How to Manage Your Chronic Nostalgia

The Swiss treated nostalgia as an illness, so a Swiss doctor gave the illness its name.

(photo via Flickr user yooperann)

The Swiss treated nostalgia as an illness, so a Swiss doctor gave the illness its name. He combined the Greek word for returning home with the one for pain and so created a new word that seems perfect until we consider it ignores the condition’s most terrible aspect: time. Seventeenth-century soldiers left bedridden by their longing for home could be, and sometimes were, successfully cured by a few weeks’ leave, but they could not be transported back in time.

I raged during my first years after college about how unfair it is that we are stuck in time and cannot re-experience our memories, but this rage was impotent. We can’t vacation in the past. 

Internet quizzes about your favorite ‘90s TV shows are not nostalgia, and you do not remember as good a movie that is bad because of nostalgia, and a reactionary political agenda that aims to recreate the good old days is not nostalgia. These are sentimentality, and sentimentality is not nostalgia. You earn nostalgia; nostalgia is elegiac. Vendors of sentimentality want you to feel feelings that are unearned and not at all elegiac. Vendors of sentimentality want you to express your emotions in controlled environments: a list about ‘90s TV shows, a Nicholas Sparks novel, MAGA. 

Controlled environments are where vendors of sentimentality collect human emotions to further their agendas.

Retro is not nostalgia. Retro is cynicism wrapped in appreciation. Hipsterism was retro but also not.

Enough years ago to produce nostalgia, I went with the girlfriend I would marry from New York to  New Brunswick to watch the lead singer of a favorite band play a solo acoustic show in the basement of a dive bar.

During the show, so many singing bodies were pressed together in the basement that condensation forming on its low ceiling rained on us and mixed with our sweat and beer. The dozen shirtless guys in front grabbed one another by the shoulders and screamed a song they had been listening to since, I thought, their late recent days at Rutgers. I hugged the girlfriend I would marry and, whispering into her ear, changed one lyric to something private between us.

After the show, the lead singer talked with people in the alley between the dive bar and a larger building. The amber glow of his cigarette illuminated the ink on his arm. I didn’t say hello. We went to the train station and missed the night’s last train to the city, and when we got back to the dive bar the lead singer was gone. We pooled the cash we had between us and convinced a cab driver to take us to Penn Station. The experience was such that I was aware of its nostalgic potential as I experienced it. 

Sometimes this happens. Sometimes moments are so present that their transition from experience to memory is seamless and instant. During college in Hattiesburg, I went on an awkward non-date with a girl at the coffee shop across the street from the university’s main entrance. While we had coffee a sparrow stunned itself against the window. After a while, the bird was okay, and the girl and I agreed the best bits of life are the ones that feel as if they are part of the movie of which we are the protagonist. 

One night after I moved to Jackson, Mississippi, from New York, I drove down to Hattiesburg to meet college friends at our favorite pub and suffered a nostalgia attack so overwhelming that at some point I went alone into the bathroom and splashed cold water against my face to keep from crying. At our table I said, Why can’t we choose a number of days or weeks or months to live over and over? Why doesn’t time work like that? I was a little drunk.

My girlfriend and I went, once, back to New Brunswick for a different concert at a nicer venue. We went to the dive bar before the show and got a beer. The show was okay, and then we went home. 

The time aspect of nostalgia cannot be treated, even with a facsimile of the inciting experience. Even if you could go back in time, knowing what you know now, you could not relive your memory. That’s not because memory inflates the value of an experience that wasn’t as good in life as it is in your head. It’s because the confluence of the specific everythings that created it will be changed by your knowledge, rendering it unrecognizable, mutating it maybe into something that will not incite nostalgia and so will be unworthy of the reliving. The time travel paradox: Even if you could go back in time to relive what makes you nostalgic, the act of reliving would change it, so you would never have wanted to relive it, so you would never have gone back in time, etc.

I remind myself that I used to swear I would find a way to split my time between New Orleans, New York, and Hattiesburg. I need this reminder because knowing that I do now split a my time between New Orleans, New York, and Hattiesburg helps keep the nostalgia away. Knowing that reliving the past is physically and metaphysically impossible, and that every moment of the present instantly becomes a past I can’t relive, helps keep the nostalgia away.

I went to Florida with my college friends. We sat on a balcony and watched red beach sunsets. We drank together and cooked together and only talked about the good old days to comment on the fact we were not talking about the good old days. When we all went home, we started talking about our next trip. I remembered a conversation I am nostalgic for, between me and the friend who planned the trip, over coffee more than a decade ago.

It was about the experiences we would all one day have together.