For the Time Being: Reflections on Life and aging: Nostalgia
Is nostalgia a comfort in old age, or does it have the potential to invoke a longing for something no longer attainable?
Do you ever feel nostalgic? Just what is nostalgia, and is it something we can feel at any age?
Last week, I had to go into the loft for something. It doesn’t qualify as an attic because it is accessed by a drop-down ladder rather than a proper staircase, but it is a rather large space. Which is just as well, as Mr C is a veteran hoarder. Here, the story of his long life lies haphazardly in piles of books; battered briefcases brimming with dog-eared papers; stacks of LPs; once-loved, now moth-eaten winter coats; old photographs that deserve a better home than a dilapidated cardboard box….you get the picture. Fighting for air in one small corner amongst all of this is a medium-sized box in which I keep family photograph albums and a few old photo frames. I was looking for a frame for a new photo that my daughter had sent me. As I dug deep, I came across two small, green boxes, each containing a pair of tiny shoes. One red, one blue, both scuffed, well worn. These were the shoes in which each of my babies turned into toddlers, took their first tentative steps into the world, learned to explore streets and gardens and parks. I was immediately transported to another time, another world — to a feeling of overwhelming love for that newly-upright little person. I remembered how uncommonly proud I was of their actually quite commonplace achievement. Still smiling to myself, I found the photo frame I’d come for and came back down the ladder, reminding myself that as lunch was on the table, this was not the time to berate Mr C about the state of affairs above our heads. I had enjoyed my brief moment of nostalgia though.
I reflect: what exactly is nostalgia? Is it a positive emotion, engendered by happy memories, or does it arouse feelings of dissatisfaction: a sense that where we have come from was better than where we are now — that we will never have it so good again? In this article I want to explore the nature of nostalgia, and reflect on where it fits in to life as we age.
Nostalgia as a painful experience
First, how do we define nostalgia? The term was coined in the 17th century from the Greek “nostós”: coming home, and “álgos” pain, to describe the debilitating and even life-threatening anxieties experienced by Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home; they were homesick. For centuries it was viewed as having a negative psychological effect; an indulgence to be avoided if emotional equilibrium was to be maintained.
Homesickness seems to be at the heart of the Welsh word hiraeth (pronounced here-eye-th) too. The word has no equivalent in English, but means a yearning for something no longer attainable: a homesickness, both literal and metaphorical. It is the longing for the land of Wales: its mountains, its rocks, its rivers, its lakes, its past, and is often used in the context of the mass emigration from Wales at the turn of the nineteenth century and during the Great Depression of the 1920s. Descendants of those migrants, many of them in the USA and Argentina, still claim to feel hiraeth. I am not a Welsh speaker, but the word seems to me to be steeped in melancholy, as if the invocation of the beauty of the Welsh landscape can bring a sorrow that will be eased only by returning to the land. As a line in the beautiful song “We’ll keep a welcome in the hillside” goes:
“We’ll kiss away each hour of hiraeth
When you return once again to Wales”.
This bitter-sweet, sentimental longing for the past can arouse very negative feelings; if we believe that our past was a paradise to which we can never return, what does that tell us about our life in the present and in the future?
“The past is always well remembered”
When I look at those little shoes, I wonder if nostalgia is a form of self-deception. The hard bits of parenting don’t come to mind — the sleepless nights, the endless round of nappy changing, soaking, washing and drying (no disposables in my day) or not being able to go to the loo without a tiny someone tapping on the door demanding my attention. If ever I find myself getting a tad too sentimental about those days, I always call up those memories. But this requires a conscious effort; I have to overcome the cognitive bias that psychologists call ‘rosy retrospection’ if I want to bring some reality into the mix. The Romans understood this tendency to look back in wonder at our past: “memoria praeteritorum bonorum”: the past is always well remembered.
Is that such a bad thing? If we see the past in a rosy glow, might that not help us to be more positive about our present and our future? Taylor & Routledge (2020) argue that nostalgia increases general well-being, citing many studies indicating that people are more optimistic about their future when they recount events from their past: “nostalgia doesn’t just make people feel inspired. It drives them to act on that inspiration.” The conclusion from their review of recent literature is that when we engage in nostalgic reflection, we are not so much hiding in the past, as accessing meaningful memories in order to approach the future with renewed purpose. Looking back on something that we remember as being desirable in our past can inspire us to recreate it in our present. This makes me think about going back into the loft and rooting out that size 8 1970s skirt and top and staring at it, long and hard.
Looking forward to looking back
Why did I keep that outfit, those shoes? Because, at some moment in my past, I made a conscious decision to lay down future memories. In that moment, when my present was 1984, I was imagining a future time when my youthful figure and my toddlers would be things of the past. This interplay between past, present and future fascinates me, and I am sure I will return to it again. Dr WingWee Cheung of Winchester University and others call this ‘looking forward to looking back’. They describe the new construct of anticipated nostalgia: for example, we take photographs of our wedding because we expect to look back fondly on that day in years to come. We buy holiday souvenirs so that in future years they will invoke memories of the places we have visited. We are consciously creating our future nostalgia. For me, this notion blurs the distinction between past, present and future, for nostalgia is actually rooted in the present; it is in the here and now that we sow the seeds of nostalgia for the past, to which we will return in the future.
As an aside, I find myself wondering how we will look back in decades to come on this year, 2020 — the year the people stayed home, had their plans cancelled, were forced to work from home while looking after their children who were not in school, were unable to visit their loved ones, even those in hospital. So much is being documented about this time, from individual social media pages to medical and sociological research, from newspaper articles to TV documentaries. How will the people remember? How will the creative arts record these days for posterity? I hope I live long enough to find out. For many, the memories of this time will for ever be characterised by loss and grief, fear and anxiety. For others, it is turning out to be a time of recalibration as they begin to question their hitherto hectic lifestyles. Will we, in the end, sift out the fear, the boredom, the hardship of this time and view it in a positive light? The recent Victory in Europe (VE) celebrations give me reason to think that we might. Despite the appalling destruction and devastating loss of life over six long years, the celebrations had an air of nostalgia about them: the songs, the speeches, the community spirit — these were great, and they are what the people remember.
And yet, only a small number of people who can remember the war are still alive in 2020. So where does the nostalgia come from? I was born four years after the end of the World War II, and sometimes I think I am nostalgic for the 1940s. Maybe it is my parents’ referred nostalgia — the intensity of their lives during that time seeping into my subconscious. Mr C, born just before the outbreak of war, spent the first six years of his life alone with his mother, torn apart from the father who would not return from his overseas posting until one year after the war ended. He has few actual memories of those years but has a huge emotional investment in them. Is that nostalgia? Do you think we can feel nostalgic for something that we didn’t even experience, or of which we have no memory? And if so, I wonder if it is a relatively new phenomenon, made possible over the last century by media technology, from period dramas on our screens to any number of newsreels, advertisements, songs and photos from decades past, all quickly accessible through our search engines. We can create our own nostalgic experience any time we want. And as it isn’t possible to go back to a time that we actually did inhabit, we might just as well yearn for a time that we never even lived through. If we romanticise about the good old days, the days of rationing and air raids and the smell of death, the days before penicillin and central heating and universal suffrage, are we deluding ourselves?
Why, for example, are vintage cars so desirable when without satnav you’d get hopelessly lost, on a hot day both you and the engine would overheat and in winter you’d need three layers of insulation to avoid hypothermia? Boris Johnson apparently plays tennis with a wooden racket. Enough said.
Conscious or unconscious nostalgia?
When we look up an old TV commercial on YouTube, or bring out the box of baby memorabilia years, even decades, after that baby has left home, we are engaging in a conscious process. But surely nostalgia is not like a salt cellar that we can turn to, when we feel like enhancing the of flavour to our lives. It is something deep within our subconscious, not called up on a whim but catching us unawares. How often have you found yourself thinking of some past experience because of a sound, a scent, a taste? In “Remembrance of Things Past” Marcel Proust is transported to a moment in his childhood by the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea. For him, it is the emotion that is profound rather than the memory, which returns to him more slowly, more consciously, as a result of the powerful feeling invoked by a long-forgotten taste. Just one moment in a childhood barely remembered, but intensely felt.
“the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest”.
My own “madeleine moment” comes to me on a late summer morning, when the air is heavy with the promise of autumn. Both my babies were born in the last quarter of the year and on such mornings, I experience a strong sense of what I must have felt then, and it is almost impossible to put into words. Joyous anticipation, a hint of apprehension. The promise of new beginnings, even as the year turns towards its end. That irony never escapes me.
Which brings me back to those shoes in the attic. Do they make me a nostalgic person? I actually think that I am more inclined to live in the present than the past, and what I can say for certain is that from the day they were born my children have always been at the age at which I have loved them the most, and they still are. And yet the past is there, a much bigger part of my life now than the future can possibly be. I appreciate it, but I value the present more, because the time being is the one certainty I have. And the future? It is in relatively short supply now, but I hope that there is enough of it left to lay down more happy memories, even when I am too old to climb that stepladder to the loft.
In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge awakes from his final visitation from the spirit of Christmas yet to come, having encountered the ghosts of Christmases past and present, he declares:
“I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future. The spirits of all three will strive within me.”
I’ll go for that.
