Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a remarkable thing. It transforms the past, even the mundane, and makes it mysteriously perfect, beautiful and, dare I say, even sacred. And, of course, painful. Like much of what we consider an essential part of humanness (art, consciousness, etc), nostalgia is as awesome as it is absolutely pointless, which makes it all the more awesome. This paradoxical nature is not exclusive to human attributes and activities; it arguably extends to the very existence of the universe: pointless, but awesome. If you've read some of my previous posts you'll know that I relish this sort of paradoxes. I like to think of them as provisional truths, as stepping stones. They're true as far as they go, but they only go so far.

But I digress. Going back to nostalgia, one cannot fail to notice another paradoxical aspect of it, which is that the past that now seems wonderful, didn't feel so wonderful when it was the present. Much the same occurs with places. When I think of Varanasi my heart yearns to return to what it remembers as an ancient and magical city where the divine was almost palpable. However, my mind knows that the last time I was there I got fed up with it very quickly, to the point that I decided to shorten my stay in India by a couple of months. There are plenty of reasons why one would be fed up with a place like Varanasi. At the time what frustrated me the most was the fact that all the fellow travellers I met were into far-out New Age stuff, conspiracy theories, or some other kind of nonsense. I couldn't seem to meet anyone from whom I didn't have to conceal my beliefs — or, mostly, lack thereof — if I was to have a friendly conversation with them. You would think that after three prior trips to India I would have had the wit to adjust my expectations, but that is what nostalgia does to you. It makes you forget, idealise, romanticise. And even now as I write this, I can't think of many things more enticing than a trip back to India.

The lesson we might extract from this is that, contrary to what our heart would have us believe, there is nothing special about the past and all those places we now miss. Whenever we are beset by nostalgia we can remind ourselves that when the past was present it didn't feel special; if it feels special now it's only because we are idealising it. This sobering thought can sometimes come as a breath of fresh air for people of a romantic temperament like myself. In my case, however, my longing tends to be more geographical than temporal: I miss places more than I miss the past. Seemingly random images of places that, for some reason or other, are dear to me, unexpectedly crop up in my mind with such frequency that I don't give it much attention any more, but, as soon as I do, the unbidden memories become more and more vivid, something inside my chest turns breathing into an activity that requires a conscious effort, and then all I want is to be somewhere else, thousands of miles away. When that happens I often allow myself to drift into nostalgia, as there usually is something beautiful and poetic about it, but when it simply hurts and there is nothing positive about it, I might choose to "dispel the illusion" — or at least try — reminding myself that when I was in those places that I now miss, I often dreamed of being exactly where I am now.

That's one way of looking at it: nostalgia as a kind of cognitive distortion. But there is a much more interesting side to it. Nostalgia has the power to instil beauty and emotional depth into anything it touches, typically, as I've already said, the past or places we've been to, but also experiences we've never had, times when we weren't born yet, and places unknown to us. We would normally call that "longing", but it feels so similar to nostalgia that arguably the difference is merely conceptual, not experiential. Nostalgia is, by definition, about experiences we've actually had, while longing is about experiences we haven't had. Now, can you imagine a kind of emotion, akin to nostalgia and longing, were the object is not experiences that we've had or haven't had, but the experiences we are having right now? In other words, is there any way we instil that mysterious beauty and depth to the here are now? I think we can. How? Read on.

I said above that one way to deflate a bubble of nostalgia is to remind oneself that when the past was present there was nothing great about it, so there is nothing to miss. But we can flip that around and, instead of arguing against the specialness of the past, accept that it is indeed special, and then remind ourselves that the present will one day be the past, and that we will then miss it in the same way that we now miss what from our standpoint is the past. In all likelihood the world in the year 2010 will in 2060 look to us as charming as the world in the year 1970 looks to us now. Think of all those daily things we take for granted or positively dislike: high-street shops, the carpet in your doctor's waiting room, the design of cars and buses, the current state of technology in laptops, mobile phones and various other gadgets, commercial pop music, chavs, petrol stations, buildings from the eighties, video games, the economic downturn. All those things will appear incredibly charming in a hundred years' time. Imagine you could travel back in time to 1969, 1936, or any other time you chose, and just walk around the streets. How would that make you feel? How would you perceive things? Think of the shops, the way people dressed, the cars, the news on the radio, the music people listened to, how they spoke, the latest fashion at the time. I'm sure your mind would be filled with intensely vivid perceptions of all those little things that everyone else took for granted, and that you would bubble over with feelings of excitement, appreciation and affection.

I would like to suggest that we can look at our present world through the same lens, reminding ourselves that a lot of the ordinary objects that we now use will one day be collectibles, that contemporary Ikea furniture will be sold in antique shops, that Eastenders will be the subject of PhD theses, that in a few decades' time there will be a self-conscious revival of the fashion we now take for granted, that the cars that spoil the otherwise perfect photograph of an ancient monument will appear suitably ancient and picturesque to our grandchildren. Hopefully that will transfigure our here and now, if only for a fleeting few minutes, in the same way that nostalgia transfigures the past, only in a more joyous way, for the present is here for us to revel in. This will not change your life — if it does, please, let me know! — but it's an interesting experiment nevertheless.