Against Nostalgia
Something different.... I was in a mood!
Graydon Carter pissed me off recently. I read an excerpt of his memoir while eating lunch after a morning of self-promotion, a process I affectionately call “screaming into the void.” Carter recounted the halcyon days of 1990s Condé Nast, a time you couldn’t describe as flush so much as downright gluttonous: the Connaught, the Ritz, the Hotel du Cap, the Concorde, the catering, the flowers, the interest-free loans, rates per word that would be good NOW, never mind thirty years ago. Am I jealous? DUH who wouldn’t be. (Graydon, I’M AVAILABLE for AirMail, tysm) But what irks me isn’t the expense accounts or the glitterati of it all. It’s nostalgia that offends me the most.
Nostalgia at its core is a mean sentiment. It excludes, it obfuscates. It tells only part of the story. At first it comes across as earnest reminiscence. But then the teller of the story departs. A gauziness descends over his eyes. He has left the building, gone to Elaine’s. You cannot accompany him on this journey, the vessel seats only one.
And since you are eager, and you appreciate these cultural products, and you wish you had been there, you listen. You ask questions. You let out guttural exhales of wow, holy shit, I can’t even imagine. Nostalgia needs you, the audience, the reader, you, the one who was absent.
Carter knows you can’t stay in the past when you report on the culture. Nostalgia is a way for him to exert power, to wield a currency that has been decommissioned yet still has collector’s value.
* * * * * * * * *
For much of my life I sought validation from Boomer and Gen-X men and didn’t even realize I was doing it. They were the arbiters of taste I grew up around, my mom’s male colleagues at the university. Men who hosted college radio shows playing Modern Lovers, men who taped new albums from CDs and wrote the titles of songs in tiny all caps in ballpoint pen on the card insert of the cassette box, men who could pick up a guitar and sing a Carpenters song ironically. (Irony, nostalgia’s mortal enemy, is somehow also the shield these men carry. I don’t quite understand how the two reconcile, but we have allowed them that.) So I studied. And I genuinely adored my materials: the novels of Roth, the films of Altman, the poetry of the Beats, until I realized how young that made me seem. Big Star, English Beat, The Clash; Pavement. It is with Pavement where I’ve had to ask whether I actually like Pavement or have been a victim of patriarchy yet again. I thrilled to see Stephen Malkamus as a punchline in Barbie. Barbie herself is mired in nostalgia, whether you decapitated her, played with her, longed to be her, longed for her. You longed.
But I am not moving with the times either. I am stymied by the simplest technologies. My undergraduate students see the way I fumble their assignments on the class website. How I make them sign up for conferences on a sheet of paper (which I then go on to lose, humiliatingly), how a big stack of photocopied essays I put out for them to pick up is left behind. Two students did a recent reading assignment by listening to the audiobook and I didn’t know how to respond. Is listening to an audiobook really reading, the skill which I am attempting to teach?
The book for that week was American Fire, which chronicles of a five-month period of arsons in a rural Virginia county. The author, Monica Hesse, develops the fires as a metaphor for the problem of nostalgia: “America fretted about its rural parts, and the arsons were an ideal criminal metaphor for 2012.” In the preface she names the problem: “America: the way it’s disappointing sometimes, the way it’s never what it used to be.”
In Purple Crayons, Ross Ellenhorn writes that nostalgia is “another form of terror management—an orientation to conserve the past, not for the sake of remembering our ancestors and placing ourselves in history but to induce a sense of safety for safety’s sake. And in this, the greatest threats to restorative nostalgia are change, diversity, complexity, fluidity…all nostalgia is about a perceived simpler—and simplified time.”
It's the again that is the nastiest part of the fantasy of America’s greatness. Nostalgia is rude. Look where it got us.
* * * * * * * *
I watched a music documentary from 1981 that was mostly comprised of concert footage. To see all those faces staring up at the stage, not a cell phone in sight. To be fully in the thrall of the moment, and the ecstatic hum of a crowd of bodies in motion. They did not know what was coming for them. Those sorts of moments are the ones when nostalgia seduces me. I can set my time machine to “before” and see myself bouncing up and down at an all-ages show at the Palladium. But if I were an audience member in a concert video then and you zoomed in on my face you’d see me screaming lyrics and sweating, yes, and also looking behind me to search the crowd for a boy, to check if a friend was having fun. There are a million ways to depart, phones not included.
Perhaps this is just the pessimist’s dilemma: to want to sink into the past and feel only how the mattress sags. Somehow, I have fallen victim to whatever is the inverse of nostalgia, the tendency to remember the worst of everything.
A friend once asked me about my first love. The only good answer I could come up with was my husband, who I met at 32. Prior to that all love was unprocessed, sweaty, looking for love in all the places: a friend’s brother, another’s boyfriend, someone’s husband, a man who didn’t love me back but I would show him, I would I would. Perhaps I am so irked by nostalgia because I am unable to access it. But then let me get a hit of eucalyptus in the wind and suddenly I’m lambasting my interlocutor about San Francisco in a time between bubbles, when I paid a few hundred dollars for a room off Alamo Square and zipped up those hills on a red Vespa.
The impulse toward nostalgia is tempting now, when it feels like the world is ending. My friend and I went to a 90s dance party which commenced at 8 pm and ended at 11. The DJ played the hits, you know the ones. And yet it was inflected with a very 21st century attention span. One chorus and he was off to the next track. We walked home to our respective families, a light dose of mushrooms making us pause over the Union St bridge and admire the beauty of the Gowanus, you can’t tell it’s sewage at nighttime (save the stench). We wanted to hear a song, in its entirety. This TikTok attention span has come for us, and how dare it dovetail with the brain fog of perimenopause. I downstairs that night but not after watching clips, mesmerized, of beauty influencers and subway station reviews.
In the 1954 essay “The Loss of the Creature,” Walker Percy describes a tourist’s disappointment visiting the Grand Canyon:
“For him there is no present; there is only the past of what has been formulated and seen and the future of what has been formulated and not seen. The present is surrendered to the past and the future.”
The thing you are beholding, whether the Grand Canyon or the Gowanus or the Golden Gate Bridge is rarely ever the thing itself. It is also the accumulation of associations and context, photographs you saw in Vanity Fair, the nostalgia of another. (Have I ever really heard Paul Westerberg sing “Unsatisfied” naked and without imprimatur?) Percy wants his reader to be able to see the world with a freshness that renders expectations and disappointments irrelevant. And yet we live in the world, and in order to survive must block out so much. I avoid the eyes of the girl selling candy on the subway. There’s an apple blossom tree outside the window of my workspace that blooms white and pink for about a week in the spring. Then the flowers shake loose and fall to the ground like confetti. After watching it for a few minutes in the morning, I sit with my back turned against it. I hold my son’s hand and quicken our pace when we pass our neighborhood lunatic. I want to stop, to feel it all, to be in virgin experience. I also want to do work and get on the train. I want to survive. The call of the past must be resisted, even when the future is so scary. (The future is always scary.)
* * * * * * *
When you have small children, you become subject to a looping refrain: It goes so fast. Enjoy it, they implore. Fast, so goes it. They look at you and your sticky offspring in nostalgia that cannot penetrate the current reality: everyone exhausted and overstimulated; the brothers assaulting one another and me. Enjoy it, they say. Because what they are clumsily attempting is to stand as an oracle from the future. There is something special about this time of life when your kids mostly like you and the problems are simple. Life gets harder and more complicated the older they get, and you have been demoted from the center of the universe to a dwarf planet.
But one cannot be brought into compulsory enjoyment. The wisdom of our elders is a point of view, sure. I’ve been the vessel for men’s cultural reveries and taken hostage too by older women’s domestic yearnings. It feels like an ancient ritual, a hazing an experienced mother inflicts upon a newer mother to revel in her current circumstance. She casts a curse upon you: these days you are not enjoying? You better love them because one day you will long for them. Nostalgia has sanded down the jagged edges of memory. The facts at the fore for a newer mother: an episiotomy with insufficient anesthesia, teeth bearing into nipples, the Sisyphean waltz from the fridge to the table to the sink, all blotted out by the homemade cards and squeezy thighs, scraped knees that are new again by morning. Her nostalgia forgets.
When I am accosted in this way, I want to shake my interlocutor into recalling the tedium of filling a toddler’s hours. Without the aid of psychedelic drugs, just how many times can I be amazed at this rock? Especially when my kids were very young it took a lot of energy to stay on the frequency of wonder for more than a few minutes. I start looking for a catalog to leaf through, a dish to wash, a family member to facetime, anything to let me feel not so alone and bored and exhausted by what is going on. And what is going on? Life. But that amazement is the one Percy wants for us. Why do I find it so excruciating to stay here? Why must I depart? This is nostalgia’s cruelty—it makes you feel like shit for not being there, even when the there is right here.
The real reason I feel an allergy to nostalgia is because my anxiety hurtles me forward to a future I have somehow determined to be superior to now. In the simplest sense, depression is a disease of the past, and anxiety of the future. The misty reveries of nostalgia do not move me; I see the cataracts in my elders’ eyes. Depression may have ruminations of the past, anxiety may lay claim to the future, there, just out of reach in its pristine glory. Both are temporal disorders. They put us out of time. Here I am, a perfect specimen of the present, projecting into my future, trying to figure out what I will miss from today, fretting over lost time while still in time.
I’m not suggesting we blot out the past. I was a history major! But your budgets without ceilings, your accessible real estate, your Boomer entitlement to a good life? Keep it. While I find this kind of nostalgia offensive, it will be in even poorer taste to write of the way things were to my kids’ generation. The way we once lived will likely be completely irrelevant. The best we can do is to shut up about it and work toward being in whatever their reality is. It’s a lot easier to get misty over a past that probably never even was.
* * * * * * * *
Zoe, my best friend from college, visited me with her six-year-old daughter. I picked my son up early from kindergarten to meet them in Central Park. It was a sunny day in October. Zoe was singing the lyric from “Danke Schoen” I recall Central Park in fall. We were there, recalling it already. Our children together going up and down and around and around on the carousel. The children who, when we drove to New York from San Francisco upon graduation, we didn’t know would be. And now they are scrambling up ancient schist rock faces together, leading each other into misadventures the way we used to. A kaleidoscope of nostalgia.
We fulfilled a long-held fantasy of mine, going for a carriage ride through the park. I remember first seeing this in Manhattan, when Woody Allen tells his teenage girlfriend they can do whatever she wants. It’s a punchline, a little girl’s fantasy. The audience smiles, nods, metabolizes this information as charming. Woody Allen, Walker Percy, Graydon Carter, I love you and I hate that there’s something approval seeking in my love for you. We chose our carriage, white and red velvet drawn by a horse named Whitney. The sun, the friend, the children, the child’s fantasy. It all came together. I felt the tug of my phone to map the walking distance to the restaurant. I heard our driver point out the fountain. Can I see it as new? Can I see it from this moment, a moment steeped in nostalgia I had for it before it happened, a moment which is already a memory? Here I am. Here we are.
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And while you’re keeping your gaze trained firmly on the future, might I recommend….
Dying for Sex: Award for funniest dominatrix-tinted joke about Bill de Blasio goes to….
Also a Poet by Ada Calhoun: I’m becoming a Calhoun completist.
Tituss Burgess is Mary Todd Lincoln!: I peed my pants.
I can’t help but be nostalgic. I think it’s about the truly unreasonable, unsustainable cost of living in New York right now. Also, I wish the midtown tunnel had never been built. Saudade.
Ezra Klein accuses Trump of overnostalgia on the same day you publish this essay!