I am a highly nostalgic person and I know that makes me a bit odd (I can precisely remember a moment of nostalgia at age seven: driving home from a family vacation, watching the horizon, thinking about my best friend, contemplating all the fun I'd had over the summer--and feeling sad knowing that time was altered and that we were altered and that those experiences would never happen again. Sometimes I even feel a sense of nostalgia for the passage of the immediate present into the past--in my happiest moments, I'm always a little bit sad because I know the moment is being shifted to an unretrievable past.) Even though I know I'm far more nostalgic than most people, I've strangely never thought much about nostalgia and age--that there's a moment when one becomes nostalgic or that there's a proper age to embrace nostalgia.
So, tell me:
- Do you consider yourself a nostalgic person? If so, how does the nostalgia manifest itself? If not, is there an age where you think you'll become nostalgic, where it will feel acceptable?
- Also, just because I love nostalgic songs and books tell me your favorites (and please, no Proust!). My favorite nostalgic song: Tony Bennett's "Once Upon a Time"
4 comments:
I read a book by some guy about a philosopher of nostalgia a long time ago--a theory, as it were, of nostalgia. (I could probably dig up the specifics, if you're interested, but I'm too afternoon-headach-y at the moment.) He argued that your experience--of feeling nostalgic before the experience was even over--was the norm. I think you become nostalgic at whatever point you become aware of time. For you, at seven, apparently!
I too am a highly nostalgic person. Van Morrison makes me feel almost unbearably nostalgic (a favorite of my first husband's--I know, go figure). Also the whole of For the Roses, by Joni Mitchell. Layla, the early version, does it for me. There are other songs, but perhaps enough for now. Also, my daughter has Eminem ("Ass Like That") playing in the background, which, come to think of it, may be contributing to that afternoon headachy feeling.
I, too, am an extremely nostalgic person. The Violent Femmes make me feel nostalgic, as does the B-52s. My favorite nostalgia literature is "Nostalgia for Everything" by Andre Coderescu (could be misspelled) from In Short. My students didn't seem to love it as much as I do. I think loss is a necessary precondition for nostalgia, so those people who haven't experienced much loss or who are not very self-reflective say things like "Being young, I was not interested in nostalgia." I'm a big fan of false nostalgia too. For example, I love the song "Lady is a Tramp" because it reminds me of a time I never experienced. And also because of the line "She doesn't bother with people she hates; That's why the lady is a tramp."
I don't think I'm particularly nostalgic, probably because people tell me I am curmudgeonly towards the past. For example, I had a "I hate the 80's" trope going for far too long. I've since abandoned that and come to accept that my black & white thinking on that issue was highly problemtatic, and, indeed, there are things from the 80s that I quite liked. If anything I get nostalgic over sappy lovey dovey stuff, and I've written about that before, so I won't bother your comments sections with it.
Absolutely, I'm nostalgic. At periods in my life where big, path-altering changes have loomed (say, out-of-state moves), it gets especially acute, to where I spend weeks beforehand obsessing over all the little things I love that are going to become part of the unretrievable past.
Music does it most for me -- give me a mix tape I made ten years ago and I'll probably choke up. But sometimes, that personal association isn't even necessary -- a really great song can make me nostalgic for somewhere I've never been. "Midnight Train to Georgia" does it for me. Gets me every time, despite my not being even remotely southern...
(See? Told you I'd read your blog :) )
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