On Nostalgia
Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer“The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance
A cold winter morning, you are waiting for your school van, a couple of sparrows flutter their wings around the newly blossomed flowers of your garden, the sun is playing hide and seek behind the early morning clouds. As you stand there, outside the gates of your home, a sudden fear grips you, you haven’t completed the assigned homework, the teacher is strict, you want to go back, miss the school bus and come up with some reason to tell your parents. It’s better to stay bored at home all day than to face your teacher’s wrath. And then again, just as suddenly as that fear gripped you, another feeling enthralls you, your whole body feels this new found energy highly ecstatic, yes, there is a better reason to go to school, to face the wrath of that teacher whose assigned work you did not complete.
As you get on in the van and settle down in the seat that has been self-assigned to you for as long as you can remember, the speakers of the bus slowly tune in a rhythm, your favorite melody song starts playing, the cold breeze from the open windows surrounds you to carry you to the other side of this world. To the dimension that will change you forever.
Your young heart is unable to define this feeling, all you know is, when you see the person that your heart leaps up to see from the moment you wake up, you will feel like you are truly alive, that your life has a meaning and in the casual darkness of your existence you have found the ray of light that brightens your world.
The perfect combination of innocence and extravagant emotions define the meaning of that initial period of your life. The question of right or wrong, fear or courage - disappear, friends, fun, and being with the one who conquered every kingdom of your heart, that’s all that matters to you.
Some say home is a place, and others say home is a person, but what if — home is a memory?
Times change and with the flow of life people change too, even though you try to be in the present and even though the very nature of existence forces you to move on from your memories of past, there will be certain moments, certain events, and a certain people who will keep coming back to your memory, like an unsinkable ship that keeps returning to float on the surface. Like the dancing dolls that never fall even when pushed down constantly, again and again.
“There is no greater sorrow
Than to recall a happy time
When miserable.”
― Dante Alighieri
Like the time when you knew a fun teacher is entering the classroom and all the sufferings from the boring classes has come to an end, or like the time when your exams were coming and none of your friends had prepared or studied and that somehow validates your own lack of preparation, and the time a teacher helped you with the answers for multiple choice questions that helped you pass the exam. And amid these many million memories hide the golden moments, like how you wait for the lunch hour to come, even though you are not hungry, just because you know a certain someone will try to sit as near to you as possible, and their presence, distant yet close adds to the preexisting energy of your soul, making you feel like you’re on top of the world.
Like those moments your gazes meet and the whole wide world around you stops, freezes in that moment and all that you thought once mattered becomes insignificant, and the only thing that will be of consideration now will be the paradise you were in, at that moment. Because you know, even with the infinite possibilities out there for you, without this feeling you cannot achieve anything.
Life has its own ways of teaching us how to live, the remembrance of those lessons is called memories, and the desire to relive those lessons is what I think is nostalgia.
The closer the memory is to your heart, in a good shade or in a bad shade, it will be remembered, and it will be triggered at the right time, the right moment. It doesn’t have to be recalled as it was, or as it actually happened, sometimes your consciousness alters your memories as you want to see them, thus blinding you of the truth of what actually happened.
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust
Good memories that make you who you are, bad memories that taught you — who you should be and how you shouldn’t be, they are the ones that shape us, the ones that mould us into the people we turn out to be in future, and after a lot of adjustments and remakes, if you are lucky you’ll understand who you are, what your purpose is, or you might even live on with the fact that life has no need of a specific purpose to be lived with.
Memories are like portable magic, like time machines, you can go back in time without having to move from you present, yet every time you revisit that point in time you see it differently. Whoever the creator is, he gave us the capability to think, to remember yet not re-experience. That too if we look at it in that aspect that there is a creator. And if we don’t, who else do we have to blame for our incapability of going back in time other than ourselves? Some might even ask, why go back in time when you can focus on the present and future. Well, the very concept of nostalgia is to experience the moments of your past, and the only way to do that is to be in that moment, with that mindset, at the same situation, both physically and mentally. And that is a lost cause to fight for.
But the feeling of nostalgia has a different essence to it, a complete magic that almost makes you suffer in a soothing way, there is that hint of pain in wanting to go back in time, and a pinch of joy with the realization that you’ve actually lived through and spent those days and your life wasn’t completely in vain.
Now when talking about nostalgia, we cannot miss out on talking about memories, and how stubborn some of them can be.
You’ve had a busy day, you’ve come too far in your life that when you’re in the right mood you have no reason to think of all those days that went by and moved past you, all you will focus on will be the present, the people who are surrounding you at this moment, at this particular point in time. But then out of nowhere you see something, a backpack with a familiar design, someone calling someone else with a familiar name, a tune playing in someone’s mobile phone and like a snap it takes you back in time, plays that distant memory in repeat, you start to feel like that younger self, that alter ego of yours that slowly faded into oblivion along the timeline.
These little reminders, they play a major part in our lives. It is at times beyond our power about how we associate music/songs, fragrances, colors or designs to particular memories or to particular people, but it happens, subconsciously, and when its time to rise comes, it will eventually dig deep trenches in your memory’s field and leave you static and scarred for the time being.
That’s when the nostalgia kicks in, that deep longing to go back in time, to live your past, to be that old carefree and innocent self once again, to be hopelessly in love yet deal with the pain of heartbreak, to remember all those moments when you sit alone in the classroom before the morning prayer and look towards the main gate through the open windows to see if the person who is the reason behind your coming to school will be present or not, and when they’re absent you slowly pull yourself back into that camouflage that’ll help you disappear from the attention span of every other person around you.
“The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd — The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”
― Fernando Pessoa
Nostalgia is almost always associated with the past, though many great philosophers and thinkers ask you to leave behind your past and focus on the present and future, it becomes hard to convince some people of this aspect of life’s philosophy. For they find a certain comfort in living in the past, reaching out their hands towards the ghosts of all those who left them or they left behind along the passing of time.
Past is not just a part of you that demands to be forgotten, there are parts of it that leaves you with regrets, making you hope that we can go back in time and undo that one thing that changed the way how the person who matters the most to you sees you, or thinks of you. Now, that can be unhealthy when it is not driven in the right direction. There are parts of our past that shaped us into who we are, that gives us a reason to live to, that reminds us that we have a purpose in life, and then there are those moments which makes you feel like you want to go back in time just to relive those moments, to experience that heart filling joy once more.
Past, memories, reminiscence, nostalgia — these are the interlinked aspects of our lives that not only pull us backward but also at times gives us the power to go forward and move ahead. There are many shades to these feelings, to these emotions, and different people have their own perception of how they deal with this sudden surge of impossible longing to re-live the past. I had my own ways too, one of them being poetry.
In my first collection of poems titled ‘The Poetic Refuge’, I’ve composed a mediocre poem titled — “Take Me Back…”, which deals with this feeling of nostalgia, the longing to go back in time and be that young innocent self once more, and relive the moments of that long lost past.
~ C. Madan
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