(I still have the suitcase.)
As a person who spends a lot of time in history, I’ve never been a fan of nostalgia. It is not as if its practitioners are learning incorrect lessons from history, but rather that they are misapplying it altogether. The two are not even remotely the same thing-so much so that they rarely overlap. Doing history—whether one treasures, preserves, appreciates, or absorbs and incorporates it—does not involve smothering it in a gauzy net of sweet sentimentalities. Rather, nostalgia grows from the mythologies we construct about ourselves—whether personal, national, or civilizational. Mind you, these stories are absolutely necessary, and there is a place, in a qualified sense, for all that.
In my personal life, much that is good and indeed, fascinating has happened in my “mature” years; so much so that I have never been tempted to dream of returning to an earlier stage of life. As the saying goes, youth is wasted on the young. I do have one memory that is as sentimentally nostalgic as any. It was the summer before the third grade when I spent a week alone with my parents. It was just the three of us in Colorado, with several days in a little cabin in Estes Park. I saw mountains and chipmunks up close. But it really could have been anywhere, for the memorable part of it was having my parents to myself. No businesses to manage, no cattle to be attended to nor hay to bale, no dramas with the extended family, no aggravating brother—just me and my parents. This time remains magical in my memory; but of course it could not last, nor ever return.
(My mother was a very pretty woman, but it was the 60s and camping was not her best look.)
As is the case with all nostalgia, it was more complicated than that. My parents were two years into dealing with a toxic situation in her family. They felt guilty, I learned later, that in the midst of all that drama, I had been neglected. (I did not feel that way.) And in truth, my parents needed a break themselves. And so, they experimented with this novelty to them, called a “vacation,” in the place where people did that sort of thing: Colorado.
(My dad was older and it is sobering to realize I am now 19 years older than he was then.)
I also do not acknowledge nostalgia for any earlier national, or civilizational period. At least for us, I see no Golden Eras. The closest I can come is a fondness, in this country and the U.K., for the fin de siècle and the Edwardian era—anything BWW (Before Woodrow Wilson.) Of course, if I was a factory worker rather than some imagined intellectual of independent means, then my view might be different. And also, imperialism was in full swing then (including, most definitely, our own). If you were on the receiving end of colonialism, it might not have been such a grand time to be alive.
And I also realize that my view of nostalgia can be something of a straw man: identifying this stance with the idealized scenarios in the much-ridiculed paintings of Thomas Kinkade. He deserves it, of course, but rampaging and burning through his sentimental vistas is not much of an effort.
(I use this rendition of the Ringwraithes riding through a Thomas Kinkade scene simply because I couldn’t find one with Vikings or Mongols. The point is the same.)
There are, of course, degrees of nostalgia. On the opposite end of the spectrum from Kinkade is a view of nostalgia as simply the remembrance of, and longing for what has been lost. If that is the definition of nostalgia, then I am indeed one of its practitioners.
For a number of years, one of my favorite contemporary writers has been Paul Kingsnorth, who blogs at The Abbey of Misrule. His latest post really resonated with me, as he articulated some ideas I have been grappling with for some time. Last year I spun them out in a long missive to my son who had just married. Later, he encouraged me to expand upon them. I eventually complied, and they, in turn, surprised me with a bound copy for Christmas. Once I finally complete a piece of writing, I rarely reread it. But after Paul’s post, I revisited my “Manifesto,” with some satisfaction. His is professional writer and I am not, but I was gratified to find were were on the same page.
Kingsnorth admits to his own susceptibility to nostalgia. At the end of the day, it is not the stance he advocates, but he makes one of the best defenses of it I have read. His post sees three broad approaches to dealing with what he characterizes as “the Machine.” (The terminology is not unique to Kingsnorth; Christopher Dawson was calling it that in the early 1920s.) As it sees it, the “escape to nostalgia” is infinitely preferable to the “embrace of Progress.” Ultimately, he sees a “Third Stance” which steers a course between the Scylla of unthinking nostalgia as well as the Charybdis of blind faith in the future.
Kingsnorth is sympathetic to nostalgia, particularly as we of our age find ourselves in a tragedy rather than a great epic, more Isengard than Lothlorien, with most of the things we like “falling away.” As he describes (in a series of incomplete sentences):
The great forests and the stories made in and by them. The strange cultures spanning centuries of time. The little pubs and the curious uninhabited places. The thrumming temples and dark marshlands and crooked villages and folk tales and conviviality and spontaneous song and old houses which might have witches in them. The possibility of dragons. The empty beaches and wild hilltops, the chance of getting lost in the rain forever or discovering something that was never on any map. A world without maps, a world without engines.
But that world is nearly gone, if not already vanished, replaced by “straight lines and concrete car parks.” As Kingsnorth concludes, there is no arguing with it, and so the nostalgic stance becomes “a form of rebellion. The world in your heart merges with the world that used to be. At least you have somewhere to hide.” And in so doing, nostalgia becomes a rational and practical response to a “world heading in wrong direction.” And if this is romanticizing the past, well so be it. For as Kingsnorth concludes, “it’s a hell of a lot better than romanticizing the future.”
But there are dangers in idolizing an imagined past. It can lead to fatalism and bitterness. As everything worthwhile lay in the past-whether “the hawthorn lanes of old England or Holy Russia or pre-colonial Africa or the Islamic caliphate”—we ultimately must face the fact that the past “cannot be laid out on the map of the present.” Thus bitterness hardens into ideology, and worse, politicization, where there will be raging at the perishing of the republic or kingdom or empire, flailing around in search of someone to blame.
The more popular stance is simpler, with the whole force of our world pushing us in that direction: the embrace of Progress. The basic outlines are clear:
Everything has been getting better since the Enlightenment; Science and Reason will get us through; technology is our friend; we are leaving behind oppression and hate and embracing liberation and love; the arc of history bends towards whatever Western progressives are up to this month…the smart people are in charge and, despite inevitable hiccups along the road, will get us where we need to go.
Well, how is this working out for you? Unless completely blind to reality, most people “find it harder and harder to persuade ourselves of humanity’s persistent moral and practical betterment.” Progress promises us the Golden Age of the future, Nostalgia tells us it was in the past. “Here, nostalgia has the weight of history on its side, as virtually every myth and religious origin story on Earth also teaches that we have fallen from a lost world which was better than the one we fell into.” So, Progress requires blind faith in an unknowable future, whereas Nostalgia simple requires the ability to mourn a great loss.
Kingsnorth succinctly puts his finger on the problems with this belief. First, it is based on a massive delusion. Second, “it gives humanity permission to attempt to deify itself.” And third, it refuses to accept limits, either on our given nature or that of other life.
And so, both the promised future and the lost past are each ultimately unattainable. But this binary choice is not one we have to make. Kingsnorth sees another, far superior approach; a way through the impasse. He finds the path in the words of four disparate poets: two Americans, a Welshman, and an Alexandrian Greek.
First, Robert Frost:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Then, Robinson Jeffers:
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots
to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.
You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there
are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant,
insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught - they say - God, when he walked on earth.
And:
These are the falling years,
They will go deep,
Never weep, never weep.
With clear eyes explore the pit.
Watch the great fall
With religious awe.
Then, C. P. Cavafy:
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive - don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen - your final delectation - to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
And finally, R. S. Thomas:
Job Davies, eighty-five
Winters old, and still alive
After the slow poison
And treachery of the seasons.
Miserable? Kick my arse!
It needs more than the rain's hearse,
Wind-drawn to pull me off
The great perch of my laugh.
What's living but courage?
Paunch full of hot porridge
Nerves strengthened with tea,
Peat-black, dawn found me
Mowing where the grass grew,
Bearded with golden dew.
Rhythm of the long scythe
Kept this tall frame lithe
What to do? Stay green.
Never mind the machine,
Whose fuel is human souls
Live large, man, and dream small.
Kingsnorth finds a common theme. With Frost, nothing gold can stay. Jeffers warns our children to keep their distance from the thickening center in these falling years. Cavafy in recounting Marc Anthony, as he was losing, don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now, work gone wrong, your plans all proving deceptive - don’t mourn them uselessly. As one long prepared, and graced with courage, say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving. Finally, Thomas sums it up with What’s living but courage? and Stay green. Never mind the machine, Whose fuel is human souls, Live large, man, and dream small. In all, Kingsnorth finds an appeal “to the reality of where we are. To open our eyes, and take in the moment.”
For Kingsnorth, this stoicism—Jeffers’ not weeping over the falling year, but watching the great fall “with religious awe,” and Cavafy’s remonstrance to having been “long prepared and graced with courage”—is neither losing hope nor giving up, but being strong enough to see what is passing by. He describes this as “necessary detachment,” and finds it in both Buddhist and Orthodox Christian thought and practice.
To watch the great fall, to say goodbye to Alexandria, to accept that nothing gold can stay: this is the task of people who find themselves living through the falling years. It is the prelude to doing anything useful with our time. If we spend that time lamenting the fall, or trying to prevent it, or stewing in bitterness at those we believe responsible, we will find ourselves cast into darkness. If we ‘degrade ourselves with empty hopes’ of some form of technological or political salvation yet to come, the darkness will be just as deep.
No: the only way out is through. To dance with the way things are moving. To watch the great fall, accept its reality, and then get on with our work. What that work might be, in the age of the Total system, will differ for each one of us. Rebellion, restoration, protection, the building of new structures…But before anything can happen, we have first to geAt our inner house in order.
The modern experiment has failed. The tower is coming down. There are opportunities to be found in all of the cracks that are spreading upwards from its foundations. In the rotting of the old world is the seed of the new. But only if we let go - of both the past and the future.
Nothing is coming back.
We are not going where we thought we were.
Beyond Progress and Nostalgia is the third stance: I will meet you there. We can watch the fall together.
As I wrote my son (and with a nod to possible future grandchildren):
There is no time, however, for despair, the desperation of those who have no faith. Again, our time is better spent salvaging that which is worthy from the ages preceding, and to plan for our flourishing in the age unfolding. The end of an Age can be one of the most exciting times to live; the rough transitional seas being more bracing and invigorating than the placid shoals of comfortable complacency…This is not hopeless fatalism, but a recognition of the true nature of things, a rejection of futile human utopianism, and a renewed commitment to nurture and husband the fragile deposit that has been entrusted to us.