1. Modernity & Nostalgia
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.
Marshall Berman
In Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Mark Fisher claims that our current moment is in the grip of a "formal nostalgia". And in our nostalgia, "there's an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present". Or worse, that "there is no present to grasp and articulate any more.”
Nostalgia is the modern relationship to time. Unconcerned with building things that last, the logic of our culture has created a world we cannot trust. An object of nostalgic reflection contains within it something that lives beyond itself. So, if our culture is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, it is because we long for eternity and to belong to it.
Living on the precipice of destruction, we call for the comfort and safety of guarantees. We reach out to the past so that we can have something to hold on to. Nostalgia is a longing for something that will last.
This is why we feel nostalgic when we watch films or listen to music with the setting and sounds of a time we never lived in. That setting and sound are local and time-bound. They are grounded. They are in the world. They are, therefore, human. By speaking of itself and its particularity, it speaks universally because it captures the human spirit. And spirit is eternal.
Nostalgia is our soul journeying through time, seeking the place where it is spoken to. So, we feel it and we miss it.
2. Our Need for Home
If nostalgia is our modern condition, it tells us that we don’t feel at home in the world. In Ancient Greece, nostalgia referenced homesickness. It is both present and future-oriented. It belongs to a wistfulness that longs for the past and the desperation and hurry towards a better future. We long for home because we belong there. Our ultimate longing is to belong.
Nostalgia is our soul’s search for a home. It directs our energy towards those moments of deep intimacy with the world. Nostalgia is the feeling of the part of us that wants to live. It is a call to consciousness. What we hear is, “Will you take me back there?” What is meant is, “Will you find me somewhere like this?
Anthony Esolen writes that this leaves us in a difficult place. The problem he sees is that most of us are “unwilling to endure the confusion of the battle” which would establish our home. For Esolen, home is internal and communal order. We resist this restoration because it is difficult. But what we are left with is “confusion worse than death.” What we are left with is questions.
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves...Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
R.M. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Nostalgia is both the question and the beginning of an answer. Overcoming nostalgia involves learning to endure the chaos and disorder of confusion - questions - to arrive at orderliness and belonging in the resolution of a realisation and our arrival home on this earth and within ourselves.
Nostalgia is a promise that, if we’re courageous enough, life could be something else entirely. It could feel like this. To fall in love for the first time with every moment. To feel the depth of the everyday. To see our fate in the fleeting. To hold that hand, whose homeliness claimed our souls, and never let it go.
3. Rethinking Nostalgia
In Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, David Whyte re-writes the story of nostalgia:
Nostalgia is the arriving waveform of a dynamic past, newly remembered and about to be re-imagined by a mind and a body at last ready to come to terms with what actually occurred.
Close to grief and regret, nostalgia catches us in a cycle of loss and return. Between the wish to forget and the need to remember, to understand - to know what that was.
Although it throws us backwards, nostalgia is ultimately about our destiny. Nostalgia is a question that asks us where we belong. A natural reminder to make sure that we're not lost. Or maybe, to rescue some part of ourselves that’s been left in the past and needs to be brought back with us.
Nostalgia subverts the present by its overwhelming physical connection to a person or a place - to a time in which we lived or to a person with whom we lived - making us wonder, in the meeting of past and present, if the intervening years ever occurred. Nostalgia can feel like an indulgence, a sickness, an inundation by forces beyond us, but strangely, forces that have always lived with us and within.
David Whyte, Consolations
Nostalgia is the revelation that our lives are always beyond us in some way and, at the same time, always still happening within us. This is a confusing sentiment that is neatly expressed by Mary Oliver in When Did It Happen?:
When did it happen?
"It was a long time ago."
Where did it happen?
"It was far away."
No, tell. Where did it happen?
"In my heart."
What is your heart doing now?
"Remembering. Remembering!"
Mary Oliver, When Did it Happen?
For David Whyte, nostalgia is not a fantasy about a time not fully lived or a possible future carelessly thrown away by something unimportant. It’s no indulgence. Instead, it is experiencing for the first time something that we were not ready to experience when it first happened. It is a happening, not a remembering.
Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together by the way we have remembered: something we thought we understood but that we are now about to fully understand, something already lived but not fully lived, issuing not from our future but from something already experienced; something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough, something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused.
David Whyte, Consolations
Hoping to avoid nostalgia is like trying to avoid regret; an impossibility, because it surprises us. An inevitable consequence of having lived a question we could not answer, nostalgia is the cruel tragedy, and the blessing, of awakening.
Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past; nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end.
David Whyte, Consolations
Even though nostalgia threatens us by presenting an alternative ending, one more vital and attractive than our present. Or gives us the sense that what was could have been so much more. It does not ask us to resurrect the past. Rather, it wants us to notice its death.
Nostalgia is a nudge from the story that was written for you, which you denied because it was too painful or too beautiful, asking you to return to it and nurture it. To become who you are.
Perhaps, the trick is to understand that this moment may one day be the object of nostalgia, and to grow closer to it and love it for what is hidden. Not something that’s lost, but something to be gifted to us when we’re ready for it.
That is home.