The word "nostalgia" has a curious history. It was coined in the late 17th century by attaching Greek άλγος (algos - pain) to νόστος (nostos -homecoming). Originally, nostalgia carried a strongly negative signification: "intense homesickness" -- "the depressing symptoms... that arise in persons when they are seized with a longing to return to their home and friends." Then, for reasons that are not on the record, sometime during the first part of the last century, the meaning of nostalgia shifted and became much more positive. It's now a good word: "a wistful yearning for the past." A useful word.
Nostalgia is a familiar phenomena that all can recognize: the savoring of a pleasant memory from earlier in our lives. It seems that nostalgia contains within it a bias toward or even a falsification of the past. It's implicit in nostalgia that things were better "back then." For example: I am a member of a Facebook group called My Flatbush House from Years Ago. Its contributors routinely idealize their childhoods. Reading their posts, you'd think that the Flatbush of our youth was if not the the classical Golden Age at least the Garden of Eden. "I loved my Brooklyn childhood." "I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything." "I grew up in the 40s and 50s! We were so lucky to have known those days." "Much simpler times, more real and human-sized." "There was no fear, everybody felt safe; we played out in the streets, unsupervised, until it was suppertime." "We walked to and from school in every weather." "Going out meant playing games in the street." "I feel so blessed to have lived such a wonderful free life." "The fragrance of roses was everywhere in July (why don't roses have perfume anymore?)"
"Ou sont les neiges d'antan?" "Those were the days, my friend,/ We thought they'd never end." "Rocky Top you'll always be/ Home sweet home to me."
Of course I also remember the good times, but I can't embrace such unalloyed, uncritical celebrations. Yes, I can savor some pleasant moments in my seventy-years-ago life. But I also recall that the 1950s was the era of "juvenile delinquents" and gang wars, back alley abortions, ethnic strife, "broken homes," heroin, segregation, overcrowded chaotic schools, imminent nuclear holocaust and "take cover" drills, McCarthyism, polio, the Korean War, Stalin, and Walter O'Malley.
It's fascinating that the English language does not have a word for an antonym of nostalgia. One of my sources suggests "cynicism." But I'm not a cynic; I'm an intermittent and realistic anti-nostalgist.
And why, when I lie insomniac (as is my too-frequent custom), do I not savor the odor of those ever-perfumed Coney Island Avenue hybrid tea roses but instead am tormented by nightmares of fear, humiliation, awkwardness, embarrassment and loneliness. My childhood was pretty good one, thanks to my attentive parents. So why do I obsess about the bad times? Have I gone full curmudgeon? Or am I simply more honest than my cohort of Flatbush contemporaries?
In The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Shakespeare explores nostalgia and its opposite. Two old guys, Shallow and Silence, reminisce.
SHALLOW: I was once of Clement's Inn, where I think they will talk of mad Shallow yet.
SILENCE: You were called 'lusty Shallow" then, cousin...
SHALLOW: On that very same day did I fight with on Samson Stockfish, a fruiterer, behind Gray's Inn. Jesu, jesu, the mad days that I have spent. And to see how many of my old acquaintance are now dead.
SILENCE: We shall all follow, cousin...
SHALLOW: Death is certain. Is old Double of your town living yet?
SILENCE: Dead, sir.
SHALLOW: Jesu, jesu, dead. He drew a good bow; and dead. He shot a fine shot... And is Jane Nightwork alive?... Nay, she must be old; she cannot choose but be old; certain she's old, and had Robin Nightwork by old Nightwork before I came to Clement's Inn.
SILENCE: That's fifty-five years since.
And then comes the correction, the anti-nostalgist.
FALSTAFF: Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying. This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street; and every third word a lie.... He was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey,... And now is this vice's dagger become a squire and talks as familiarly of John o' Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him, and I'll be sworn he never saw him but once in the tilt-yard, and then he burst his head for crowding among the marshal's men.
And on and on, at great amusing length.
Shallow and Silence indulge their nostalgia; Falstaff sees thing differently, but whether he is a realist, a cynic or a curmudgeon is open to interpretation.
Yet doesn't Falstaff also say, "We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow"?
Posted by: Don Z. Block | October 27, 2022 at 08:22 PM