I LOVE THE WORD...
NOSTALGIA, even though the word itself is seems to be an imperfect one to describe the emotion. It is hopelessly vague. Sometimes happy. Sometimes sad. At my age, it evokes an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent present of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same. Wednesday turns into Thursday and something valuable is gone forever. An "is" has become a "was." Whatever you have lost, you will never get it back: not that much beloved father and mother, not those baseball teams you once played on when you were young, not those splendid New York bars you once sat in with good friends, not Elitch Gardens in Denver where you once went dancing with the girl who you thought was the most beautiful female in the entire world. Irreversible change happens so often and that experience affects character itself. Living life toughens people against being schmaltzy by allowing the truer emotion of nostalgia. Schmaltzy is always about a lie. Nostalgia is about real things gone. Nobody truly mourns a lie.
Which is why in a million ways, Americans behaved so well on September 12, 2001. Millions of us wept over the abomination of the day before. Many mourned their own dead. More millions grieved for the world that had existed on September 10th, knowing it was forever behind us. For a while, at least, all felt various degrees of rage. But nobody ran. We knew that at least we lived in a world before the archfiends attack changed it forever. With all its blemished, horrors, disappointments, cruelties, we would remember that lost world all our days and most of our nights. And now we would get up in the morning and go to work. Our only solace would be nostalgia. That hardy nostalgia helps explain America. Its built into our codes, like DNA, and beyond the explanation of constant change, there is another common thread in deepest emotion. I believe that American nostalgia also comes from that extraordinary process that created this country: immigration.
Many paid an emotional price for their decisions to leave the country of their origin. Those nineteenth-century immigrants would carry with them what their American children could not fully comprehend: the things they left behind. Those things were at once objects, people, and emotions, and they were part of what almost all immigrants came to call the Old Country. The place where they once were children. The place where they once ran with friends on summer mornings. The place where all spoke a common language. That rupture with the immediate past would mark all of them and did not go away as the young immigrants grew old. Many of their nostalgia's would be expressed in music. Songs were sung in tenements and dance halls and while walking on the street. Songs of the Old Country. Most saw their children grow tall and healthy and educated. And yet...and yet, for all who prospered and those who did not, the music was still there.
On the deepest level, it didn't matter whether they had that past taken from them, or whether they had decided personally to leave it behind; at a certain hour of the night, the vanished past could be vividly alive in memory with its own special sense of hope, anguish, or loss. And if they can afford airline tickets, they can carrying their children with them, can show their children the places where they were young on a visit to the Old Country, and can show off photographs of where they now live to those who remained behind. This, they can say in the Old Country, is their America. Their nostalgia's are familiar. In one form or another, they are the nostalgia's of everyone who has ever lived...
...And that is why I love the word.
Which is why in a million ways, Americans behaved so well on September 12, 2001. Millions of us wept over the abomination of the day before. Many mourned their own dead. More millions grieved for the world that had existed on September 10th, knowing it was forever behind us. For a while, at least, all felt various degrees of rage. But nobody ran. We knew that at least we lived in a world before the archfiends attack changed it forever. With all its blemished, horrors, disappointments, cruelties, we would remember that lost world all our days and most of our nights. And now we would get up in the morning and go to work. Our only solace would be nostalgia. That hardy nostalgia helps explain America. Its built into our codes, like DNA, and beyond the explanation of constant change, there is another common thread in deepest emotion. I believe that American nostalgia also comes from that extraordinary process that created this country: immigration.
Many paid an emotional price for their decisions to leave the country of their origin. Those nineteenth-century immigrants would carry with them what their American children could not fully comprehend: the things they left behind. Those things were at once objects, people, and emotions, and they were part of what almost all immigrants came to call the Old Country. The place where they once were children. The place where they once ran with friends on summer mornings. The place where all spoke a common language. That rupture with the immediate past would mark all of them and did not go away as the young immigrants grew old. Many of their nostalgia's would be expressed in music. Songs were sung in tenements and dance halls and while walking on the street. Songs of the Old Country. Most saw their children grow tall and healthy and educated. And yet...and yet, for all who prospered and those who did not, the music was still there.
On the deepest level, it didn't matter whether they had that past taken from them, or whether they had decided personally to leave it behind; at a certain hour of the night, the vanished past could be vividly alive in memory with its own special sense of hope, anguish, or loss. And if they can afford airline tickets, they can carrying their children with them, can show their children the places where they were young on a visit to the Old Country, and can show off photographs of where they now live to those who remained behind. This, they can say in the Old Country, is their America. Their nostalgia's are familiar. In one form or another, they are the nostalgia's of everyone who has ever lived...
...And that is why I love the word.
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