Nostalgia Was Better When I Was Young
and ten more theses on a despised emotion
“I really don’t know what your past is like, but I’ve got to assume, like everyone else, you have plenty of pain in it, right? But when you go back to the places where the pain was at, you find that there was more stuff there, and that there’s stuff about it that you miss just because it’s you. Because that’s who you were, and you grow to accept that. When you do that kind of stuff, whether it’s Eden or not, it is. Every place that you left is Eden in some way.”
—John Darnielle interviewed in Pitchfork
Creatures, it’s easy to mock nostalgia. It’s an inherently ironic emotional genre! It’s got the critique already built-in: If you’re so smart, why aren’t you existent? You can have poetry against nostalgia (Les Murray’s “Drought-Dust on the Crockery”) or “South Park” against nostalgia and they’re both right, nobody could argue. But nobody who came up with my reading/prayer cycle could be truly opposed to rolling around in the past. So here, nine more defenses of an emotion that needs no defense, because you’re probably doing it right now.
ONE: This whole post started at Naomi Kanakia’s substack… somehow. I don’t remember where and I can’t find it now (maybe it’s in the comments here????), but somebody, maybe Kanakia and maybe not, posted the table of contents from something like Best American Short Stories of the 1960s. And the authors were… sort of hilariously obscure nowadays, with the exceptions of iirc Joyce Carol Oates and maybe two other women. (I also recognized one of the men, very vaguely, as a Beat or Beat-adjacent.) (Yes, it is kind of funny that the women were all quite well-known today.) So okay, somebody asked, “But why does this happen? Why are we so bad at judging the genius of our own time, and yet so confident in our judgments of past literature as Great or mid?”
And an imp within me cried, “Because nostalgia is always correct! The backwards look is the look that frees us from the busy detritus of the present moment and allows us to see what, though it was created in response to the conditions of a particular time and place, nonetheless speaks across time to something like a human nature. The owl of Minerva flies at sunset, and you can’t make her wake up early!”
Thus said the imp. I could not assess its claim, for it was high noon, and the owl of Minerva slumbered.
TWO: I wanted to write that the literature of nostalgia is expansive, ruminative, dreamlike and allusive, a prose style with its own secret gardens and nightingale floors. But then I remembered the slender, knifelike Some Prefer Nettles.
THREE: I have no idea what the Japanese title is, but that translation title is the nostalgist’s greatest slogan.
FOUR: Nostalgia is a way of keeping some emotions secret, by hiding them under cover of the past.
FIVE: There is an obvious case that nostalgia is a conservative emotion. But what the previous item suggests is that it is also an inherently camp and queer emotion. “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is one of the purest nostalgia creations of that intensely nostalgic industry, the movies. The past and the future are still gayer than the present.
SIX: “To be 1890 in 1890 might be considered almost normal. To be 1890 in 1922 might be considered almost queer.”
—Carl Van Vechten on Ronald Firbank
SEVEN: Look, of course nostalgia is not about a time period but about the fact that one was a child then. Of course! I was born in 1978 and the 1980s and 1990s were sort of awful, actually. Everybody kept dying! In retrospect certain features which we knew to be bad back then, like the homicide rate and the whole thing where everybody we looked up to died from having sex, stand out as uniquely bad aspects of the time. They are bad things about those years, not bad things about life as it is and always will be. And meanwhile nostalgia is not about being a child, either. Being a child was confusing and often shameful. Children have no precedents, no life experience, no alternative perspectives from which to view their lives. They fill in the gaps in their understanding with guesses, and it’s a rare child who will guess that God is merciful.
Being young is bad and the 1980s and 1990s were bad. And yet… being young in the 1980s and 1990s? Now you’re talking! Now the bad things of childhood are assigned to childhood, because we know children now are still suffering them, and the bad things of the time are assigned to the time because they’ve changed. And so the lost, specific joys can emerge, the photographs we carry with us: a girl jumping double dutch as the barrettes on the ends of her braids clack together, the blue robins and the pink cat-and-fiddles and the yellow praying hands. A home video of the mind, in which a little girl drifts past the horror shelves at Blockbuster again and again, revisiting the pleasure of the VHS covers for House and Phase IV and Blood Beach (“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… you can’t even get there!”). The hand-clap rhymes, the color-changing gloves we yearned for, the catalogs and the old wallpaper with its giant 1970s tawny sunflower heads. The earth tones that were a little old-fashioned even then, and the neons and fluorescents that were the future once.
EIGHT: Nostalgic art can capture a dynamic ambivalence: the awfulness of past days, for which we nonetheless long. Why does Cleo in Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy miss the violent South? There’s an acting guide called Audition that says (or so I’ve been told) that an actor should always find the opposite emotion hidden in a scene: When the script has you say “No,” you should seek out and play the hidden yes; say a tragic thing with a hint of a giggle, say an objectively ridiculous thing with heart-attack seriousness. This trick basically always works on me. Both things are usually true! There’s a way to go theological here if you want to: the felix culpa, Christ’s victory on the Cross. Or I could just say that America’s greatest nostalgia artist is Stephen King.
NINE: There is an account on what once was Twitter which was created to promote a PBS documentary about the civil-rights hero Fannie Lou Hamer, and yet I follow(ed) it because it was like walking back in time, into the living room of my friends’ moms in elementary school. Whoever runs this account feels like someone you could meet on the street, at the bus stop, as a school volunteer or let’s say a Sodalite—someone living now, but in a way where now moves in a skin made of remembered joys and hard lessons: back then.
Now playing
The Mountain Goats, “Genesis 3:23.”
Take a look through the Barbie Viewmaster… Now that’s what I call rose-colored glasses! This image comes from a Norwegian website, so I’m not sure who to credit, but it is used under a Creative Commons license.