nostalgia is a peculiar word which...
DENOTES THAT SOMETHING VALUABLE IS FOREVER BEHIND US...
AND THAT AN "IS" HAS SOMEHOW NOW BECOME BECOME "WAS." It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Whatever you have lost, you will not get it back: not that much beloved brother or sister or mother or father , not the Brooklyn Dodgers or New York Giants, not that splendid bar called Jack Dempsey's on Broadway and Forty-Ninth Street in the City of New York, or that place that you once went to see Andy Warhol and other celebrities by the name of Studio 54 over on West Fifty-Fourth. It also erupts in me whenever I see a fragment of the newsreel showing a President of the United in the rear seat of a black limousine with the back of his head exploding into the lap of his wife.
Nostalgia is about real things gone.
Our losses would accumulate, of course, with the violent destruction of the World Trade Center. A Tuesday turned into a Wednesday and something of value was behind us forever. After the murderous morning of September 11th in 2001, with the ferocious human toll, it was no longer the just loss of the building themselves, it was that the comparative innocence of America had forever disappeared along with 3,000 innocent lives. On September 12th in 2001, millions of us wept over the horrors of the day before. Many mourned their own dead and the deaths of folks they never knew. More millions grieved for the world that had existed on September 10th. For a while, many of us experienced various degrees of fury. We knew that we had lived in the world before the fanatics changed it forever. With all the flaws, horrors, disappointments, cruelties, we would remember that lost world all of our days and most of our nights from that day forward, but would get up in the morning, and go to work.
Nobody ran.
Our only consolation would be nostalgia.
Perhaps that tough nostalgia helps explain America. It is built into our codes, like DNA, and beyond the explanation of constant change, there is a constant change, there is another thread in our deepest emotion. I believe that American nostalgia comes from that extraordinary process that created our Nation: immigration. Every American stresses the role of immigration, because the tale of our country cannot be told without it. Starting in the early nineteenth century, our country absorbed millions of European immigrants, many arriving in waves: the Irish in flight from famine in the 1840's; Germans and Europeans after the political furies of 1848; the flood between between 1880 and 1920 of Italians, Eastern European Jews, and others fleeing from debasing poverty or murderous persecution. We know so much about them, and yet we know so little.
Inscribed on the Northeast Corner of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. is a quote by William Shakespeare from his play The Tempest: "What's past is prologue..." Many of those who came to the American shores were illiterate and wrote no letters or memoirs; they were young and poor and could not read those words; the common mixture of overlapping hope served as their personal engines; to raise their children in a place where they would be healthy and educated and all they knew that they would never need to bend their knee to a monarch again. For the rest of their lives, those first-generation nineteenth-century immigrants would carry with them what their American children could not fully comprehend: the nostalgia for those things they left behind. Nostalgia for the place where they once ran with other children on summer mornings, the place where all spoke a common language, the place of tradition and certainties, including those that eventually became intolerable. And yet they came to America with a special sense of hope.
As they sat late on Saturday nights in summer, with windows open to the cooling air, and heard familiar music in unfamiliar languages, those aching ballads of loss and regret had eased themselves into future hopes and dreams...
...The "Is" and "Was" of life's journey came together as one...
DENOTES THAT SOMETHING VALUABLE IS FOREVER BEHIND US...
AND THAT AN "IS" HAS SOMEHOW NOW BECOME BECOME "WAS." It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Whatever you have lost, you will not get it back: not that much beloved brother or sister or mother or father , not the Brooklyn Dodgers or New York Giants, not that splendid bar called Jack Dempsey's on Broadway and Forty-Ninth Street in the City of New York, or that place that you once went to see Andy Warhol and other celebrities by the name of Studio 54 over on West Fifty-Fourth. It also erupts in me whenever I see a fragment of the newsreel showing a President of the United in the rear seat of a black limousine with the back of his head exploding into the lap of his wife.
Nostalgia is about real things gone.
Our losses would accumulate, of course, with the violent destruction of the World Trade Center. A Tuesday turned into a Wednesday and something of value was behind us forever. After the murderous morning of September 11th in 2001, with the ferocious human toll, it was no longer the just loss of the building themselves, it was that the comparative innocence of America had forever disappeared along with 3,000 innocent lives. On September 12th in 2001, millions of us wept over the horrors of the day before. Many mourned their own dead and the deaths of folks they never knew. More millions grieved for the world that had existed on September 10th. For a while, many of us experienced various degrees of fury. We knew that we had lived in the world before the fanatics changed it forever. With all the flaws, horrors, disappointments, cruelties, we would remember that lost world all of our days and most of our nights from that day forward, but would get up in the morning, and go to work.
Nobody ran.
Our only consolation would be nostalgia.
Perhaps that tough nostalgia helps explain America. It is built into our codes, like DNA, and beyond the explanation of constant change, there is a constant change, there is another thread in our deepest emotion. I believe that American nostalgia comes from that extraordinary process that created our Nation: immigration. Every American stresses the role of immigration, because the tale of our country cannot be told without it. Starting in the early nineteenth century, our country absorbed millions of European immigrants, many arriving in waves: the Irish in flight from famine in the 1840's; Germans and Europeans after the political furies of 1848; the flood between between 1880 and 1920 of Italians, Eastern European Jews, and others fleeing from debasing poverty or murderous persecution. We know so much about them, and yet we know so little.
Inscribed on the Northeast Corner of the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. is a quote by William Shakespeare from his play The Tempest: "What's past is prologue..." Many of those who came to the American shores were illiterate and wrote no letters or memoirs; they were young and poor and could not read those words; the common mixture of overlapping hope served as their personal engines; to raise their children in a place where they would be healthy and educated and all they knew that they would never need to bend their knee to a monarch again. For the rest of their lives, those first-generation nineteenth-century immigrants would carry with them what their American children could not fully comprehend: the nostalgia for those things they left behind. Nostalgia for the place where they once ran with other children on summer mornings, the place where all spoke a common language, the place of tradition and certainties, including those that eventually became intolerable. And yet they came to America with a special sense of hope.
As they sat late on Saturday nights in summer, with windows open to the cooling air, and heard familiar music in unfamiliar languages, those aching ballads of loss and regret had eased themselves into future hopes and dreams...
...The "Is" and "Was" of life's journey came together as one...
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