Maybe the more anxiety-provoking the current moment, the further back in time we feel the need to go. Nostalgia softens an era’s harsh edges, so we can sink back into a warm bath of fantasy. Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Tales from Earthsea, “Past events exist, after all, only in memory, which is a form of imagination. The event is real now, but once it’s then, its continuing reality is entirely up to us, dependent on our energy and honesty.” Maintaining honesty about the past is so exhausting, many of us opt not to try.
