Nostalgia Isn't What it Used to Be
I was born nostalgic.
How do I know this? Because of one of my earliest memories. I was three. I remember picking up one of the family toys and regarding it thoughtfully. It was a Model T car. Instinctively I knew this was a car from a previous time. I made an aesthetic judgement, finding the Model T to be more pleasing and interesting than present-day cars. From the Model T I concluded the past must have been a wonderful time.
I was born in a nostalgic time, too, just a few years after a big fad for coonskin caps, for instance, brought on by Disney's Davey Crockett movie. It's hard to imagine such a thing happening today.
It seems nostalgia really peaked around 1973. Consider the movies that came out that year: The Sting, American Graffiti, Paper Moon. The Sting had the double nostalgia of the Depression era and ragtime music from a couple decades before that. So ragtime became big too. Around that time my oldest brother played ragtime on the piano between acts at a melodrama in Cascade, Colorado.
It's my theory that the whole Watergate thing might have spurred on a lot of that nostalgia-- the need for escapism and innocence. But maybe if I compared notes with more people on this, I'd find my theory to be common knowledge.
I remember watching Nixon resign on TV the summer of 1974. (The Great Gatsby movie version came out that year too.) Some of my family members and I were at a neighbor's house-- neighbor's to our vacation log cabin in Victor, Colorado. That log cabin in itself was another log on the fire of my personal nostalgia-- set in one of the great gold mining towns of Colorado, off the beaten path, character galore, historical documents right in our shed. My folks bought it in that era too. And at night the thing I liked to do was to listen to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. That show started in 1974. I've listened to some early shows from the internet-- complete with news summaries of the Watergate investigations and commercials for a local theater production that's guaranteed to take you back to a simpler time. (I forget the play offhand.) Of course, the return to radio as a dramatic medium was a very nostalgic move on CBS's part.
Nostalgia is very much a part of the quixotic impulse. Don Quixote clearly had the sense he was born in the wrong time. He was meant for the epoch of knighthood. One might criticize him, as one might criticize anyone feeling nostalgic, for desiring something that never actually existed. His ideas of those times were based upon fantasies in books. But that's entirely beside the point. It's like Dr. Phil, whom I caught while I was channel-surfing, telling a young woman she shouldn't feel so bad about a romantic rejection she was suffering from. After all, she was feeling bad about a relationship that only existed in the future her imagination had invented. The counsel was in keeping with Dr. Phil's tough approach, but he really missed the point, in my opinion. Just because the longing doesn't necessarily have a bearing on real life doesn't mean it's the less painful. It's the same with nostalgia. Whether the nostalgia is located firmly in a reality or not makes no difference. The deep nostalgia isn't about historical accuracy. It's about something more intangible.
I think we're nostalgic for heaven, plain and simple. Or heaven/the Garden of Eden. It's a form of the longing created by that God-shaped vacuum in us. Nostalgia is a healthy thing, if we keep this in mind. But as I implied earlier, there seems to be a curious absence of nostalgia in the popular culture these days. Now the past is merely a time when political incorrectness ran rampant, people were less enlightened, and often with no fashion sense. There's very little awareness of the past, period. It's disturbing, symptomatic of other ills, I think.
I wonder if people still have experiences like this: I was, in my teens, on a ladder, painting the trim on the sunny south end of our cabin in Victor. It wasn't hard to imagine I was an early settler in the Old West. Through my head went the tune "No Goodbyes"-- part of the soundtrack to the movie How the West Was Won-- one of the most nostalgic, soul-grabbing pieces of music I've heard. (Little snatches of it can be heard here http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/album/How-The-West-Was-Won-How-The-West-Was-Won-Original-Motion-Picture-Sou-MP3-Download/11748619.html::
on track 38 and 44. I don't know offhand any handier way to link to it.) But I didn't merely feel I'd been transported into the past. It felt more like living in the eternity God has placed in our hearts. That's longing. That's nostalgia, good and true.
How do I know this? Because of one of my earliest memories. I was three. I remember picking up one of the family toys and regarding it thoughtfully. It was a Model T car. Instinctively I knew this was a car from a previous time. I made an aesthetic judgement, finding the Model T to be more pleasing and interesting than present-day cars. From the Model T I concluded the past must have been a wonderful time.
I was born in a nostalgic time, too, just a few years after a big fad for coonskin caps, for instance, brought on by Disney's Davey Crockett movie. It's hard to imagine such a thing happening today.
It seems nostalgia really peaked around 1973. Consider the movies that came out that year: The Sting, American Graffiti, Paper Moon. The Sting had the double nostalgia of the Depression era and ragtime music from a couple decades before that. So ragtime became big too. Around that time my oldest brother played ragtime on the piano between acts at a melodrama in Cascade, Colorado.
It's my theory that the whole Watergate thing might have spurred on a lot of that nostalgia-- the need for escapism and innocence. But maybe if I compared notes with more people on this, I'd find my theory to be common knowledge.
I remember watching Nixon resign on TV the summer of 1974. (The Great Gatsby movie version came out that year too.) Some of my family members and I were at a neighbor's house-- neighbor's to our vacation log cabin in Victor, Colorado. That log cabin in itself was another log on the fire of my personal nostalgia-- set in one of the great gold mining towns of Colorado, off the beaten path, character galore, historical documents right in our shed. My folks bought it in that era too. And at night the thing I liked to do was to listen to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater. That show started in 1974. I've listened to some early shows from the internet-- complete with news summaries of the Watergate investigations and commercials for a local theater production that's guaranteed to take you back to a simpler time. (I forget the play offhand.) Of course, the return to radio as a dramatic medium was a very nostalgic move on CBS's part.
Nostalgia is very much a part of the quixotic impulse. Don Quixote clearly had the sense he was born in the wrong time. He was meant for the epoch of knighthood. One might criticize him, as one might criticize anyone feeling nostalgic, for desiring something that never actually existed. His ideas of those times were based upon fantasies in books. But that's entirely beside the point. It's like Dr. Phil, whom I caught while I was channel-surfing, telling a young woman she shouldn't feel so bad about a romantic rejection she was suffering from. After all, she was feeling bad about a relationship that only existed in the future her imagination had invented. The counsel was in keeping with Dr. Phil's tough approach, but he really missed the point, in my opinion. Just because the longing doesn't necessarily have a bearing on real life doesn't mean it's the less painful. It's the same with nostalgia. Whether the nostalgia is located firmly in a reality or not makes no difference. The deep nostalgia isn't about historical accuracy. It's about something more intangible.
I think we're nostalgic for heaven, plain and simple. Or heaven/the Garden of Eden. It's a form of the longing created by that God-shaped vacuum in us. Nostalgia is a healthy thing, if we keep this in mind. But as I implied earlier, there seems to be a curious absence of nostalgia in the popular culture these days. Now the past is merely a time when political incorrectness ran rampant, people were less enlightened, and often with no fashion sense. There's very little awareness of the past, period. It's disturbing, symptomatic of other ills, I think.
I wonder if people still have experiences like this: I was, in my teens, on a ladder, painting the trim on the sunny south end of our cabin in Victor. It wasn't hard to imagine I was an early settler in the Old West. Through my head went the tune "No Goodbyes"-- part of the soundtrack to the movie How the West Was Won-- one of the most nostalgic, soul-grabbing pieces of music I've heard. (Little snatches of it can be heard here http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/album/How-The-West-Was-Won-How-The-West-Was-Won-Original-Motion-Picture-Sou-MP3-Download/11748619.html::
on track 38 and 44. I don't know offhand any handier way to link to it.) But I didn't merely feel I'd been transported into the past. It felt more like living in the eternity God has placed in our hearts. That's longing. That's nostalgia, good and true.
I love your thought provoking posts Drew! I am a friend of Lisa's from MOPS and I was just telling her yesterday that I enjoyed reading your blog. She also told me it was your birthday, so happy birthday to you!!
ReplyDelete