Nostalgia beyond Memories
23.45
At my desk, I sit a few feet away from boxes of old notes and yellowed journals tucked away in my drawer. Every now and then, I find old photos of myself, like a pin from kindergarten when my head was too big for my body or a print of me holding a round snowball up to my even rounder face. The memorabilia around me, from the sentimental to the comical, has turned my childhood bedroom into a pseudo-time machine. I’ve been traveling a lot lately, just not through space, but time.
The other night, I decided to re-read one of the yellowed journals. It started in the fall of my freshman year of college, a time when my handwriting was more legible. There were names I wrote about as if we had been best friends that I can barely recall today. There was a grease smudge on the page I wrote about treating myself to a breakfast pork roll from Lyn’s while skipping math lecture. Then, there was a breadcrumb of rose-tinted nights with a doomed romantic relationship written between the lines. That was my cue to close the journal, but my eyes glued to the disaster as if I were driving past it on the side of the freeway.
Without getting into the details, I eventually remembered that I used to only write in this journal when I was upset. I thought of my friend S, who would tell me that she didn’t like to go through old journals, as they were better off just for catharsis. This must’ve been what my seventeen-year-old self intended for as well, but I still caught myself reminiscing. Usually, when people describe nostalgia, they refer to a longing for a time or place with happy associations. But, my experience here was the contrary—feeling contentment for a time with unhappy associations. It was nostalgia, inverted.
I thought I was being delusional, so I asked M to describe how he experiences nostalgia. To my surprise, he told me that nostalgia had always been a positive emotion for him. He always seemed to be able to look back fondly on memories without the need to sulk over, compare, or replicate his past experiences in the present. I figured this was a good start, but I knew that there was more to nostalgia.
So, down the rabbit hole, I went.
Coined by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in 1688, “nostalgia” was a medical term used to describe soldiers and sailors with a melancholic longing to return home (nostos means the desire to return home and algos means pain). By the early 20th century, ‘home’ began to be interpreted more broadly to include abstract places such as past experiences or moments. Then, researchers began to characterize nostalgia by three components: cognitive, affective, and conative. The traditional view became that for each instance of nostalgia, there was a retrieval of autobiographical memories, a negative emotion, and a desire to relive or re-experience something.
However, Felipe De Brigard, associate professor of philosophy at Duke, goes on to challenge each of these components in his essay, “Nostalgia Reimagined”. He discusses some key scientific developments in memory and imagination, but I’ll try my best to summarize some of his points:
We are capable of feeling nostalgic for a variety of events and times, even those that we have not personally experienced because nostalgia doesn’t need autobiographical memories.
Nostalgia can be bittersweet—involving both positive and negative valences. De Brigard also believes that most researchers have the causation order for nostalgia backward: nostalgia doesn’t always cause negative affect, but rather, is caused by negative affect.
The object of nostalgia’s desire is a place-in-time. In other words, a person can desire something but remain unsatisfied when they get the object of desire because either the place or time did not match up.
While knowing all the different ways to analyze nostalgia may be unnecessary for the average person, his premise has stuck with me: nostalgia doesn’t need real memories. As someone who has obsessed with documenting their life lately, this is unsettling at first. It highlights our fallibility, bias, and irrationality. Ironically, these are also what makes us most human. His premise also suggests that nostalgia is not just a fleeting emotion, but a powerful force of inspiration with potential for good or bad. De Brigard ends his essay with a relevant note on nostalgia’s role in political propaganda and the dangers of when imagined pasts turn into delusions, so, I’ll close instead with imagined nostalgia’s potential for good.
When I find myself reminiscing—diving into old journals, photo albums, and automated “On This Day” reminders, I realize I’m seeking some kind of comfort. In happier memories, that is rather simple so long as I don’t overstay my welcome. In sadder memories, it’s more complicated, but I can find it by recognizing things I’ve been able to move on from that I may have once felt I never would. This is of course easier said than done, but it’s reassuring to know that I can discover meaningful reflections, as I am sharing right now.
Just as we travel to new places to stimulate behaviors, thoughts, and feelings and learn something new about ourselves, perhaps my recent mind-wandering of nostalgia throughout this pandemic shares similar motivations. I’m curious as to how we will choose to remember the pandemic in both the history books and in our minds. Many of us will try to archive it deep within our minds as soon as possible. Yet, part of me wants to believe that perhaps it will be pleasant someday to remember even this time—that when our present and future turn to the past, a combination of our memory and imagination will allow us to preserve the gratitude and clarity we sought all along.
