Nostalgia

If you look up the word ‘nostalgia’ in a dictionary, you may see something like this: ‘a sentimental longing for the past’. Other dictionaries prefer the word ‘wistful’ to ‘sentimental’. This is confusing because the two words mean different things. A dictionary defines ‘wistful’ as meaning ‘mournfully expectant or longing’. The same dictionary defines ‘sentimental’ as meaning ‘arising from or determined by feeling rather than reason’. It doesn’t specify that the feeling has to be mournful or sad. I suppose then you could feel nostalgic in a happy way. So, whether we think of nostalgia as happy or sad seems arbitrary. Take your pick.

Perhaps, it’s better, if you want to understand nostalgia, to look beyond the dictionary and look into your own life. Look for examples of what people may call nostalgia. Maybe, you have a battered blue Oxford dictionary, which smells a bit like an old wooden school desk. If so, it may be that the smell of the tatty old book is what helps you to understand nostalgia, rather than any definition within its pages.

I sometimes experience a kind of nostalgia when I find something I wasn’t expecting to find. Like a paperback copy of The Silver Sword, by Ian Serraillier, a novel I read at school. I found an old copy in a charity shop. It was the same kind of paperback copy I had when I was maybe ten, a Puffin book. On the cover is a drawing of a boy in raggedy clothes, a chicken under one arm, and a cardboard box under the other. Behind him is a long column of marching refugees, and behind them the broken side of a bombed building. When I stumbled upon that book it felt like I was stepping onto a lift and descending incredibly fast. It was scary, and I remember thinking: this is weird. I had a sense of almost unbearable loss, as if someone I loved had just died. And that was strange because I wasn’t thinking of anything sad. I loved the book, and it hadn’t died. I was pleased to see it again. I remembered that the cardboard box the boy was carrying contained his few possessions as he tramped over war scarred Europe. What was I mourning?

I’ve had the same strange feeling several times, over the years. I feel happy and sad mixed up together. Like when I see myself cycling along a road beside the familiar sparkling blue of the River Tay. I’m young, fit, full of energy, the silver stars on the river are dazzling, and the air is sweet, and every breath makes me feel that I’m flying. And then it’s a different now. I am motionless, decades later, sitting at my desk, staring at words on a page. I suppose the dizzy feeling I have is because I’ve zoomed across decades at a ridiculously fast speed. And, for a second or two, there’s a feeling of something like loss, only it’s not an ordinary loss. It’s more like – I am that young man, and then I blink, and suddenly I’m much older.

Perhaps, nostalgia, for want of a better word, is our way of connecting to the fact that inside ourselves we remain partly the same person no matter how many years pass.

Another kind of nostalgia I feel is wholly positive and never sad. It also involves a younger me cycling and an older me sitting, but not at a desk. This kind of nostalgia usually appears when I’m sitting in an armchair, with our cat Nergal curled up on my chest, and I’m stroking her, and she’s purring so loudly I call her “tractor cat”. There’s soft sunlight gleaming on her fur. In the distance, a car is making a gentle whooshing sound as it approaches. The sound becomes slightly louder as the car passes by in the street below, then it quietly fades away. As the sound of the car becomes smaller and smaller, it seems that Nergal’s purring grows louder. Again, as I have done many times, I allow myself to think of being on a bike years ago, cycling up a very steep concrete mound in a play park. I’ve written about it before. Every time I cycle up the hill, pushing on the pedals, and seeing the big blue sky above me, I feel incredibly happy. And the me stroking the cat and the simultaneous me cycling up the hill are both, somehow, doing exactly the same thing. And as I write these words, I suddenly realise why it feels that way. The me cycling and the me stroking the cat are both noticing the same thing:  the world and me in it are one, and my mind is celebrating this simple and astonishing fact.

Of course, some nostalgic thoughts are clearly sad or tinged with sadness. A few days ago, I heard that the Scottish writer John Burnside died, aged 69. He wrote novels, autobiography, and many volumes of poetry. I have 18 of his books of poems, and I think there are more in print. When I heard of his death, I immediately remembered writing about him, in the precursor to this blog, called ‘As I Write’. In a post dated January 18th, 2020, I wrote:

‘John Burnside is a Fife magician of words. Reading his poems is like taking a walk in the countryside and noticing autumn as if you have never seen it before, and you suddenly smell centuries of forests, and just when you become accustomed to that kind of magic, you are guided through secret passages of word-sounds and word- meaning, into a haunted grey land, where pure terror hides in mist. Then in the next poem and the next, Burnside helps you to escape from that ‘now’ to another ‘now’ – each one as real and strange as the one before. Every ordinary object and event can become a door to wonder.’

I felt I had to send him those words, and I remembered how happy I was when I received an e-mail back:

‘Thank you so much for sharing your blogs with me. I really appreciated your piece on my poems – like you I am deeply insomniac so I sympathised. And I loved your description of me as “a mod wondering if someone has just stolen his scooter”.’

The mod reference came from me trying to describe the photograph on the back of his first book of poems: The Hoop (1988).

Later, he wrote to me again, after he noticed photographs on my website.

‘I just wanted to say how much I liked your photographs, especially the ones where I recognised the city of Dundee, (I lived there for a while, and I recall its atmospheres). I lean towards b&w, I admit, and I was drawn particularly to the street scenes, particularly the misty street scene and the image of the tall white building against a stormy sky. But I was inspired, moved and delighted by all those images- it really is fine work.’

When I learned of his passing, my nostalgia was coloured by a deep sadness that never again would I be able to share words or images with him. I had hoped to eventually send him my first book. Along with my sadness, but a little later on, I remembered the joy I felt at reading his kind words to me. And I decided my nostalgia need not always be quite so sad, and I can always read his poems again.

I hadn’t intended that this post be so tied to talking about writers and books. I’d also thought about referring to memories of watching the movies of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. Movies like A Matter of Life and Death  (1946), The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), and I Know Where I’m Going! (1945). Recently, I was reminded of these films and others, in a wonderfully nostalgic way, when I sat in a little cinema, watching Martin Scorsese talk, in a new documentary, about his love for these movies. Sitting in the dark, as the big screen flickered in front of me, I watched scenes filmed long before I was born. I felt, as I’d felt years before, a kind of nostalgia for events and hopes which were themselves only echoes of a distant past. I still don’t know how Powell and Pressburger wove their special magic.

I’d also thought of writing about nostalgia for holidays in Spain, Sweden, Arbroath and Banff, but I had to leave those memories aside because book reading had decided it wasn’t finished with me yet.

A few days ago, I finished rereading John Steinbeck’s great novel about the Dust Bowl migrants of America, in the 1930s: The Grapes of Wrath (1939). I first read it when I was at secondary school. The copy I had then was a Pan paperback, with a pale blue cover and an illustration of a man in denim dungarees and a cloth cup, squinting into the distance, with an old truck behind him. The effect upon me of reading this book was so intense, I long associated it with that particular paperback version of the novel. So much so, that when I decided to reread it, I searched for a similar copy, but it was no longer cheap. I settled instead for an old hardack, without a dust jacket, printed in 1940.  It was a bit bashed but that seemed appropriate, as most of the objects in the novel itself are worn out.

After a few days of reading, I came to the last chapter of the book, and I felt a painful mixture of wonder and trauma. Nostalgia had got me started reading, but soon I had to leave that feeling behind. As I wrote elsewhere, it is one of the first books that made me feel that very good writing is like a living thing, it breathes, it sweats, it doesn’t just tell you about fear or hope or the need to struggle, it makes you feel those things. As I got to the last few pages, which I couldn’t recall from my first reading, all those years ago, I became anxious for the fate of the people in the book because I didn’t know what would happen to them. I wasn’t just reading a story. I was reading about people I cared about. And I was scared for them. How much more tragedy could I cope with? Would I be able to see hope through my own angry tears? It took me a few hours to get over my reading-induced trauma, and then I could see – invincible wonder and hope along with the sadness. I could even feel a refreshed nostalgia for the experience of getting to know those people.

For anyone who hasn’t read The Grapes of Wrath, the names of the main characters are just names. For us millions who have read the novel, the characters are as real as people we have lived with. There are the towering figures of Ma and Pa, holding the family together like two great trees holding a forest together; the little but indomitable children Ruthie and Winfield; the almost mythical ex-preacher Jim Casey, searching for a new faith and finding it in the people and in the battles of the people; and Tom Joad – a living symbol of courage, tenacity, and the capacity to learn and grow. And there’s the haunted but indestructible Uncle John. Fiery, sometimes hilarious Granma and Granpa. And Al, Tom’s younger brother, whose skills as a driver and mechanic merge with the one great inanimate character: a battered truck that has to get the family 2000 miles from Oklahoma to California. And there are strange, wonderful loners: Muley, who cannot leave the land where he grew up, although everyone else has gone; and Noah – a boy who finds a river where he can live peacefully, but alone. And there is the tragic but immortal young woman Rose of Sharon, sometimes called Rosaharn, who experiences hope and terror, joy and despair. Despite all her harsh challenges, she is the future which cannot be destroyed.    

A few hundred years ago, ‘nostalgia’ meant only a severe kind of homesickness, felt by people who had to live too long away from their homeland. Now, the word is used to refer to lots of other hints and wonders. I find that nostalgia can help me to feel at home inside, wherever I am.

Harvey Duke