The Changing Nature of Nostalgia

“I am getting older and reflecting on the past more than once I did. So many people today look back on things like Hwy 66, or old cars with nostalgia.  And I wonder when she is older, what will my daughter and grand daughter look upon with nostalgic memory?”

– Peter Pazucha

This morning my email informed me that our new LED lightbulbs shipped yesterday.  Today, I’m eagerly waiting for the temperature outside to rise a few more degrees before I go to the storage yard and bring Journey over to the school so that I can plug her in and do some more maintenance chores.  I have enough on my plate for now.  And I’m still looking forward.

But…

When I was doing my morning blog reading I came across this 1925 picture of New York laundry lines I got to thinking about how the nature of nostalgia changes over time.  I can remember people hanging wet laundry from clothes lines.  My mom did it.  (not from apartment windows, but from lines between posts in the back yard) That was hard work, yet there is a certain nostalgia for me — a memory of a simpler time, and I have come to realize that at this point in life simpler is a desirable thing.  Complicated is, well…. just complicated.

But, the point is that anything can become a nostalgic memory — depending on when you lived.

I’m more from a generation for whom The Beach Boys have become nostalgic memories than Route 66.  Oh, I can remember things like wringer washers — and we used one for the first two years of our marriage — they aren’t the things we remember with nostalgia, as of a better time.  The Beach Boys however are quite a different story.  When I was trucking I spent an entire Labor Day Weekend listening to 72 hours of Beach Boys radio while waiting for the grocery store to open where I was supposed to deliver new freezer cases for their remodel.  It was a mellow weekend for sure.  I’m not sure I’d want to relive the experience — and there should be a sense of longing to return for those things nostalgic.  So I’m not sure how many memories I have that are actually nostalgia.

I was over at Notes to Ponder reading about recollections and it struck me not only how your place in time determines what you look back on with fondness or nostalgia, but also how our individual differences further alter those memories.  Some of us recall snippets, others entire scenarios.  For some aromas are like blaring trumpets alerting us to memories. Other people need visual triggers, or auditory triggers.  Just how our individual differences may play in determining what we look back on with nostalgia is something I don’t think has ever been studied.

(Or maybe I don’t read enough)

But the fact of the matter is that what  we remember never actually happened.  Surely, some of it happened, but from the moment an event has passed our brains begin modifying our memory according to algorithms no computer programmer would ever claim as their own.   The same hunting trip could be equally nostalgic or horrific depending upon how one viewed the taking of life.  A train trip could be remembered with joy or nostalgic fondness depending on whether one was en route to a funeral, or met the love of their life; yet it might be the trip by train that triggers our memory.

Recently when talking with our daughter I heard little bits of history a la Kathryn and realized that her memories of family events are very different than my own.  Not wrong.  Just different. I like that.  After all, memory is not about objective history.  Memory is about personality, about character.  In a way, memory is about the soul; about what is intrinsically different in us all, the intangible, undefinable, something that makes us who we are.

I hope to be around long enough to hear some of the things my daughter will look upon with nostalgia.  What it will be that she might like to return to.  And perhaps I’ll hear some from my Grand Daughter too. I’m not sure just when memory transitions from history to nostalgia about better or more desirable times.  It surely does.  I’ve never known anyone who didn’t have a few of those times they’d like to return to.

Related articles

• Nostalgic (sharmaineloh13.wordpress.com)
• Dealing with Death (psychologytoday.com)
• Nostalgia: The Pain of Leaving Home (fragmentsfromfloyd.com)
• Nostalgia (jthoughtsandwords.wordpress.com)
• The Beach Boys Celebrate 50 Years in 2012 (vividseats.com)
• To the Beach (vividseats.com)
• Nostalgia for a Time that Never Was: Natural Law and Anamnesis (sancrucensis.wordpress.com)