On Nostalgia. David Berry
yearn for a return.
It took some time for the popular conception to catch up to the cultural theorists. Homesickness as an idea percolated through the first half of the twentieth century, but it wasn’t until the fifties and sixties that nostalgia, as both concept and preferred term for that concept, really started to insinuate itself into the popular consciousness. Like much about nostalgia, the precise reasons for its sudden surge in popularity are fuzzy and elusive: Fred Davis, in his 1979 study of contemporary nostalgia, noted that even in the fifties nostalgia had been considered a ‘fancy word,’ limited to professionals and ‘cultivated lay speakers,’ but by the sixties it was in common enough parlance to be the subject of consideration in popular books and magazines. One theory Davis alludes to is that, as the notion of ‘home’ became less potent – as people moved around more frequently, gained easier access to increasingly widespread sources of information, and became less creatures of a specific place – homesick lost some of its power, and nostalgia slipped in as a way to capture the same feeling without being tied down: essentially, nostalgia became a better metaphor for the feeling it was trying to describe. The concept of home became a time, not a place, so we needed a new word for it.
This seems entirely plausible: to modern ears (and even at its coining), nostalgia is itself a nostalgic word, an evocation of some more glorious past, a time when they knew how to name these feelings, if not actually deal with them. You can see some evidence of this in the way nostalgia was popularly defined in the time before we had dictionaries in our pockets: broadly. Its hint of classical, distant authority allowed writers to indulge some poetry, misdefining it in ways that nevertheless captured the ethereal import of the subject: a generic ‘overwhelming yearning’ or the ‘tragic pain of loss.’ (The TV series Mad Men, set in the sixties, captures this perfectly when its central character, Don Draper, claims nostalgia is Greek for ‘the pain from an old wound.’) Windbag Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was purported to have told a crowd at the ribbon-cutting of some major project in the sixties that he was ‘looking to the future with nostalgia,’ which either suggests that the word was widely understood enough that he thought he could be clever or – more probably, based on Daley’s reputation – that it was widely known but still vaguely understood as a kind of longing.
Even if people were fuzzy on the exact Greek roots, nostalgia as a concept was solidified in the popular consciousness by the time of Davis’s book: he neatly summed it up in his title, Yearning for Yesterday. It was a strong enough force that Davis openly wonders if the seventies represented some kind of peak in nostalgic feeling. Though he himself admits that this would be impossible to measure and that nostalgia was probably universal anyway, he makes a compelling case that the seventies was at least a boom time for open use of the term: ‘nostalgia shops,’ a sort of midpoint between antique stores and thrift stores, were a staple of retail streets; book clubs and sports memorabilia suppliers openly branded themselves with ‘nostalgia’ in their names; there was even a periodical, Liberty, whose tag line was ‘The Nostalgia Magazine’ and that consisted solely of reprinted articles from its original run, which had ended in the early forties.
If the word nostalgia is no longer novel enough to be used as branding, its presence in our collective consciousness has certainly not diminished any since Davis’s day. If we complain about Hollywood strip-mining our nostalgia for an easy buck, or if we post pictures of nineties toys under a hashtag, everyone knows roughly what we’re talking about. We don’t even really need to conjecture here: nostalgia is ubiquitous enough to have been repeatedly studied by psychologists around the world, and their findings confirm that we all think the word means roughly the same thing. The largest study, pulling in more than 1,800 students from seventeen culturally and geographically diverse countries, found that people associate nostalgia primarily with memories and the past, and that these memories are almost all fond ones. Underneath this surface understanding, nostalgia generally provokes a certain sense of happiness, but for almost everyone it is strongly tinted with a sense of longing or loss – and often, of course, a desire to return. If asked, most of us basically define nostalgia as bittersweet memory.
Even that, though, is not precisely accurate: the tastes aren’t properly mixed, except in retrospect. They are more shot and chaser than one large gulp. Nostalgia is sweet, finding its undertones of bitterness only when we become aware again that it is about our memories – snapshots of a time we can never relive, outlines of a home that has been wiped from the map. It’s this aspect that gives nostalgia both its mystery and its meaning: why on earth should we feel this way? What part of our humanity demands that we should be not just drawn toward our past but pulled so hard that it pains us? Why is this phenomenon so important that we had to rehabilitate a disorder just so that we might adequately express it?
However much we like to claim that it’s a modern condition or the sole province of the wilfully deluded, there is every evidence that nostalgia is indeed a universal part of the human condition: a setting to be toggled, not a trait that can be picked up or discarded. Eckart Frahm, professor of Assyriology at Yale, estimates that nostalgic writings started showing up about two hundred years after Sumerians developed a codified language – just enough time for sufficiently old records to accumulate that people might start feeling like their own time was missing something. And that’s only nostalgia on a societal scale: as we’ll explore in more depth in Chapter 3, art is littered with nostalgic feeling from its earliest days – it was prevalent enough to make up a whole subcategory of Greek storytelling, after all. And being aware enough of the feeling to name it has done nothing to diminish its prevalence: another batch of psychological studies found that roughly three-quarters of people feel nostalgic at least once a week. They’re the median of a population that leans heavily toward nostalgia: more than a quarter of people reported feeling nostalgic at least three to four times a week, while only 4 percent claimed it happened less than once a month.
What is it, though, that sends us yearning backward? Often as not, it is simply interaction with something from our past: sometimes that is as simple as the smell or taste of a madeleine, though slightly more often it is the presence of another person – many nostalgic memories are centred on family, friends, and other significant people in our life, although that probably has more to do with how we value social connections than with some underlying quirk of our memory. This is understandable but feels a little inadequate: of course we will remember things, but why should we yearn for them when we know we can’t ever get them back? The answer might lie in what actually appears to be the most common trigger for nostalgia: feeling bad.
It would be wonderful to have some grander explanation, but here we are. In terms of the spectrum of bad feelings, loneliness seems to be the most common trigger, but really any sort of vaguely baddish mood will do, from anger or feeling threatened right on down to simple boredom. (Perhaps I shouldn’t sell boredom short: psychologist Clay Routledge theorizes that it might prime nostalgia because bored people are tapping into the grander existential angst that comes from lacking purpose.) The basic idea is that by casting our thoughts backward to a time when we weren’t feeling bad, we find some comfort, or maybe more importantly some steel, to help us carry on. To use loneliness as our example, it seems that when we’re feeling isolated, we have a reflex to think back to fine times with friends and family, reminding ourselves that we have been surrounded by love and companionship before and presumably will be again. We are, in effect, turning our past into our present – even giving ourselves a tenable future – by reminding ourselves that we are still that person who was not so lonely, not so long ago.
As far as we can trust the psychologists, their findings are a curious reversal of nostalgia’s origins. In labelling it a disease, Hofer assumed nostalgia was the cause of its subjects’ physical maladies and psychological distresses, when, even then, it was the result of them. People felt bad and so longed for the last time they felt good – which, given the limits of sixteenth-century life, was almost inevitably the last time they were at home; their problem wasn’t necessarily that they were away from home, just that they were currently miserable. The psychologists’ conception of nostalgia does fit in quite nicely with several of the reigning theories of nostalgia from more contemporary figures, though: the postmodernist search for authenticity tracks, for instance, if we’re to assume