the changes of the present--the alluring path that leads to staleness.

I have no Russian, but etymologically nostalgia is born of a desire from home. I'm typing from a departure lounge (a literal one, I'm not on my way out yet), so I can't easily check, but I believe it had something to do with a sailor's longing for home and, of course, there's likely to be a prominent strand of that in my own thoughts. I'm minded of Mark Kermode's whimsical proposition that a vast number of successful movies are, if taken broadly, about a quest to get 'home'--figuratively or literally. If one takes 'home' to be sucessively the sanctuary of the womb, parents, childhood and youth, there's almost certainly an archetypal basis for this mood/mode of being.

More as it comes--must fly.
 
... 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?

In the most general sense - yes, it's inevitable ...

One's personal development is a process within which certain key waypoints or junctures are standard fare in terms of their general types (e.g., learning to walk; learning to operate in the broader social milieu outside the home; love / sex / marriage; etc., etc.). Each person's experience will involve such key scenes and chapters, all of which are grounded in the time and place of their occurrence. The results of earlier experiences set the basis for later ones, and in some cases determine the overall course of subsequent events.

In other words, there's an unavoidable historicity* to experience that results in being somewhat tethered to the times and places that led to now.

(* - The characteristic of having appeared or developed in history (ideas, practices, institutions...), as opposed to being natural or universal. - Wiktionary)

One never completely escapes his / her past, though he / she is free to surmount or defy it through sufficient exercise of will and deliberate action.

Falling back into the past can be an escape from struggling with the present. However, it's not not the full-blown alternative explanation for nostalgia your phrasing insinuates. Historicity explains the basis for nostalgia; fleeing the present is merely a potential trigger.


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 ...

Would you say there is any especial justification for my own particular claim, or could anybody make a comparably strong argument for their own childhold? ...

The historicity theme helps to explain this ... Life experience unfolds as a series of transitions, and doors close behind you. The 'end of an era' feelings arise from the ends of one's own personal 'eras' (episodes; chapters; incarnations; whatever ...) and / or the memories of having striven to deal with novel circumstances. This much is 'built in'.

The variables affecting one's reactions within this basic scenario relate to:

- how much of the 'external world' one treats as intrinsic to the descriptions of these segments of experience and the transitions among them; and / or

- the extent to which one attributes causality between changes in this 'external world' and one's own life.

I came of age in the Sixties - a period when several sociocultural 'eras' ended or began to unravel. There's no clear basis for distinguishing how much of my (let's call it ... ) 'loss of innocence' derived from my own personal experiences versus the broader historical upheavals of the period. History is to human as water is to fish - a medium we can inhabit but not objectively grasp.

Second, more seriously, I find myself extrapolating from those faded soon-to-be anachronisms of my childhood to a time before I was born ... ... 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.

The repository of human cultural detritus is cumulative. In childhood we are exposed to a certain amount of retrospective fondness vicariously, via our parents / grandparents / etc. As we age and learn about the even more distant past, it's easy to retro-project fondness onto some aspects of even older periods. This latter bit is facilitated whenever contemporary pop culture exhumes and re-popularizes fashions or themes from the past (as happened endlessly throughout the 1960's / 1970's).

The end result is that we have a lot of material to engage and for which we may feel what feels like personal nostalgia.

If asked for the most romantic songs of my actual / historical youth, I suppose I'd answer Unchained Melody or When a Man Loves a Woman. If asked for the musical numbers I find most romantic I'd just as likely answer Moonlight Sonata or Moonlight Serenade.
 
Nostalgia, or Future Shock?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

Future Shock is a book written by the futurist Alvin Toffler in 1970. In the book, Toffler defines the term "future shock" as a certain psychological state of individuals and entire societies. His shortest definition for the term is a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time". The book, which became an international bestseller, grew out of an article "The Future as a Way of Life" in Horizon magazine, Summer 1965 issue.[1][2][3][4] The book has sold over 6 million copies and has been widely translated.
Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change overwhelms people. He believed the accelerated rate of technological and social change left people disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation"—future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems are symptoms of future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he popularized the term "information overload."
 
Nostalgia, or Future Shock? ...

Two entirely different things, though future shock can drive one into a pathologically nostalgic state.

Nostalgia can be framed as a positive regard for things known and past, typically circumscribed by the person's experiences.

Future shock, in contrast, is a negative response to things unknown and presumed imminent, typically circumscribed by the person's fevered imagination.

Toffler's book was notably prescient, insofar as it pre-dated even the more speculative projections about the effects of computerization and networking. On the other hand, many of the effects he predicted can be seen as extrapolations from the effects of earlier revolutionary changes (e.g., industrialization).
 
I love delving into the pop culture of the past, my own and other people's, it offers a fascinating context to view the modern world through. But I don't kid myself it was better, or that current pop culture has nothing to offer me, because of course it does, not to get pretentious, the human condition is present even in the ephemera. Life is a river, and those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Which is why there are so many movie remakes and sequels.
 
As a child back in the '60s I was already a big reader and knew a lot beyond what I was taught in school, and I thought a lot too. Frustratingly, if I tried to discuss my thoughts with adults I was told to stop talking rubbish and other kids just stared incomprehensibly.

So... what were these, for my age at least, rather well-informed thoughts?
Some were about the passing of time and the value of first-hand memory.

For a start, I could see that my town was being pulled down and rebuilt around me and that in future people would want to know how it looked before it changed. So someone should record it all for posterity, no matter how run-down and crummy parts of it looked, for future generations.

Was I right? I see a few old photos of my home town posted repeatedly on Facebook to great acclaim, with people commenting that they wished there were lots more. So yeah, I was right.

Then there was my idea that people who remembered significant events were dying off and should be grilled about their lives. I knew men who'd lived through WW2 and even 1 and they'd chat a bit if you listened respectfully, but nobody was much interested because back then, especially in the Vietnam era, war was very much out of fashion.

The women who'd kept things going at home while the men were away in both Wars also had great tales to tell but they were 'only' women and weren't seen as heroines as they are now. So who cared about their stories of hardship and exciting new freedoms?

In the '60s I was conscious that the 1860s were only just out of living memory. My two grandmothers remembered their own grandparents and great-grandparents, who'd've been born in the middle of the 19th century. One gran told me all about a forbear who'd lived from 1830 - seven years before Victoria was crowned! He'd have remembered it! - to 1929. He was a former agricultural worker who'd been made unemployed through mechanisation. That's real social history.

There was also, along with the reconstruction of the town, a sense for me that the new buildings too would be impermanent and would eventually give way to newer ones, during the construction of which we'd see traces of the old. This too came about and was discussed on the town's Facebook pages with much happy reminiscing about the archaic domestic sanitary arrangements that were unearthed and the progress they represented. There's a PhD in there somewhere!

So yeah, while I wouldn't call my thoughts necessarily 'nostalgic' I've always felt that ordinary people's personal experience of the past is undervalued and that we should record and treasure it. Because history, as we know, repeats itself, and we need to remind ourselves how fantastically well-off most of us are compared to our forbears; how hard fought-for our prosperity is; and how easily we could slip back into penury and ill-health.

This is pretty much how I feel about it. I've been haunted less by nostalgia and more by the passage of time.

I don't have any feelings about things having been "better" in some real or abstract way. I believe that things are of their time and change is inevitable, though not necessarily bad. The remembering is important on its own.

I do watch cultural changes with interest and notice how some have profound effects. Some were/are personally meaningful to me, and some things I remember fondly. I try not to fall into the trap of believing things were objectively better back then or are irrevocably lost now.

Trying to capture my "haunted" memories and feelings is what often motivates me to write, paint, draw or take photos.
 
Escargot1, your comments really ring true for me. One of my wife's treasures is her great-grandmother's diaries. Her GGM wrote something every day for years, sometimes her thoughts on world events, but mostly just the minutiae of everyday life. They make fascinating reading, and the continuity of her entries over a long period makes those times come to life. You start to feel that her friends and neighbors are people you have actually met.

Perhaps as you say we owe a debt to the future to record at least some details of our life and times. Just speaking for myself, I guess we get so caught up the day-to-day business of living that the mundane details just don't seem important enough to dwell upon, let alone record. The irony is, those seemingly unimportant details are exactly what folks in the future will find most compelling.

We are acquainted with a woman who works on archaeological sites in northern Peru. She has so little to work with, yet she's trying to reconstruct an entire ancient culture. So much of it is educated guesswork, plus a lot of out-of-thin-air guesswork. It must be frustrating work.

I expect the day will come when archaeologists digging through the strata of our times will wish they had more details to flesh out the general picture. Maybe the things we decide to record will be important, maybe they won't. A lot of it certainly won't survive. I can't help but feel, though, that we should make an effort.
 
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Nostalgia at its most acute will always be bittersweet. As you age, I think you learn to recognise that the times you look upon most fondly are less about the actual events or location, but your reaction to that at the time. One of my most treasured memories is of a "perfect" family Xmas, when I was around ten, I can remember it all in great detail, the fun everyone had (full house, six of us, with many more coming and going), the presents, the weather, the food.. everything. But now, at 50, I also recognise that that year everyone was well, everyone was happy, everyone was still alive.. it was the last time all the people I most cared about in my life at that age were together, and I was safe, happy and had no worries or concerns: and that's what prompts the nostalgia for me, especially knowing now that until I had children of my own no Xmas would ever be as good again.

There's a Japanese phrase: Mono No Aware. It embodies the recognition that all things must change, and that realisation of it is a key to your own happiness. Acknowledging that the spring blossom, summer warmth, autumn colour and winter cold must always pass and that this is an intrinsic part of their beauty is an emotion of its own. Someone described the notion (brilliantly) as looking out at the rain, at dusk, on a long quiet train journey as the leaves are falling.
 
Coincidence that this should be recommended to me on YT. I think it might have a place on this thread.

The novelty of a video camera back in 1987. The strangers being filmed all seem genuinely interested and react in a friendly manner to something that today would be very annoying.

 
These days I regularly experience something that you might call 'future nostalgia'. So, I am experiencing something in the present, but I am simultaneously aware that in the future I will be nostalgic for this time. I feel a sort of squeeze to the heart as we float paper boats in puddles in the park, or see the first tentative yards on a balance bike. It's a very specific feeling but I don't think there's a proper word for it in English.

It's a strange conflation of time - totally rooted in the present, but with its roots in the past (you feel the bones of your own childhood beneath today's skin) and the simultaneous shadow of the future. That thing about knowing how precious it is, that everyone you love is together, safe and well, right now.
 
It's a 'thing' that we, as humans, tend to look back on the past with some undeserved fondness, iirc it's called "rosy retrospection".

I personally think it's part of the way we protect ourselves by forgetting the bad bits. I also suspect it's part of the reason why abuses are so disruptive through life, they interfere with our natural tendency to rose-tint the past, which is part of what keeps us sane and balanced. With nostalgia we focus on what we recall fondly, but a part of normal life often overlooked is forgetting. We need to forget stuff to keep ourselves balanced. Put simply, if we recall with stunning clarity all the crap stuff, it's hard to hang onto the notion that all is well today.

IMO, the mental health problems people with HSAM tend to have, illustrate this. It's hard to forgive and forget when you recall exactly the injustice done to you.

If that seems a drab explanation, I recall aspects of my childhood with some fondness, despite the certain objective knowledge they were for the most part, a living purgatory. Which is odd.
 
These days I regularly experience something that you might call 'future nostalgia'. So, I am experiencing something in the present, but I am simultaneously aware that in the future I will be nostalgic for this time. I feel a sort of squeeze to the heart as we float paper boats in puddles in the park, or see the first tentative yards on a balance bike. It's a very specific feeling but I don't think there's a proper word for it in English.

It's a strange conflation of time - totally rooted in the present, but with its roots in the past (you feel the bones of your own childhood beneath today's skin) and the simultaneous shadow of the future. That thing about knowing how precious it is, that everyone you love is together, safe and well, right now.

Derrida probably has a word for it, but it's been awhile since I've studied him. I do know what you mean, about that particular ache of knowledge. It's another part of what I consider "haunted" feelings. This may not be how most people use the word, but it's the one most apt for me.
 
Derrida probably has a word for it, but it's been awhile since I've studied him. I do know what you mean, about that particular ache of knowledge. It's another part of what I consider "haunted" feelings. This may not be how most people use the word, but it's the one most apt for me.

Yeah well there's all that hauntology stuff, which I'm not really up on, but as far as I know that's more about a disjunction between presence and context. I feel like it might be more of an alienating experience? I've not looked at that stuff for a while though! Might be worth a revisit.
 
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 brylcream 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.
For me, this part is the real attraction of we call nostalgia. The "so near and yet so far"--I was almost there. I have memories of knowing people who lived from the 1910's on into the 20th century, and memories of real places and objects, gradually vanishing, from those days. Of course, some of the material things are still around and seeing them makes me want to have a time machine to be a fly on the wall to observe the actual places and absorb the atmosphere. And vague memories tug at me--I dimly remember a fantastically "modern" Art Deco bus station and a scary Gothic Catholic boy's school in my downtown. I was impressed but what does a three-year -old know about architecture?
Of course, there's a lot of this stuff still around to feed our imaginations. I was a docent in a tour of houses that are presently occupied by history-, and very probably, nostalgia-minded people. It showed in how they furnished the places. Here's one of the first TV's in my town:
sizfairmount day 004crop.jpg
 
These days I regularly experience something that you might call 'future nostalgia'. So, I am experiencing something in the present, but I am simultaneously aware that in the future I will be nostalgic for this time. I feel a sort of squeeze to the heart as we float paper boats in puddles in the park, or see the first tentative yards on a balance bike. It's a very specific feeling but I don't think there's a proper word for it in English.

It's a strange conflation of time - totally rooted in the present, but with its roots in the past (you feel the bones of your own childhood beneath today's skin) and the simultaneous shadow of the future. That thing about knowing how precious it is, that everyone you love is together, safe and well, right now.

That's a feeling I've known well. When my children were small I'd think how lucky I was, and how one day I'd look back on such happy times. Later when things went terribly wrong I found it all the more unfair because I felt I had never taken our happiness for granted. Illogical but there you go.
 
A few thoughts:

- might the speed of current change be going against the rate our species has to adapt to change emotionally? If you were born in 3000 BC, the rate of cultural change was glacial compared to today, where you might go multiple generations without much change in local, fashion, and entertainment. The weird twang of nostalgia might just be the emotional state of the mind looking for continuity but instead getting change on too many fronts at once.

- A strong living in nostalgia, or a strong sense of nostalgia as a foe, strikes me as too strong a response that will cause either purist side to miss out. I think that the best path lies in the middle, where you enjoy those things in the past and make some time to remember it, while you also seek out the new and enjoy that as well in equal measure.
 
Just read this excellent article by Adam Scovell on Derek Jarman's film Jubilee, Scovell is spot on writing about how London has changed for the worse in its insane property prices, and also goes into the occult and subculture of the capital and Jarman's nostalgic hauntological and psychogeographic perspective.

Grieve The Capital: Derek Jarman's Jubilee Turns 40
Adam Scovell ,

February 5th, 2018 09:57
Derek Jarman's film of visionary alchemy and edgeland punks now tells of a time before the gentrification of the capital when occulture and subculture sat side-by-side, says Adam Scovell

Released in Elizabeth II's silver jubilee year of 1978 as a provocation seemingly towards just about everyone, it's little wonder Derek Jarman's second feature film, Jubilee, caused such an uproar. The Queen herself is mugged and killed for her crown early on in a Deptford edgeland, the punk movement still then raging over London is unconsciously sent up by some of the very people who were part of it, and the raw mixture of violence, conservative nostalgia, swipes at Catholicism and copious nudity makes it as anarchic as anything the director made afterwards.

http://thequietus.com/articles/23978-derek-jarman-jubilee-review-anniversary-bfi

The article made me think of this:

''Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present. However, the ghost cannot be properly said to belong to the past. . . . Does then the ‘historical’ person who is identified with the ghost properly belong to the present? Surely not, as the idea of a return from death fractures all traditional conceptions of temporality.''

Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. Buse, P. and Scott, A. (1999)
 
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... 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 the object of our fondness probably never existed in the form that we would experience it. ...

I found this article interesting ... Nowadays we tend to treat 'nostalgia' as a benign attitude toward something past. In the early days of psychiatric interventions, the label denoted a pathological condition that could ruin or end one's life. I can recall running across old allusions to nostalgia that insinuated pathology rather than fond retrospection, but I'm not sure I knew such allusions were based on past medical diagnoses and practices.

The dark history of nostalgia, once a deadly mental illness

Asylums for the psychotic emerged in the 1800s, when it was deemed immoral to simply throw insane people into jails. And among the most serious afflictions in these wards was nostalgia.

"It was once a medical disease that could end fatally," Edward Shorter, a professor of the history of medicine and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, said in an interview.

Today, nostalgia certainly isn't viewed as anything even approximating mental illness. It's thought of as an emotion, a mild, wistful longing for the past that is, in fact, good for you. But in the 1800s, among halls of the hysterical, delusional, and unintelligible, there were those suffering from a homesickness so extreme, it drove them mad. ...

FULL STORY:

https://mashable.com/2018/05/19/nostalgia-deadly-mental-illness/#8bJ7F5tFHuqg (ORIGINAL)

https://www.yahoo.com/news/darker-past-nostalgia-once-deadly-100000922.html (MIRRORED COPY)
 
I’m not sure I bathe in a rosy glow of nostalgia. Sure, the past is a good reference point for education, lost music*, TV shows and political experience but what intrigues me more is the change in self-awareness as I’ve grown older. I realise that as each decade grows to a close, my mindset changes. Sometimes these changes have been brought about by grief or other cathartic circumstances yet, to me, it’s logical that the mindset you have as a twenty-year old isn’t going to be much use when you hit your 40s. Similarly, you need a new mindset in your fifties. So maybe the brain does a general clearout but retains certain memories that made a big difference to your psyche. Smells, colours, media influences stored in a shorthand form ready to be accessed as a security valve should things all get too much.
I’ve often thought of the mind as a very selfish thing and our dreams are a shorthand translation of experience into a simple visual cue to be used in an emergency or stressful situation.
If the past is stored in the mind in this way, it’s a reminder of the conditions of experience you’ve previously put on it to thrive and enjoy life. Any excuse to dredge up these cosy memories are Spangled to the full.

Time’s Arrow. You have the luxury of reflecting on a time when everything was good if you’re in a comfortable position now. As a kid, uncertainties were ironed out by parental responsibilities.

Anyway, I’m rambling now.

*Accept that some of it WAS much better.
 
Elsewhere, I think, we have threads on "hauntology." It can be rooted in popular culture of the sixties and seventies, though it should not be limited to that!

It's not exactly yearning for a lost world where things were right.

I was thinking of starting a Present Tense thread, where we could expand on those rare moments when we dared to feel entirely at home in the world! :loveu:
 
Elsewhere, I think, we have threads on "hauntology." It can be rooted in popular culture of the sixties and seventies, though it should not be limited to that!

It's not exactly yearning for a lost world where things were right.

I was thinking of starting a Present Tense thread, where we could expand on those rare moments when we dared to feel entirely at home in the world! :loveu:

The weird thing about the present is when you notice you're in it, it's become the past.
 
I can't pretend that I can put together a reply as eloquent as Yithian's opening post or the replies that have followed it, but here's my simple take on the matter.

I don't yearn for the past necessarily, but I often find myself wishing I had more time. I've become acutely aware in recent months of how we don't always have as much time as we think, and for several reasons that scares me. A few years ago I sometimes wished that I could go back to my early twenties and start over... not to do things differently, but so that I could appreciate the things I have done, and the people I've done them with, more.

I love watching things from my childhood - late 70s and 80s - because I have a fond appreciation of the technology of that era. Digital television doesn't hold any interest for me, but find me a website showing old regional television idents, or explaining how teletext works, or analogue transmissions, and I'll be in my element.*

I'm a huge fan of 80s music, and with the exception of a few groups I do have the "music was better in my day" mindset. Because it just was. :D But I also find myself thoroughly liking certain music that was around when I was younger, which I didn't care for at the time. I think sometimes it just wasn't the right 'time' for me to get into a particular group.

But... if you were to give me the choice of going back to a time, it wouldn't be my childhood, or indeed any era that I've actually lived through. I would choose to go back to the Sixties. Not, I might add, for the oh-so-common "Beatles/Swinging Sixties" reasons, but because I love the simplicity of that time, and that is something I hanker after.

I watch old British films from that time (I'm much more fond of them than I am of today's movies) and I love the apparent simplicity depicted; before the days of 'political correctness gone mad' and the internet and mobile phones and constant noise - and I also yearn for the lack of visual noise - for example the simplicity of the road layouts - not cluttered with a ghastly assortment of signs and paint like they are nowadays, but clean, open, beautiful.

And I lament the amount of beautifully-architectured houses that are left to go to ruin or pulled down when there's nothing actually wrong with them, only to be replaced with modern monstrosities, matchbox houses with no soul or appeal. I fear that in future there will come a time when all houses beyond a certain time-frame will have disappeared and that, to me, is as tragic as the death of the last person who fought in WW2, or the last person to have been born in the 1800s, or any similar such end-of-era events.


*But I haven't failed to notice the curious juxtaposition in the fact that I am using today's technology in order to access the things I love so much from the past.
 
...I also yearn for the lack of visual noise - for example the simplicity of the road layouts - not cluttered with a ghastly assortment of signs and paint like they are nowadays, but clean, open, beautiful.

I recently posted a video in the Non-Fortean Films thread about Akira Kurosawa's use of camera movement. In one part the narrator compares a scene in a modern film (Avengers, I think) to a scene with a similar narrative purpose (to emphaise the enormity of the battle ahead and the resolve of the protagonists, or something like that). The modern film has Samuel L Jackson endlessly gibbering and cameras pointlessly drifting across faces for identical reaction shots. Kurosawa's scene, in contrast, is wordless, but it conveys the mood much more deeply through the employment of action and physical movement--stationary figures on a stationary space station simply are not memorable.

And this isn't just a matter of variations in direction. Our songs, movies and plays have become more prolix while somehow managing to convey less to their audiences. I think somehow that people are following the trend.

That must feed into nostalgia. I am a very 'verbal' person--perhaps long-winded at times--but I know when silence speaks louder than words and when showing is more effective than explaining. With the degeneration of storytelling skills (skills far beyond mere speech), the public loses the ability to conceptualise their own lives and communicate the meaning of their gestures to others. This strikes at the fundaments of the human experience and leaves us bereft of meaningful connections with out peers. I've read a fair amount of 'Imperial/colonial' correspondence, and even in a style that has been parodied as taut, emotionally repressed and excessively socially conscious, authors manage to convey the tenor of the historic events they are caught up in with allusion, litotes and irony that does not eat away at the word count (which was often limited owing to the medium of transmission). These are not writing skills, they are tactics for life.

This essay by Walter Benjamin was highly influential on my thought:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...FjAAegQIBxAB&usg=AOvVaw0t7hpffKE7j0Jjr5m8fxZ9

Edit: wrong kind of stationery/stationary
 
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