Just before we get into the subject of Nostalgia. I want to record here that today (9th April 2023) that this is the first time I have used my new digitised approach to blogging. The change in approach was brought on by a heart attack on the 30th January 2023 and the realisation that if I had died everything would have gone in a skip headed for landfill with all my work lost forever. Just to say it is not blogging since I am not looking for an active readership nor the pressures of having to service such a readership. My blogging is how I record my DMB Publishing Knowledge Base for eternity. Google Blogger is just a very convenient and effective way to make digital records in the cloud for free.
So today I am capturing an old article (19/05/21) from
the Times Newspaper by James Marriott and copying it below with all the relevant
Copyright acknowledgements. This is then followed with some notes I wanted to
make on the article. Finally the link to the article is recorded at the bottom.
Nostalgia
JAMES MARRIOTT
Why nostalgia beats living in the moment
Visiting our past is a rich and rewarding
experience that helps overcome sadness and loneliness
Wednesday May 19 2021, 5.00pm, The Times
I have long understood that I am a chronic nostalgic. The
nature of my condition makes me a sort of obsessive tourist of my own past:
incapable of passing the vicinity of an old flat without making a detour to
stand on the doorstep, and forever dragging pliant, unlucky friends on trips to
once-frequented cafés and streets where I can pester them with questions that
all begin: “Remember how . . . ?”
Nostalgia was first diagnosed in 17th-century Swiss
mercenaries as “a neurological disease of essentially demonic cause”. Its
reputation is no longer quite as infernal as that but it is still not
considered entirely healthy. Our culture’s standard of mental good health is
the ability to “live in the moment”. In the world of therapy, the psychological
past has never been more old fashioned as symptom-focused treatments such as
cognitive behavioural therapy replace talking cures.
Having long viewed nostalgia as a personal lost cause, I
was delighted to discover this month that a journal as thrusting and
forward-looking as the Harvard Business Review believes it is a valuable
workplace skill. Or, to quote the review’s wonderful jargon, a “self-regulatory
existential resource” helpful for anyone hoping to “find the motivation needed
to move forward with purpose and focus”.
This doesn’t go far enough. In our tendency to view
nostalgia as a pathology, or even a useful but marginal emotion, we have
gravely misunderstood ourselves. We are a species that moves in time. It is our
tragedy and our privilege that we know this (as animals can’t) and the yearning
for lost time is the most characteristically human emotion there is.
The poetry anthologies of any great literary tradition
are not filled, as young readers first expect, with love affairs but with
laments for lost time. The first great lyric poem in English (or, more
accurately, Anglo-Saxon), The Wanderer, mourns the mailed warriors, mead
halls and bright goblets that have vanished into the past “as if they never
were”.
The Oxford English Dictionary organises words into
“frequency bands” according to how often they are used. Band 8 contains the
most frequently used words, mostly things like “the, an, from, with, but”.
There is only one noun: time. I find this rather beautifully eerie. The great
human obsession: time and its passing, hiding in plain speech.
Nostalgia has suffered by its reputation as an emotion
for the senile but it is common in children as young as seven (recall, too,
that in 2012 One Direction released a wistful song called Rock Me that
begins “Do you remember summer ’09”). And while it is, yes, most
frequent in old people, the next most nostalgic demographic are young adults;
thinking about the past apparently provides stability in times of change.
Unlike many emotions (such as shame) familiar only to certain cultures,
nostalgia is universal in human societies.
The painful-joyful ambiguity of nostalgia (the “sweet
sharp sense of a fugitive day”, Thomas Hardy called it), has made it hard to
categorise or defend. Love or fear propel you all-too-obviously in one
direction or another. But what is nostalgia telling you? Go back? You can’t.
And if you could, would you want to?
Recent psychological research into nostalgia has tended
to emphasise its importance to the human sense of meaning, a crucial factor in
well-being associated with a lower risk of death. Through nostalgia we build
stories about ourselves: where we’ve come from, why we’re here, where we’re
going.
It is an emotion often connected with moping but
scientists at Southampton University have shown we have the causality the wrong
way round. People who are made to feel lonely or sad become nostalgic — and
becoming nostalgic makes them feel better. That bittersweet quality appears to
be related to the kinds of nostalgic stories we tell ourselves, which tend to
begin with a sense of loss and develop towards redemption and a stronger
feeling of “belonging and affiliation”. Wordsworth referred to “spots of time”
by which our minds are “nourished and repaired”.
Nostalgia helps us redeem our pasts too. Reflecting
nostalgically on my unhappy first years in London, I don’t think about the
things that seemed so horribly important then — how lost and lonely and poor I
felt — but about the summer evenings I spent sitting on my bed by the tall
window of my old flat, reading and watching the fading sunlight.
Nostalgia cathartically reveals the insubstantiality of
the past. A friend recently visited the Cambridge college which had rejected
her ten years previously. All the academics who interviewed her had moved on,
the students studying there were only children when she applied. Nothing of
what had once felt a terrible failure really remained at all. Just a building.
And her memory.
The most crucial sign of nostalgia’s importance is that it
is one of the fundamental impulses of art. Philip Larkin, who was more honest
about what he was up to than most poets, wrote: “I am always trying to
‘preserve’ things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel
what I felt.”
One of the sensations that reassures me that I’m really
responding to a painting is the small shock of recognised feeling: the sense
that something I had thought irrevocably lost has been found and handed back to
me.
We are all stranded in time. The present, in which we are
so frequently advised to live, is fleeting and trivial. Our pasts are richer,
more filled with lessons and associations and meaning. We should spend more
time there.
David Bannister
Comments
If you look at the Times readership feedback comments
they are all positive firstly thanking James Marriott for his philosophical thinking
then wondering how someone so young can have acquired this depth of thought and
more significantly the ability to convey it in words and in the process stir
emotions. It is the stirring of emotions through words that is his real gift. Like
all brilliant journalists, although more a philosopher, James has caused
readers to stop in their tracks and in my case choose to cut the article out
for my future reference. As anyone who reads my blogs will appreciate I write
between future, present and past or in terms of sequence more likely past, present
and future. I often begin a blog with a past story. Then a present event
stirring my imagination. Then a future prediction as to where we are headed. The
past often covered in a very nostalgic way. My parents, Bill and Mary, had a
very profound impact on my upbringing and who I am. Jenny my wife and children
Helen and Alan similarly have impacted my life. Dear friends, many now departed,
cause me to spend many nostalgic moments thinking back on times spent together.
Fortunately in many cases for both family and friends my planning of times together
in the future needs to ensure they are the right events to support my future nostalgic
thinking. So what best supports nostalgic thoughts? The company, the setting,
the food and taking the time to talk and listen. Oddly enough to plan the
future and when you get there to make the most of the present so to guarantee
it stands out in your nostalgic past. It does extend beyond just planning
events it extends into financial planning and legacy planning. Not a subject
some can face but planning for the life of those you leave behind after you
have departed.
Times
Link
No comments:
Post a Comment