Andrew Statum

If anything, the "what remains behind," the nostalgia, saps me of strength. I'll remember, suddenly, a happy moment from childhood, unintentionally, and I'm paralyzed. That weird sensation of living in a time out of season comes over me and I'm helpless to do anything but sit through a mnemonic film strip of some heretofore unremembered incident that seems so trivial: me riding a trike, me sitting on my Dad's shoulders, Mom taking me to karate, the fireflies in the gloaming flying around our apartment complex. Why these memories? If I smell cut grass, why don't I remember cutting grass? Why do I remember, say, the grains on the maple tree in my Uncle's back yard and get this vague yet intense and implacable sense of loss? It's just a stupid tree!

Perhaps there are those rare people, artists mostly, for whom nostalgia can be harnessed and put to good use. Like Proust. Like Joyce. Like this Franco Magnini guy. Good for them. For these lucky few, their art becomes a means to bridge the gap of nostalgia, a way for them to reassemble the best (and the worst) parts of their past. But for me, nostalgia seems like such a plague. A bittersweet plague, sweet because I get to re-experience something wonderful, bitter because the memory is never as wonderful as the actual experience and leaves me with the feeling that I will never recapture the essence of a joyous lived experience. Ultimately, I'm left with the grief of loss.

But nostalgia, I guess, is really a necessary evil. And I think Sacks, in The Landscape of His Dreams really gets at the nostalgia that is impetus behind many people's need for artistic expression - the need to recapture the past, the need to rebuild an experience - or an entire world as in Magnini's case - that is gone. But what makes the past so great? Isn't it just this feeling of nostalgia that makes everything seem more than what it was. Right? But even if I acknowledge that nostalgia is warping my memories, I still feel the need to somehow relive them. Perhaps that's my bulwark against an uncertain future. Even if a memory isn't that great, at least I know, unlike the future, that it's there, that it happened (even though the more we read about memory in this class, the less confident I am in the content of my memories).

I don't know. The good old days can't come back. But I guess they're not going anywhere either. So in the end, perhaps nostalgia's a good thing. And maybe Wordsworth's not too far off after all. Maybe there is "strength in what remains behind." At least there's a little something left of the past for me to savor. The good memories and the bad, they're not completely gone. It's how you use it, I guess, that makes you who you are.