The Future of Nostalgia

May 25, 2003

"Yesterday is gone, gone--but tomorrow is forever."

--Dolly Parton, "Tomorrow is Forever"

"Tomorrow is Forever" is a great anti-nostalgic song:

Take my hand and walk with me
Out of the past of yesterday
And walk with me into the future of tomorrow
Yesterday must be forgot
No looking back no matter what
There's nothing there but mem'ries that bring sorrow

I care not for yesterday
I love you as you are today
Yesterday just helped to pass the time while waiting

Being one of the self-designated "great nostalgics" of all time, I find Boym's insights fascinating. From its origins as a medical "disease" of homesick Swiss soldiers in the 17th century, when doctors sought to cure it with opium, leeches, and journies to the Swiss Alps, right down to its many manifestations in the 21st century, nostalgia has baffled all attempts at a cure.

"Nostalgia," writes Boym, "(from nostos--return home, and algia--longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one's own fantasy." Historian George Lukacs called it a kind of "transcendental homesickness." If anything, after all the displacements of humanity in the century just passed, nostalgia is more prevalent than ever.

I'm sure I have related to you how sometimes, as an antidote to insomnia, I will journey in my imagination past every house in my hometown of Castine, Maine, remembering each inhabitant from my childhood, and whatever other salient details come to mind. But nostalgia, Boym points out, is not really a longing for place; rather, it is a longing for a time: "Nostalgic time," she says with humor, "is that time-out-of-time of daydreaming and longing that jeopardizes one's timetables and work ethic, even when one is working on nostalgia."

The nostalgic "feels stifled within the conventional confines of time and space":

The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.

There is a spiritual aspect to nostalgia as well, for the nostalgic longs for "continuity in a fragmented world" and for a "community with a collective memory." This sounds an awful lot like what many of us are seeking in our religious experience. It is why we come to church. "Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return," writes Boym, "for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values; it could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, a home that is both physical and spiritual, the edenic time and space before entry into history. The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addresse [my emphasis]." Nostalgia can even be an attempt "to restore a sense of the sacred believed to be missing from the modern world."

But nostalgia becomes dangerous when an individual, a community, or, worst of all, a religion or a nation attempts a literal return to that unambiguous "enchanted world." Boym calls this kind of nostalgia "restorative," and its dreadful outcome can be observed in various places around the world, perhaps most recently and destructively in the former state of Yugoslavia. Restorative nostalgia attempts a recreation of an usually idealized past, a past that never really existed: a time when there were "only Serbs," a time of racial or religious purity without ambiguity or confusion, a "golden age" which can be recaptured only through some form of racial purification or "ethnic cleansing."

The fact that it isn't true hardly matters. The idea that the world has never been less complicated than today is unacceptable. In our own country in recent years, there have been those in the religious (and unfortunately, in the political) community who have called for a return to "a Christian America," a simpler time which supposedly existed at the time of our nation's founding. Never mind that from the beginning there were Jews and others, Africans brought as slaves, not to mention Native Americans, living here; that the "Christian commonwealth" quickly splintered into a number of competing and not particularly compatible Protestant Christian sects; that there were always non-believers; that Catholics soon arrived; and that the founding "fathers," while nominally "Christian," were mostly a bunch of deists and intellectual radicals who feared the marriage of church and state and who would have abhorred the kind of Christian fundamentalism which rules the day and yearns for a return to a theocratic past that never existed.

(The founding fathers were futurists, and clearly in Dolly's camp. Unfortunately, most of us no longer have the optimistic hope for the future that they held.)

Restorative nostalgia also thrives on conspiracy theories which can be found in such works as The Turner Diaries, the book which inspired Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and which also inspires the various "militia" and survivalist groups around the country. Restorative nostalgia of both kinds is also behind a good deal of Islamic fundamentalist violence, as evidenced not only by the desire to return to some imagined form of pure Islam but also by the implication of America as "the Great Satan" conspiring the ruin of the Arab world.

In Transylvania, where our partner church is located, restorative nostalgia is an ever present danger, among both the Romanian majority and the Hungarian minority. Even today there are calls among extreme nationalist Romanian politicians to rid Romania of its Hungarian and gypsy minorities. Both Romanians and Hungarians hearken back to a time when only they inhabited Transylvania, even though there is no historical evidence that such a time ever really existed. Historical truth in much of Eastern Europe depends on who is writing it.

"Reflective" nostalgia, on the other hand, is, or can be, a kinder and gentler form of the "disease." It is the kind of nostalgia that most of us experience in our individual lives. "Reflective nostalgia is more concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude," writes Boym. It "cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space," and can be "ironic and humorous." Reflective nostalgia has "a capacity to awaken multiple planes of consciousness." Vladimir Yankelevitch holds that "the goal of the odyssey [of nostalgia] is a rendez-vous with oneself."

This definition of nostalgia sounds a bit narcissistic, and, of course, nostalgia can be that. We all know some who can't leave the past behind. Nostalgia for the past can keep us from living in the present moment, in the here and now, and appreciating what we are and what we have on this once-only day in our lives. What we really need, my colleague Forrest Church has written, is a "nostalgia for the present." The past, as Dolly Parton suggested, was not all that it is cracked up to have been. And tomorrow may be forever, but today is all we've actually got.

Is there a future for nostalgia? Alas, restorative nostalgia is not likely to go away any time soon. Nor is its counterpart, reflective nostalgia. If we continue to hear calls from our Secretary of Defense for a return to nuclear weapons testing, I can even imagine some of us becoming nostalgic for the era of the cold war, when our enemies were (supposedly) obvious and when issues of defense were clear cut; when there were checks and balances to keep our worst potentialities under control. Now, I wonder, who will keep us in check? Who will save us from ourselves and our own worst instincts? The fifties are looking better every day--except that we forget what the world was really like in the 1950's, before the Civil Rights movement, and Stonewall, and The Female Eunuch.

For me, the future of nostalgia lies in the lessons we may take from the past. If nostalgia causes us to seek out community and to attempt to overcome the fragmentation of our lives and to find some sense of wholeness, then there is a very positive use for the kind of "reflective" nostalgia that Boym writes about. As she points out, "Reflective nostalgia is a form of deep mourning that performs a labor of grief both through pondering pain and through play that points to the future."

In my nocturnal, imaginary visits to the hometown of my childhood there is a kind of grief, but like all grief it provides an opportunity to consider what is most important in my life. We can only grieve for what we love. And what we love, even when it is lost forever, is what gives our lives their meaning. I like to think about all the "characters" who inhabited my childhood world, and I am grateful for all that they taught me about what it means to be human: to love, to laugh, even to hate and to lose.

Nostalgia can be a wonderful spur to empathy. For how can we think on the irreversibility of time, on all that we have loved and lost, and not feel with our fellow travelers on this dark journey of life? How can we recall our childhoods, whether good or ill, and not wish to make the world a better place for our children? How can we remember, and not mourn?

These are deep questions, questions well suited to a nostalgic temperament, and to the observation of Memorial Day, a day for memory, but also, we trust, for hope. In Dolly's words,

Tomorrow's waiting, let's journey there together
Yesterday is gone, gone--but tomorrow is forever.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock