Nostalgia. It's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, "nostalgia" literally means "the pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel. It's called the Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved. -- Don Draper
I write a great deal on here about nostalgia. I guess you'd expect that from someone who's, at heart, a historian. Sometimes nostalgia is welcome. Other times, it's as welcome as neuralgia. But, despite your best efforts, it'll still come up and whack you in the knee and leave you in the floor in tears. And, often, when you least need it. It doesn't have to be anything that big, either: just a word someone says, or a whiff of some kind of food you haven't had in years, or hearing a song.
This happened to me last Thursday. Hubby and I were watching The Office, as we normally do, and last week's was a clip show. Near the end, there was a montage of clips chronicling the romance between Jim and Pam, backed by the song "Sing" by Travis (which was played during a Season Two episode, before Jim and Pam became a couple, as they listened to it together on an iPod in a quietly sweet little scene). It's a slow, sweet song, the kind of song you fall in love to when you're in your twenties. It haunted me the first time I saw that episode, and it was the backing track during the whole two- or three-minute montage during the clip show as you followed all those years of the relationship, all the ups and downs, on through the wedding, as Pam and Jim go from a couple of smitten twentysomethings to a married couple with a baby on the way.
I know how silly it is for those kinds of things to make me get misty-eyed. But, though I'm hard-boiled cynical, I can still be a marshmallow inside, and it made me think of the last decade and all the things hubby and I have been through together -- how our relationship grew from something kind of goofy into something strong and really special, how (like Pam) I went from being shy and somewhat inhibited and not terribly self-confident into someone who's grown up a little more and become a little more assertive (or, in my case, at least a little less inhibited and good at least at acting self-confident at the right times), and all the moments we've shared together, the little everyday moments that, when we look back, we didn't realize when they happened just how special they were. But we shared them as we built the life we have together. Then one day, you get the pictures out, or tell the stories, and you realize just how big those little moments were. It's like your very own three-minute montage set to music, as you realize all those "ordinary" moments added up to an awful lot that was, and is, special.
The next morning, as "Sing" still echoed in my head, I couldn't help thinking of Don Draper's pitch for the Kodak Carousel. The pictures in your head are like those slides in the projector, and your mind is a time machine. It does, indeed, take you back to a place you ache to go again. And it makes you wish that, at certain moments, you'd have appreciated them more than you did when they happened. On the other hand, you wonder if they'd mean as much now if you had. Maybe when you're in the moment, you're too close to appreciate it...and perhaps, like certain spirits, it has to age a bit.
But, at the same time, you must keep in mind the folly of nostalgia...its sepia tones are very good at making you forget all the rotten things that went along with the times you remember. It's the Horace Ford syndrome, and part of why, the older I get, the more I sort of hate nostalgia. Yes, I think back to those special moments, and how I'd love to re-live some of those feelings from back then. But the more I think about it, some of them took place in some really rotten circumstances. I wouldn't, for instance, want to go back and live where we lived then, or deal with some of the background stresses and uncertainties. Certainly not when what I live in now is pretty darn good.
Nostalgia. It's delicate, but potent. And dangerous. It's fun to take the memories out every once in a while, but do it too much and you miss the wonder around you now. That's a lesson I really need to remember more than I sometimes do.
Comments