Nostalgia

I often think of that wonderful opening to L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between:  “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”  I really do believe that Hartley is right.  And that belief goes beyond the obvious point, that what people believed and did during Claudius’s reign is a universe divided from what they believed and did during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and both equally divided from what we believe now, during the threatened reign of King Donald I.  I also believe that the past that we have lived—or, to be humble in all this, the past through which I travelled is profoundly different, not just from my actual present but also, and powerfully, from the past as I remember it now in my doddering old age.

 

It's hard, maybe impossible to quantify the difference between what was and what I remember.  If there were others who remember the same set of events and who can compare and contrast their memory with mine, then I could have a vivid sense of the misperceptions that memory enables.  I imagine some people can check their memories that way, with at least some success.  In my case there are no such voices.  In fact, not only are there no such voices, but there is also no chance that I can compare my memory of the most concrete, realest of objects with their actuality.  Exile will do that for you.

 

But it’s not just that distant and physically remote past that I can’t recover with any degree of accuracy.  In exile in Miami or in Harrisburg or in State College or in Boston or in Carlinville—even here in Reading where I now type this—I experienced things that are involved in convolutions of memory that defy any effort to pin the past down.  Even as I wrote the beginning of this paragraph, which starts with a “but,” I remember some teacher in elementary school drilling into her students that one should never ever start a sentence with that word.  That is a true thing.  But did I really then ask her, “But why not?”  I like to think so.  And the very fact that I like to gives me pause.

 

I have what I know must be a fanciful notion of what I was like back then.  Independent, willing to challenge authority, even if in a fairly minor way.  I also like to think of myself as being adept with English, no doubt because English was my second language and fancying myself an adept made me less of a stranger in a strange land.  Here again, that I like to think that about me back then gives me pause.

 

For me the most challenging part of memory, though, is nostalgia.  I sometimes define nostalgia as a neuralgia of the soul.  The handy-dandy dictionary built into the Mac operating system, the New Oxford American Dictionary, tells me I’m wrong.  Nostalgia, it says, is “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.”  In my book, sentimentality and wistfulness are other words for neuralgia of the soul—but I’ll let that pass.

 

What’s the effect of nostalgia?

 

As far as I can tell, in the first place it substitutes comfort, sometimes pleasure, for reality.  In my memory, in whichever place I might wish to dwell on, from Cienfuegos at least through State College, I never once encountered bullying, for instance.  Now you have to understand that I am an eminently bullyable kind of guy.  I’m short and gawky and nerdly.  A milquetoast (what a wonderful word, which I never get to use).  So not to have been bullied, other than by my siblings of course, for those twenty-odd years would be nothing short of miraculous.  I have to wonder, then, whether what I remember of those places and my reception in them is an actual reality or only an effect of nostalgia, framed by the fact that what I’m really celebrating is being young and naïve rather than not being bullied.

 

Still, I cannot get  it out of my memory that what I encountered back then was the opposite of bullying.  Let me move from Cienfuegos to Harrisburg in illustrating the point.  What do I recall in that town, to which we moved when I was in 10^th grade, so 15, going on 16 years old?  In William Penn High School, alas now closed, I remember being welcomed with open arms into the school community.  And not just the teachers, although I imagine that the welcoming was fostered by them.  The kids were wonderful.

 

One memory that definitely begins in fact, although it might trail off into nostalgia, will demonstrate the point.  In the spring of 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.  That horrible event resonated through the school. The school had a wonderful mixture of students.  It was fully integrated, although I have no idea what the percent of each ethnic group might have been.  Anyway, the powers that be thought it wise to address the assassination directly.  So they set up groups throughout the school, about twenty or so kids per group, for rap sessions—and for the kids of today, “rap” here does not mean music but conversation—to confront the fact of Dr. King’s death.  Each group was led by a teacher, who guided the discussion.

 

I rehearse all this because in the rap session that I experienced there was one student who stands out in my memory.  She was a Schwenkfelder, a member of a small Anabaptist confession that, nowadays, numbers a total of around 2,500 souls.  How many Schwenkfelders there may have been in 1968 I do not know.  As I hope to show, the numbers here are not irrelevant.

In the course of the rapping, the question came up, “Would you marry one of ‘them,’” where the characteristics of the “them” depended on each person’s own self-identity.  Most of us said that we would, so long as love was in the air.  But the Schwenkfelder begged to differ.  Not only would she not marry a person of color, she said, but she wouldn’t even consider marrying anyone who was not also a Schwenkfelder.

 

You see why the numbers are important.  That poor, at least from my perspective then as now, young woman would have to go fishing in a very very very shallow gene pool.  From the three and a half or so billion people on the planet in 1968 she was obliged to choose to love from a scant 2,500.  I felt sorry for her.

 

Where does the nostalgia come in?  Well, given the accuracy of my memory of what she said in the rap session, am I also accurate in remembering that that same girl was kind, friendly, welcoming to me, not only a new student, but a Latino egghead?  Was that the way things actually happened, or am I coloring the past in the shade of nostalgic wistful affection?

 

Memories of my first love fall under the wraith (I mean that word) of nostalgia very powerfully.  Everything surrounding first love is for me, I assume also for everyone, peak times in no trump.  The first date, the first handholding, the first kiss, the first time naked, the first . . . .  All of it is full of wistful affection.  Even the falling out and the breaking up is wrapped up in the warmth of nostalgia.  There are times when I long for that past, all of it, from first date to the falling out, with all my soul, which suffers that longing as a phantom neuralgia.

 

I wish I could remember clearly because I’m sure—or the nostalgia makes me think, at any rate—that all of those memories, from Cienfuegos to State College, were indeed fabulous.  But like the old song says, how can I be sure?

Fortunately, thanks to my love, I can validate the memories from Boston to the present.  Some of the past is really as wonderful as I remember it to be.