Sorry, bad joke. Actually, nostalgia is a fascinating subject, because its possible to find oneself being nostalgic about the strangest of things. This time of year in particular, early September, seems to bring it out very strongly. I think it’s probably connected, among other things, with ingrained memories of going back to school. The long summer holidays are finally over, autumn has definitely started, and along with it the new school year, which always brought its own sense of excitement, but also tinged with sadness, of course.
Yesterday I took a walk down to a local nature reserve, a patch of ancient woodland and streams in the middle of the suburbs, a place I’ve known all my life, and which is full of memories. One in particular was in my mind, namely, going there with my family just before starting secondary school, when I was 11. Afterwards we went to a nearby pub for scampi and chips, which I remember quite distinctly, and in fact, whenever I think of, or hear of, scampi and chips, I always think of that occasion, and all its memories come flooding back, which were mostly ones of pretty major trepidation at being sent away from home for the first time. But here’s the odd thing about nostalgia, and how it works, because, although I know full well that at the time, I was not at all happy, when I think back to it, I think of it as a happy memory. That’s the best way I can put it, anyway, though it doesn’t quite do it justice.
I have no sentimental longing or wistful affection for a period in the past, although the speed at which my age is progressing seems to grow as we go on, and with it, a suspicion that the end of my life as I know it is approaching. Of course, we don’t know what is in store for us in this life or a possible next. We know that time has passed, mistakes were made that we can’t rectify, chances were not used, and yet, things have turned out reasonably okay. That is why nostalgia and resentment seem to be a waste of time.
I had a childhood in which I was continually being taken out of the surroundings I had come to terms with. My father was in the army, and we moved about quite a lot. I visited about eight schools in ten years – in the last one, I was known for my truancy. I went through two jobs, then joined the army, and when I finished, I stayed in Germany. I married a local girl. I came to terms with it, but I was so used to moving on that staying in one place for longer than four years was a novelty.
If anything, I am sorry that my son’s development coincided with my changing professions and that I wasn’t attentive enough. He’s 42 now, and we have a good relationship, so it was a missed chance that is now gone. I once went through a depressive period, and my mind was fixated on the past, trying to ascertain why I arrived where I was. But it’s futile. The present is all we have. The person next to you is the one you have.
Although it has other connotations, a song text went: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” That was my motto in a figurative sense because I emigrated. Here, now, and the one you’re with are all better than nostalgia. And if it isn’t, it’ll pass.
I certainly agree that resentment is a complete waste of time, and much worse than that, even, as it poisons the present. Not so sure about nostalgia, though, as I think it might be some sort of inherent way the mind works, turning what should, logically, be unhappy memories into happy ones, if that’s the right word. I think it might be something to do with the emotional intensity of the memory, just as with dreams.
I was lucky, and privileged, to have had a pretty happy childhood, most of the time, with a very loving and supportive family. Indeed, they still are. No moving around, or anything, unless you count boarding school, and my parents still live in the same house that I grew up in, though I have my own flat, now.
Yes, be happy with what you have. That’s very much what I think, too. There aren’t many things I would go back and change, if I could, but none of them are essential, and none of them affect my ability to live my life as I want to.
Oh, I’m perfectly capable of seeing the best in situations that were unpleasant at the time, and the lessons learned that helped me later. I also tend to remember a glance, a smile, a momentary uncertainty, a rush of emotion. That may be because I looked for these in dying patients as a kind of means to connect, even whem they were drifting off.
It’s beautiful when people can say that, recognising their advantage over others, but using it to give something back to those less privileged. My wife and I often sit in our garden and look out saying the same, grateful that we have grown old together and can enjoy the benefits of retirement amongst the trees, shrubs and flowers.
Life is often circular and even if it isn’t the same path you are travelling down, you often receive opportunities to make a different choice this time around, as though making up for the mistakes of the past and showing we are able to learn. Of course, there is no guarantee, so we can’t assume we’ll have that chance again, but looking back, that was often my experience.
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Timocrats be like… Nostalgia? what nostalgia…
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…sure I reminisce, but I don’t want to relive my past but to embrace my future and new approaching experiences, live for my days but not to nearly die for them.
I can fully understand that. It’s not part of my job to be with the clients in hospital, or anything like that, but I have visited a few, over the years, and occasionally been present when they passed away. I have always felt honoured to have been allowed to be part of such a private time, and, sometimes, a little out of place, too, I must admit. The staff have always been wonderful, of course, finding little private rooms to put the patients in when they enter their final decline, despite the pressures on the NHS, and even allowing members of their families to kip over for as many days and nights as they need to, which surprised me, the first time. None of the clients who I worked with when I first started are with us any longer, and that’s very sad.
That sounds idyllic. Yes, I’ve been very lucky in life, in all the ways that matter, and I’m very conscious of the fact that not everybody has had the same sort of experience. I’m also fully aware that I can, if I’m not careful, sometimes come across as a bit judgemental at times, which is one particular flaw that I’ve tried to work on. It goes without saying, obviously, that other than that I’m completely flawless and perfect.
Actually, in truth, although I’m far from being flawless and perfect, there are some things that I don’t consider to be flaws, even though other people might. A lot of our clients, being elderly, are in the process of losing, or have already lost, their sight, and being blind myself, I feel that they can sometimes relate to me in a way that they might not be able to do with the others so much. They’re always full of questions, anyway, which is perfectly fine, of course. So this is very much an advantage, I think, and something that I’ve been blessed with.
I think that’s definitely right. I don’t believe anything is completely set in stone, and there is always a chance to revisit things.
It’s more of a spontaneous thing, I think. Memories that come flooding back when triggered by something, such as a smell, or a piece of music, or anything, really. I certainly agree that deliberately dwelling in the past is a bad idea.
Have you heard of Jacques Lusseyran? I love the way that Maria Popova reviewed his memoir And There Was Light on The Marginalian site:
Looking back on his blissful early childhood, Lusseyran recounts his formative enchantment with the world:
Light cast a spell over me. I saw it everywhere I went and watched it by the hour… flowing over the surface of the houses in front of me and through the tunnel of the street to right and left. This light was not like the flow of water, but something more fleeting and numberless, for its source was everywhere. I liked seeing that the light came from nowhere in particular, but was an element just like air. We never ask ourselves where air comes from, for it is there and we are alive. With the sun it is the same thing.
There was no use my seeing the sun high up in the sky in its place in space at noon, since I was always searching for it elsewhere. I looked for it in the flickering of its beams, in the echo which, as a rule, we attribute only to sound, but which belongs to light in the same measure. Radiance multiplied, reflected itself from one window to the next, from a fragment of wall to cloud above. It entered into me, became part of me. I was eating sun.
Nightfall didn’t end the spell of the light, for he felt it in the very fabric of being:
Darkness, for me, was still light, but in a new form and a new rhythm. It was light at a slower pace. In other words, nothing in the world, not even what I saw inside myself with closed eyelids, was outside this great miracle of light.
And then, one May morning when he was seven, the light of the world went out — a classroom scuffle ended in a violent fall onto the corner of the teacher’s desk, leaving Lusseyran completely blind.
Somehow, he adapted, guided by the light within and by the discovery that the light without is a kind of vibration can we feel whenever we assume “the attitude of tender attention” — a vibration that reveals the world, its materiality and its mystery:
Objects do not stand at a given point, fixed there, confined in one form. They are alive, even the stones. What is more they vibrate and tremble. My fingers felt the pulsation distinctly, and if they failed to answer with a pulsation of their own, the fingers immediately became helpless and lost their sense of touch. But when they went toward things, in sympathetic vibration with them, they recognized them right away… Being blind I thought I should have to go out to meet things, but I found that they came to meet me instead.
In a passage evocative of Virginia Woolf’s transcendent epiphany about the oneness of the world, he adds:
If my fingers pressed the roundness of an apple, each one with a different weight, very soon I could not tell whether it was the apple or my fingers which were heavy. I didn’t even know whether I was touching it or it was touching me. As I became part of the apple, the apple became part of me. And that was how I came to understand the existence of things.
[…]
The reality — the oneness of the world — left me in the lurch, incapable of explaining it, because it seemed obvious. I could only repeat: “There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.”
Lusseyran was still a teenager when, unnerved by Hitler’s rise to power, he set out to teach himself German in order to understand the menacing radio broadcasts. In 1941, shortly after the Nazi invasion of France, he formed a resistance group and began publishing an underground newspaper that soon became the voice of the French freedom fighters. He was seventeen.
Two months before his nineteenth birthday, Lusseyran was betrayed by a member of the resistance, arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp. For six months, he was kept in “a space four feet long and three feet wide, with walls like a medieval fortress, door three fingers thick with a peephole through which the jailers watched day and night, and a sealed window.” But his bright spirit remained undimmed — devoted to stirring the spirit of resistance among the thousands of inmates, he came to see the place not as a prison but as “a church underground.” He would recount:
The mechanism of hope in our hearts must have a thousand springs, almost all of them unknown to us.
When liberation finally came two years later, Lusseyran was one of thirty inmates to leave the camp alive. Looking back on how he survived the unsurvivable, he returns to the lifeline of the light and the radiance of what the poet Muriel Rukeyser called “the living moment… in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future.” Aliveness, he intimates, is a matter of our receptivity to light, which is the quality of attention we pay the world — no matter our circumstance:
When a ray of sunshine comes, open out, absorb it to the depths of your being. Never think that an hour earlier you were cold and that an hour later you will be cold again. Just enjoy. Latch on to the passing minute. Shut off the workings of memory and hope… Take away from suffering its double drumbeat of resonance, memory and fear. Suffering may persist, but already it is relieved by half. Throw yourself into each moment as if it were the only one that really existed.
Sadly, he lived only a short life (September 19, 1924–July 27, 1971), so I suspect there were hardships not mentioned above, but feeling the vibrations all around him and in himself sounds incredible. Can you connect with that?
I hadn’t heard of him, but it sounds like he had a fascinating and very fulfilling life. I can certainly relate to a lot of what he says in those quotes, though not in exactly the same way, since I’ve never had any sight, so can’t fully appreciate what it’s like to lose it. I’ve known quite a few people who have, though, at school for example, and I know how traumatic it is. It’s pretty amazing how quickly people can adapt, especially when they’re young, like that.
The first part, with regard to his description of light, and the sun, is something I have trouble with, since I can’t really imagine what that must be like. It certainly sounds beautiful, though, and profound, made more so by it being a remembered thing from his childhood. I don’t really have any internal idea of light that distinguishes it from heat, but the difference between day and night is very clear, and not just because of the sun, giving off its heat, since the sun isn’t always strong enough for me to reliably know its direction, but for all sorts of other reasons too, such as the quality of the sound and the different smells. I prefer it when its cooler, in fact, rather than too hot.
His description of everything being alive, even so-called inanimate objects, resonates with me very strongly. With regard to touch, I imagine that having lost his sight at such a young age, he was able to develop a non-visual 3-d map of the world, which I can fully relate to, of course. It’s not even something that I really think about, most of the time, it’s just there. While touch plays a very important role in this, equally important is echolocation. If I click my tongue a few times I can tell, for example, the size and shape of a room I’m in, and what obstacles there are in it. The same is true outside. If I’m walking I use my cane for the small stuff immediately in front of me, but I can also tell if there are any trees, lampposts, or walls, and so on, including people, up ahead, which is pretty useful to avoid bumping into things too often. It’s possible to learn this skill, at least to a certain extent, but it’s difficult, nevertheless, for people who lose their sight later in life. And it doesn’t work very well when I have a cold, or hay fever.
His experience with the Gestapo sounds like the worst sort of torture. I really don’t like confined spaces very much, and am definitely not good on long car journeys, for example. I suppose we never know how we might react in such situations until we have to confront them ourselves, and thankfully, few of us ever do. I have no idea if I could survive such treatment, or what I would do, or whether I would find the same sort of inner strength as he did.
So, yes, I can indeed relate to a lot of that. I’ve always felt a strong connection to nature, and the natural world, even when I was little, and liked nothing better than going off and exploring places on my own, to the extreme concern of my parents. I must have been a real handful at times.