Nostalgia
In lieu of buying new movies or books, I've been finishing the books that I've started and revisiting the TV series that I have already bought. Lately, I've begun rewatching Mad Men, and watching it a few years later from buying it (it really has been a few years, too, which is astounding in its right) I feel like I pick up more and more on the things that it does not say. I think that silence is part of what appeals to people - you can drop into a seemingly simpler time, where all the actual "modern" conflicts are there, in a different form, but lessened, quieted, relegated to a different part of the mind than the post-modern, always there dissonance.
I think that people look back towards "a simpler time" primarily because it's just there, full of warm lights, odd details, and filtered textures of what it seemed like the moment was. My memories of the 1990s, for example, are of a time and place as foreign a country as Brazil is to me today. Today, I have Croatian money on my kitchen table, a lighter made in China with scenes of tourist Venice from the weekend I went there with Mary Chapman and forgot to bring fire of my own. A fountain pen rests on top of stationery I purchased at a little cartoleria off the main tourist route between the Rialto and Saint Mark's Square. The paintings on my kitchen wall are luminous orange and primary colors with a brush-stroke figure playing in one the guitar, in the other, a saxophone. Both were painted by a man with a shop in Songtan, South Korea. The Mason jar full of corks from bottles of cheap Italian wine on my souvenir shelf is from a particularly drunken day spent in Pensacola, FL, getting a horrible sunburn, meeting friends new and old, and trying to forget the weeks I'd been spending in Alabama getting nowhere doing what felt like nothing, but yet was supposed to "prepare" me for my life as an Air Force officer.
In Ljubljana, Slovenia, I bought a fire-blackened "bog pot" etched with designs that seem universal to any ancient civilization - bold chevrons, zigzags, and lozenges etched deeply into what is clearly an ornamental recreation rather than any practical piece of cookware. But the fact that I have that object, purchased for 27 euro on an errant weekend spent in the old center of a Habsburg city, speaks volumes to the way that my life has turned out. If I were to go back and talk to the boy I was, excited at finding large quartzes on an old wagoner's track along a ridgeline in rural Greene County, who dreamed of saving kingdoms that didn't exist from threats he didn't understand, I don't think I would believe whomever I met claiming to be the older version of myself. But when I go back to being that boy on that ridgeline, I don't have "nostalgia," literally the pain of recalling - there was very little pain to recall, and what there was, was plenty acute to etch itself into my memory. Since I was eight years old I was aware that my family didn't have "enough" money and that my parents had plenty of fights, differences, and imperfections. One of the hardest things to do is to grow up without being able to believe in some fantasy that adults know better, or have any greater understanding of the world than you feel that you do before you're even old enough to crack your voice at the slightest hesitation.
Nostalgia, then, for me is about imagining times before I was born, before I can remember so strongly, so early compared to many if not most. It's probably worse for my sister, who seems to remember what arguments in the car were about when she was still in a car seat and I was a little kindergarten brat who found that the best place in the world was the public library, because Eyewitness books had pictures that were more enticing than candy or snow forts or riding a roller coaster. But I can also go back and instead of seeing the perfect world of being a kid, the "recorder" took in video, not just memories, and so I can see the unsteadiness of the adults, the forced smiles, the exhausted travail, the frustration at our antics, the worry when we would disappear into the woods. I don't know what that means, really, to be able to actually see things more as they were than as I would idealize them to be, and maybe it is as much an illusion as those who idolize their youth as a golden age, but I wouldn't trade that awareness for a decade of innocent ignorance - it underwrites who I am.
If you've read this far, thank you for indulging my florid prose.
I think that people look back towards "a simpler time" primarily because it's just there, full of warm lights, odd details, and filtered textures of what it seemed like the moment was. My memories of the 1990s, for example, are of a time and place as foreign a country as Brazil is to me today. Today, I have Croatian money on my kitchen table, a lighter made in China with scenes of tourist Venice from the weekend I went there with Mary Chapman and forgot to bring fire of my own. A fountain pen rests on top of stationery I purchased at a little cartoleria off the main tourist route between the Rialto and Saint Mark's Square. The paintings on my kitchen wall are luminous orange and primary colors with a brush-stroke figure playing in one the guitar, in the other, a saxophone. Both were painted by a man with a shop in Songtan, South Korea. The Mason jar full of corks from bottles of cheap Italian wine on my souvenir shelf is from a particularly drunken day spent in Pensacola, FL, getting a horrible sunburn, meeting friends new and old, and trying to forget the weeks I'd been spending in Alabama getting nowhere doing what felt like nothing, but yet was supposed to "prepare" me for my life as an Air Force officer.
In Ljubljana, Slovenia, I bought a fire-blackened "bog pot" etched with designs that seem universal to any ancient civilization - bold chevrons, zigzags, and lozenges etched deeply into what is clearly an ornamental recreation rather than any practical piece of cookware. But the fact that I have that object, purchased for 27 euro on an errant weekend spent in the old center of a Habsburg city, speaks volumes to the way that my life has turned out. If I were to go back and talk to the boy I was, excited at finding large quartzes on an old wagoner's track along a ridgeline in rural Greene County, who dreamed of saving kingdoms that didn't exist from threats he didn't understand, I don't think I would believe whomever I met claiming to be the older version of myself. But when I go back to being that boy on that ridgeline, I don't have "nostalgia," literally the pain of recalling - there was very little pain to recall, and what there was, was plenty acute to etch itself into my memory. Since I was eight years old I was aware that my family didn't have "enough" money and that my parents had plenty of fights, differences, and imperfections. One of the hardest things to do is to grow up without being able to believe in some fantasy that adults know better, or have any greater understanding of the world than you feel that you do before you're even old enough to crack your voice at the slightest hesitation.
Nostalgia, then, for me is about imagining times before I was born, before I can remember so strongly, so early compared to many if not most. It's probably worse for my sister, who seems to remember what arguments in the car were about when she was still in a car seat and I was a little kindergarten brat who found that the best place in the world was the public library, because Eyewitness books had pictures that were more enticing than candy or snow forts or riding a roller coaster. But I can also go back and instead of seeing the perfect world of being a kid, the "recorder" took in video, not just memories, and so I can see the unsteadiness of the adults, the forced smiles, the exhausted travail, the frustration at our antics, the worry when we would disappear into the woods. I don't know what that means, really, to be able to actually see things more as they were than as I would idealize them to be, and maybe it is as much an illusion as those who idolize their youth as a golden age, but I wouldn't trade that awareness for a decade of innocent ignorance - it underwrites who I am.
If you've read this far, thank you for indulging my florid prose.