for what could have been?’ posed by a stranger. A question he had answered truthfully: ‘Yes.’ And when this random customer had departed with his book, Laurent wondered whether the man had come in purely to put into words the feeling he was living with. Can you experience nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened? We talk of ‘regrets’ about the course of our lives, when we are almost certain we have taken the wrong decision; but one can also be enveloped in a sweet and mysterious euphoria, a sort of nostalgia for what might have been.
