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When We Remember 2015, What Will Evoke Our Nostalgia?
I’m so prone to nostalgia, and so aware that I’m prone to it, that I’ve in the past sent notes to my future self to correct my tendency for emotional historical revisionism. I was prompted to search for one of these after seeing a photo of an old flame’s high school yearbook on Facebook — which filled me with nostalgia — and, to my amazement, I found the very note. It was stuffed in a pile of papers in my attic, and had somehow survived more than 30 years of my peripatetic wanderings.
Any historian would be satisfied, based on this documentary evidence, that I should not have felt nostalgic. I was in fact miserable after we split up. I made a point of explicitly recording this. I strongly suspected that one day I’d be wistful about the whole business. This thought infuriated me, given that I was sure the experience merited no such sentiment. The note from Claire-of-yore to Claire-of-now is as clear as it gets: “However you’re tempted to remember this, don’t kid yourself: You didn’t enjoy this at all.”
Didn’t help. Looking at my own handwriting made me nostalgic. Finding that notebook in my attic made me nostalgic. Reexamining my memories of a period that I know for a fact I didn’t enjoy — it’s documented! — made me laugh with nostalgia and wistfulness. So obviously, no matter how awful I feel about any experience, I’ll one day be nostalgic about it; and given this propensity, it struck me: it’s just inevitable that one day I’ll be terribly nostalgic for 2015. Can’t be helped, no use fighting it, I just will be.
And so, probably, will you.
Now, the odd thing about nostalgia, is that it can’t be conjured up for the present and can scarcely even be imagined. So I’m looking around me and thinking, “nostalgic for what?” I know it will be something, but what? What do you imagine we’ll all one day feel nostalgic about?
What sights and sounds and smells and characteristic signs of our times do you reckon will one day evoke that aching yearning for the past — however lousy, degraded, and meretricious they seem to us now? What will come to look to us touchingly old-fashioned? What lousy 2015 brands will bring back floods of memories? What objects that now seem common as dirt will one day be our treasured antiques and collectors’ items?
And do you think it’s possible that we’ll one day remember Caitlyn Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair the way we now remember Captain Stubing on the Love Boat?
Published in Culture, General
Yes, it’s usually called something like a “bittersweet” emotion (words are so inadequate for describing emotions, aren’t they?) … and the bitter part can overpower the sweet. I think that’s why I decided to look for that note: I knew I was having an experience in my mind that was — well, not painful, but that it was a deceptive sense of yearning, or an ache that did not correspond to the truth — and I wanted to remind myself that whatever I was remembering I had not experienced as I was remembering it.
I’m not sure why you describe your reaction to loss as “disordered.” Perhaps it is not “typical,” but surely what you say is true: loss is a cataclysm, and rather a vivid reminder of the thing most of us spend most of our emotional energy trying to forget: It will happen to us, too.
You are far from alone in this:
Last year my wife and I unearthed bins of packed away baby things, and toddler things, and toys the kids had long abandoned. I tried to help her sort them and price them for an upcoming church garage sale. I could do it for maybe an hour, then I had to quit.
I tried to sleep that night, but I swear I was watching an instant replay of every moment since we found out my wife was pregnant with #1 (we have 4), and I sat up in bed bawling. Handling those close that had once encased my infants, smelling their smells, hearing their rustle, and moreover hearing the old noises of the toys…
I’ll miss the university as a place where people could discuss ideas and could disagree without rancor.
Claire, you were away from Rico when i put up this, but nostalgia and old memories can resurface in the weirdest of ways at times:
http://ricochet.com/archives/the-places-that-haunt-us/
In 2015.
I saw a man standing on the corner and he said he was a lamppost. So we called him a lamppost.
Next to him was a woman who claimed she was a Gurnsey Cow. So we called her a Gurnsey Cow.
Another caucasian woman said she was not caucasian, but negro–culturally at least. So we called her a negro.
There was a man. He was a man indeed. However he felt he was a woman inside so a doctor changed his outside to match how he felt inside.
And then the man who would let us keep our health care. And the woman who was named after Edmund Hillary.
As an infant adoptee, I’ve come to accept that some things come with that territory, too: attachment disorders, separation anxiety, all that stuff. So yeah, between that and the birth brother suicide and family history of depression generally, if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that my brain doesn’t work correctly.
It’s OK. It’s one of those things that gets much easier just by admitting it.
Like everyone else, I used to think my inner experience was unique. Then I saw What Dreams May Come, which you might think would be an extremely dangerous film for a depressive to see, and it probably is. But my reaction was more along the lines of triumphant recognition: yes! That’s what it looks like in here!
To try to bring this back home: for me, part of nostalgia’s charm is not knowing what I’ll be nostalgic about. Nostalgia is a wrapped present, waiting for the morning.
I do have some fun even now with being a southern Hoosier: “Suckin’ on a chili dog, outside the Tasty-Freeze…” in John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” refers to a tiny ice cream stand maybe three miles from where I grew up. Watch his “Crumbling Walls” video, and picture an 18-year-old me about 100 feet away, outside the IU auditorium where it was filmed. :-)
Claire and all,
Nostalgia can be a most dangerous thing. It lures us into a romantic past that never was. Satisfied with this illusory golden age we accept anything even our own death. Then something or someone jolts us. We are frustrated at first with this irritant that won’t leave us alone to die in peace. Then it comes back to us, duty, purpose, honor.
No matter what the odds we must get back into the fight. Gd has given us special talents and knowledge. We can use them to bask in an easy glory or to perform to our very limit and beyond. If we need a miracle then we shall have it.
Who were these happy pioneers? Stopped by the side of the road they asked a total stranger to snap the photo. Full of new life and the joy of a country full of freedom. Does it really matter? I think that this time when I look at the old photo I haven’t the slightest idea who they were. They are safe in heaven as they so deserve to be.
Gd wants to know what I am doing on this earth while I have the chance. So far I have an incomplete for my grade. I must rally and turn in my assignment on time in this world not the next no matter the odds.
For you see Gd made heaven & earth and he made the odds too.
Regards,
Jim
How very Claire-voyant of you.
-E
No matter your faith or lack of, someone shared an old book with me recently written in 1950 called: Faith Can Master Fear by G. Ernest Thomas, found all dusty in an old book store. Everyone feels nostalgia whether good or not, but he has a chapter called “Fear of the Past”. For those that struggle with the present, or feel stuck, this chapter helps brings clarity – it can be gotten for pennies from Amazon. I think it is a great book for the present day. We all have our crosses to bear – no one is alone – we’re all a work in progress – God Bless.
Well, perhaps you can look at that photo without nostalgia. I can’t.
I really like this post.
I do try very hard to think about the present being the “good old days,” because it truly is. It’s also true that we’re living in dark times, in that the consequences of the Obama administration are going to be, and already are, dire. But, we will get through it as best we can, and life will go on. I imagine we’re living in a time analogous to the 1930s, when there was a Great Depression followed by a world war. Even though that was, I have to imagine, a very rough time to be alive, I think about it fondly because I see it as the origin of the age into which I was born (post World War II/Cold War late 20th century).
I think one thing that I will look back on with nostalgia is Skyping my family. We live in Texas, while our families are in Ohio and Connecticut. The first time we Skyped with my family, it was like the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I joked about it by acting emotionally dead like Dave in the movie. I imagine that kind of teleconferencing will seem antiquated before long (maybe it already is).
Sometimes, I do the opposite of nostalgia. I try to take myself back about thirty years, so that I will see 2015 as the strange, alien world of tomorrow that it is, with its “Internet” and “cell phones” and “GPS,” and try not to be disappointed that the sky isn’t full of flying cars from Blade Runner.
That would be the 1950’s, I believe. I miss it, too.
I have four as well. I see photos of them as toddlers and remember how much I loved them as toddlers – running in the door from work to pick them up and play with them.
The pictures tell me those people are gone. I can’t find them.
Sure I love them as adults too, but the little toddlers so full of wonder and who thought I was more than I am, are not here.
I wish I could find them again.
I feel like I need a shot just typing these words out.
Thanks a lot, Claire.
To Skipsul and Tommy DeSeno and all other dads on this post – the emotions you expressed here, thinking back to your children when they were so small and thought you “were bigger than you were”, I hope will call you on Father’s Day and any day and tell you what wonderful dads you are. Someone I know who works in a child support enforcement division is full of stories on the contrary – Thank you for elevating love of children and family where so many are bailing on both. Your jobs are not easy at times, but more important than ever. Have a wonderful Father’s Day!
Having to steer a car that does not drive itself.
Being able to step out of the house without being photographed or having every second recorded.
This 18 years ago:
Aw geez, Tommy. You’re killing me.