![]() ![]() ![]() But while most critics no longer viewed nostalgia as pathology, plenty still saw it as a pointless indulgence on a par with mud masques or gold-flecked hamburgers. #CHILDHOOD NOSTALGIA TORRENT#The French writer Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27) – in which the narrator tastes a madeleine cake that lets loose a torrent of memories – did much to humanise the act of reminiscence over time. It wasn’t until years later that a warmer, fuzzier aura appeared around nostalgia. The condition, according to psychoanalysts, arose from a thwarted desire to regress to the early stages of life. Nostalgia’s reputation scarcely improved during the Victorian era, when doctors defined it as a psychiatric disorder marked by rumination about times and places that could never be revisited. He believed that the disease’s symptoms – including bouts of weeping and a lack of appetite – were caused by ‘vibration of animal spirits through those fibres of the middle brain in which … the ideas of the Fatherland still cling’. Hofer used the word to describe a purported malady seen in Swiss mercenary soldiers who pined for their homeland. The word ‘nostalgia’, coined in the 1600s by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, is a portmanteau of the Greek words nostos (‘return’) and algos (‘pain’), implying that reflections on the past are shot through with suffering. ![]() Our collective disdain for plumbing our own past depths has hundreds of years of historical precedent. That’s where its transformative power lies. Not only does it ground us mentally and physically when the landscape shifts or founders, it focuses us, with sensory immediacy, on what we most value – and, by extension, on what we want to reflect to the world. Long derided as a crutch, something we fall back on when the appeal of the present dims, nostalgia is a surprisingly sturdy launch point into the future. The research showed that, far from lulling me into a click-driven stupor, my nostalgic journeys were feeding my inner stability, even girding me to pursue new opportunities I hadn’t yet imagined. I started poring over experimental studies on nostalgia – which felt like a more productive alternative to nostalgising – and reached a conclusion I hadn’t expected. ![]() What nagged at me afterward, besides shame at having frittered away work time, was that I had no idea why I was so determined to spelunk into my past. Swirling in the eddies of reminiscence brought on a flow state in which I felt outside of time yet acutely conscious of its passage. Each thumbnail graphic was an invitation to ride a mental slipstream that could buoy me along for 20 minutes or two hours. What purpose could photos of The Baby-Sitters Club book covers or orange mall storefronts possibly serve in the present? What could I hope to gain from inhaling the imagined scent of the scratch-and-sniff stickers my first-grade teacher put on my papers?Įven so, I couldn’t bring myself to stop. Combing through these old images – each of them bog-heavy with emotional resonance – seemed like just another way to procrastinate. Had someone else walked into the room, I would have closed the browser window. Brown leather oxfords with the lace ends wound into corkscrew-shaped knots.įor years, I felt a subtle kind of embarrassment whenever I added to this board. Models in moon boots marching across a magazine spread of a 1996 issue of Seventeen. An A4 Trapper Keeper binder with an acid-trip cover. Its images are like stills from a jaggedy film of my childhood: a Rainbow Brite doll, her yarn hair pulled into a fat ponytail. Somewhere in the recesses of my online presence, I keep a virtual pinboard called ‘Nostalgia’. ![]()
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