“Nostalgia is a seductive
liar.”— George Ball
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“Every act of
rebellion expresses nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of
being.”— Albert Camus
“I was right when
I said I’d never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you
can’t ever do anything else except look back.”— Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The
Wind
“Moments never
stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the
ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those
moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglers,
those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.”— Catherine Lacey,
Nobody Is Ever Missing
Midweek Motif
~ Nostalgia
The word
“nostalgia” comes from two Greek roots, nostos
meaning ‘return home’ and algia
‘longing’. However neither poetry nor politics birthed the term, rather it came
from ‘medicine’. In the seventeenth century nostalgia was considered as a
curable disease, like a common cold.
Nostalgia is a
longing for a Place as well as for a Time.
We are ‘back to
the good old days’ then. The feeling is almost, past was ‘Paradise’ compared to the ‘Fallen’
present. Is that so?
But who can deny
that we keep a tender, gentle feeling for the long past as we age? Shortcomings
of the past find our forgiving eyes. Time distance has a role to play may be.
Whether good or
bad, we are dealing today with long past. Let’s weave our words with the thread
of deep yearning for the bygone days of our experiences.
Yesterday all my troubles….
by John Lennon
and Paul McCartney
Yesterday all my
troubles seemed so far away.
Now it looks as
though they’re here to stay.
Oh, I believe in
yesterday.
Suddenly I’m not
half the man I used to be.
There’s a shadow
hanging over me.
Oh yesterday came
suddenly.
Why she had to
go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.
I said something
wrong, now I long for yesterday.
Yesterday love
was such an easy game to play.
Now I need a
place to hide away.
Oh, I believe in
yesterday.
Why she had to
go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.
I said something
wrong, now I long for yesterday.
Yesterday love
was such an easy game to play.
Now I need a
place to hide away.
Oh, I believe in
yesterday.
Nostalgia
by Billy Collins
Remember the 1340’s?
We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore
brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped
in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with
unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would
pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we
would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was
hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the
summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
Marathons were
the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
Of rival baronies
and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance
floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister
practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the
jargon of farries for our slang.
These days
language seems transparent a badly broken code.
The 1790’s will
never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take
walks to the very tops of hills
and write down
what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were
high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise
each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a
wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
I am very fond of
the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled
while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love
to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
Time enough to
wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back
to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the
serenity of last month when we picked
berries and
glided through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning
would be an improvement over the present
I was in the
garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin
names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the
slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs
on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was
thinking about the moments of the past
letting my memory
rush over them like water
rushing over the
stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking
a little about the future, that place
where people are
doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose
name we can only guess.
The Blade of Nostalgia
by Chase Twichell
When fed into the
crude, imaginary
machine we call
the memory,
the brain’s hard
pictures
slide into the
suggestive
waters of the
counterfeit.
They come out
glamorous and simplified,
even the violent
ones,
even the ones
that are snapshots of fear.
May be those
costumed,
clung-to fragments
are the first wedge
nostalgia drives
into our dreaming.
May be our dreams
are corrupted
right from the
start: the weight
of apples in the
blossoms overhead.
Even the two thin
reddish dogs
nosing down the
aisles of crippled trees,
digging in the
weak shade
thrown by the
first flowerers,
snuffle in the
blackened leaves
for the scent of
a dead year.
Childhood, first
love, first loss of love-
the saying of
their names
brings an ache to
the teeth
like that of
tears withheld.
(The rest is here)
(Next week Susan’s Midweek
Motif will be ~ Fear)
