Page 16 - Ruminations

14. Nostalgia and its discontents

One can be exiled without feeling much nostalgia for one’s time
and place of origin, if such a change of scene—voluntary or not—was
considerably for the better. That ought to be distinct from nostalgia
for childhood, which can arise with or without exile; nevertheless,
unpleasant early memories (if not repressed) would leave no rosy glow
regardless of physical displacement. The worst combination of events
would be misery in youth, followed by a disastrous departure and
subsequent wretched refugee or immigrant experience in adulthood.
The combinations of those variables could be ranked by their
presumed strength of nostalgia, from high to low:

Childhood Exile Adulthood
------------ ------ ------------
Happy Yes Unhappy
Happy No Unhappy
Happy Yes Happy
Happy No Happy
Unhappy No Happy
Unhappy Yes Happy
Unhappy No Unhappy
Unhappy Yes Unhappy

Complicating matters, it has been proposed that nostalgia is felt not
for what one has lost, but for what either was not one’s own
experience or what in fact did not happen at all. This relates to false
memories and cultural idiosyncrasy—but what matters is that one
feels loss, in the present, of something important. Could that welling-
up of emotion be charged by fear of another anticipated loss—one’s
own death and disappearance in the future? The resonance is a simple
analogy the unconscious but empathetic mind would reasonably make.
And it is probable that this loss (of oneself, post mortem) may not
seem “real” to anyone else in that ambiguous sense of nostalgia. Thus
I am my own chief mourner before the fact, having experienced my
future absence in imagination countless times after inventing
numerous scenarios of my demise and its aftermath, most of which
are unlikely. The cure for this—and for nostalgia, in general—is either
belief in an afterlife, in which significant pieces of the past can be
revisited, or certainty in the reality of an infinite, eternal space-time
continuum, in which no pieces of the past (or future) are missing.