Consolations - Revised edition: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

by David Whyte

Nostalgia can feel like an indulgence, a sickness, an inundation by forces beyond us, but, strangely, forces that have also lived with us and within us all along. Nostalgia is not indulgence. Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together by the way we have remembered: something we thought we understood but that we are now about to fully understand; something already lived but not fully lived, issuing not from our future but from something already experienced; something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough; something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused. Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past; nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end.