On Nostalgia. David Berry
Davis – who was by trade a sociologist, and included anecdotal but deep interviews in his studies – theorizes that nostalgia works as a way of helping us consolidate our identity, and we are especially prone to it when that sense of identity is under threat. There may be a bit of a chicken-and-egg question with regard to threatened identity or diminished authenticity and feeling shitty, but either way the outcome would presumably be the same: nostalgia as a balm, a way to get us back on our feet.
Whichever level we are considering it on, the fact that nostalgia is as much coping mechanism as reflexive condition might help explain why modern nostalgia, despite having shed its diseased origins, is often treated dismissively or with suspicion. Nostalgia can be a fairly benign reaction – a warm memory at the smell of freshly baked cookies – but just as often it might be properly understood as a sign of distress: a lonely, depressed person flailing about for their last notions of happiness. That is slightly overstating things: by most accounts, nostalgia is a fleeting experience, a few short moments or maybe a night of reminiscing among friends. It works its restorative or melancholy magic and moves on. But that’s all the more reason why someone or something who seems pervasively nostalgic might make us uncomfortable: somewhere deep down, we know they are trying to cope with some void of meaning or motivation, and it’s easier for us to mock the crutch and keep our distance than to confront their despair and risk having it provoke a similar void in ourselves. Or perhaps it burrows down even deeper than that. Maybe the mere existence of a pervasive and inescapable tendency to fling ourselves into the comforts of our past is a general reminder that meaning and identity are more elusive than we are willing to admit, hard to grasp and harder to hold on to, and so we have plenty of reason to feel disconnected from our very selves, without even getting into the rest of humanity.
In fairness here, it’s not just impending existential crisis that leaves us uneasy with our tendency toward nostalgia (though that’s probably the way I would vote). Even among those who defend nostalgia, even as a coping mechanism, there is a pervasive sense that, whatever nostalgia’s benefits, it involves an inherently blinkered view of our own past. Nostalgia is in a real sense dishonest – if not actively, then in that slipperier lie-by-omission way, not really giving us the whole truth about what came before. This is a more solid charge, if only for the fact that almost everyone is nostalgic about their past, even if those pasts strike us as objectively horrible: people who lived smack in the middle of the Depression, the Blitz of London, rampant civil unrest, meaningful threat of nuclear war, repressive police states – almost anything up to genocide (depending which side you were on) – will often describe those times in glowing terms, or at least pluck the tiniest shard of rose-coloured glass from the ashes and let it redeem the rest (‘Sure we were starving, but people stuck together back then’). Davis found nostalgic recollection inherently dishonest; he noted that most of his subjects at some point engaged in what he called ‘reflexive nostalgia,’ wherein they openly questioned their own nostalgic recollections – usually immediately after sharing them. He didn’t seem to fully appreciate how the presence of an accomplished sociologist openly probing them might affect how people try to be perceived: relatively few sessions of reminiscence, with or without other people, end with us disavowing the whole thing as BS to make ourselves feel better. (Davis also detailed a further layer of nostalgia, interpreted nostalgia, which he described as analytical questions about nostalgia – ‘Why am I feeling nostalgic now? What is the purpose of nostalgia?’ – which I can say from personal experience is profoundly rare among people who are not actively researching nostalgia or being questioned by people who are actively researching nostalgia.)
Regardless of how reflexive we ourselves might be, we are acutely aware of how warped other people’s nostalgia often is. This is not without cause: if anything, we are probably not nearly suspicious enough of how inadequate our memories really are. The most common demonstration of our faulty recollections is flashbulb memories, the tendency people have to vividly remember major events while also somehow getting virtually all of the details wrong. The most studied event in relation to this phenomenon is 9/11; there have been at least two dozen studies of people’s memories of that event and how they have changed since. In these and related studies, researchers will talk to people relatively soon after an event, having them record what they were doing; the researchers will then return after a year or two or five or ten, and ask them to share the story again. Almost inevitably, the stories have changed dramatically – but the rememberers are so sure of their current version of events that they tend to accuse the researchers of lying, right down to forging handwriting or faking voice recordings. Their memories are not just supplanted, they are supplanted with impossibly vivid but wildly inaccurate ones – at least outside the basic facts of planes hitting buildings and the like.
Though they are generally attached to significant collective experiences, flashbulb memories are not so different from anything we would call a memory. For almost anything to stick in our head for any length of time, there has to be a reasonably strong emotional experience attached to it. Partly this is because the more apparently meaningful an experience is, the more we will return to it, and that repetition, the frequent firing of neurological pathways, is important to storing memory. (This is the sense in which Hofer was generally right about how the mind forms memories, and in particular why memories that are frequently revisited will be so vivid they might seem to block out more recent experiences.) But it appears that powerfully emotional experiences will also retroactively enhance memories, bringing what had appeared to be background information to the fore. If one of your coworkers unexpectedly asks you out, for instance, that experience will cause related things that might have escaped your notice before to seem more vivid: you will remember an awkward elevator ride, or a compliment in a meeting, that had previously faded into the background hum of life. It’s an idea that rings true if you attempt to plumb your memory – try to vividly recall a specific day’s commute from three years ago, or eating an average sandwich. Outside of the things we don’t generally consider memories – reflexive, rote stuff like riding a bike or tying a shoe – there really isn’t any such thing as an unemotional memory.
In and of itself, this would be a biasing factor for our past: our memory is all extremes. We are naturally going to forget the humdrum, and even for that matter the mildly to majorly unpleasant or the only somewhat exciting. Barring the most traumatic experiences, which force their recollection on us, we are likely biased toward generally pleasant memories, too, as we’ll tend to replay those more often. But as the flashbulb memories demonstrate so clearly, it increasingly appears that not only do we plainly forget a lot of our experience, but we profoundly alter what is left. Recent research by the likes of Karim Nader and others, in fact, seems to suggest not only that we have the potential to alter our memories almost every time we recall them, but that it might actually be impossible for us to recall something without altering it in some way. The brain, far from remaining fixed, apparently returns to something like the original state it was in the first time the memory was recorded, with the potential to be subtly rewritten if it’s given the appropriate cues: say, another person sharing their experience on 9/11, or maybe, as has been attempted with PTSD patients with some success, a therapist helping throttle the emotions associated with the memory. It’s akin to walking across a snowy field: the first time you do so, you create an obvious path. The next day, the wind has covered it with a light dusting: the outline may be obvious, but because your balance is a bit shakier or you’re walking with a friend or you’re looking at your phone, you can never quite replicate the exact steps. Walk it enough, with enough tiny shifts, and the path ends up in an entirely different place, but still looks, from the end, like the same one you started with.
Considering all this, you’d be absolutely right to accuse nostalgics of yearning for a past that isn’t there. Between our need for reassurance and our tendency to subtly and (mostly) unwittingly alter our most meaningful memories – which is to say, virtually all of them – we are left with a feedback loop that would gradually but persistently turn our own past into a perfect shining gem, precisely the memory we need to get us back on our feet and out in the world, regardless of its relationship to what ‘actually’ happened. But mistrusting our nostalgic tendency in this case seems entirely beside the point. Left to ourselves, we have no meaningful way to separate our basic, unyearned-for memories from the rose-coloured memories we associate with nostalgia; limited by its mechanics and our need to maintain a coherent, motivated self, our memory inherently creates