Nostalgia

Until recently, I wasn't aware of the roots of the word "nostalgia," which are related to the pain of homesickness. But although I am not overly nostalgic by nature, it's the pain or queasiness of nostalgia that concerns me as a I grow older.

As any of us age, we accumulate a freight of memory, one largely comprised of lost worlds. Our cultural idols and heroes pass away and, with them, the age that helped bring them into their prime. For some this makes nostalgia a kind of grief akin to losing a loved one. The pain can be accute.

I have known a few people who are prisoners of nostalgia, people who pine for the cultural milieau of their childhoods or even for a long-lost time they weren't alive to see. For such people, the nostalgic affliction may be compounded by isolation and loneliness.

I grew up listening to an AM readio station that played "the music of your life." When I was a child, the music from the 30s and 40s was featured on this station. At night I would take the radio into my parents' expansive backyard and listen to that or repeats of Radio Mystery Theater with E.G. Marshall. Even at that age, there was something bitterly sad about this music and imagining the elderly, wrapped in blankets against the cold, listening to the radios in musty old homes, attended by ragged pets. That was something that haunted me, along with the sound of static and distant thunderstorms that filled AM; a sense of this or that generation passing into its particular good night.

Over the years, I found that I was succeptible to the nostalgia of those older than me. In the past hour, I have heard three examples of songs that contain a razor-sharp edge of nostalgia: "Thanks for the Memories" by Bob Hope, "It Was a Very Good Year" and "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra. It almost seems as if these songs have acquired a ghostly power imparted by lost time and the passing of avid listeners.

There is a vertigo attendant to nostalgia, too; a sense of living memory lost. One day, despite your best efforts, you may become a caretaker of memories, the docent of one of those lost worlds that we often idealize. In the crepuscular flow, as shadows flicker on the walls like a special effect in a time travel movie, it's all too easy to be caught up and carried back temporarily.

But the past is also its own kind of undiscovered country, filled with cultural obscurities that were largely ignored in their time. There are things that can be carried forward with awe and wonder, signs and portents that were never read. Perhaps they may change the present or even the future, getting a second chance. But ultimately all will become nostalgia and even that will someday blink out as the living memories that carry it are extinguished.