The Thing We Desire in All We Desire
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| 9/22/2006 |
People – ordinary people – think they know what nostalgia is. Who are they fooling? The only people who really know about nostalgia – who know how to dwell on the past so that it shuts out everything else in the world – are alcoholics.
Though no longer a practicing drinker, I am still very much a practicing nostalgist. My office is crammed with vintage paperback Mad books (the original Signet editions, none of those later Warner ones, thank you), packages of Sea Monkey growth food, and other such late 60s/early 70s bric-a-brac. My DVD shelves at home burst with old – and expensive -- Twilight Zone, Bugs Bunny, and Astro Boy collections.
Nor did all this start with my entry into middle age. I was nostalgic by nature even back in the days that I’m now so nostalgic for – in fact, long before I started drinking. I have a strong suspicion that I suffered from the condition at least as early as 1968, when I was six. I have a vivid memory from that year. The NASA astronauts were on TV taking their historic first steps on the moon. And I was pestering my mother, asking her to read me a few pages from one of my dinosaur books.
“In a minute,” my mother said. “Look at this important thing that’s happening on TV.”
“Why should I look at that?” I said -- or words to that effect. “The stuff in this book happened a long time ago. That stuff’s just happening… now.”
Who needed the present when you had the past to think about?
But developed as my skills in yearning for the past were, when I learned to drink they became turbo charged. As any alcoholic – or non-alcoholic drinker for that matter – knows, a drink in the hand gives one the magical capacity to leave the present and float back over times past like nothing else in the world. High school reunions, family get-togethers… With alcohol, such events become more than simple social gatherings: they become virtual séances in which the spirit of the past is actually – for better or worse – conjured up.
At heart, nostalgia is about longing. Longing for what? For something the writer Peter Kreeft once memorably called “the thing we desire in all we desire.” The past speaks to us. And what it says (in the words of Marcel Proust, the arch-master of all literary nostalgiasts) is this: “Grasp me as I flit by you, if you have strength enough, and try to solve the riddle of happiness that I put before you.” To experience a powerful moment of nostalgia is to feel what Proust called “the real self set free from the order of time.” It’s to rise up above time, really – to look down on our life in the world from a lofty yet intimate remove in which all the humdrum, opaque, and boring aspects vanish and we just see the interesting parts, stretching away into the past in an endless golden chain. As Proust, again, put it:
“It suffices that a sound once heard before, or a scent once breathed in, should be heard and breathed again, simultaneously in the present and the past, real without being actual, ideal without being abstract; then immediately, the permanent essence of things which is usually hidden, is set free, and our real self, which often had seemed dead for a long time yet was not dead altogether, awakes and comes to life as it receives the heavenly food now proffered to it. One minute delivered from the order of time creates in us, that we may enjoy it, the man delivered from the order of time.”
That might sound like a mouthful, but most drinkers, I think, will recognize the very real, very visceral experience that Proust is describing. To drink and think back on the past – as I used to love to do, often with the help of some old record or book or photo album – is to climb out of the world, and out of oneself, while at the same time remaining within them. It’s to be released from the life that, in our more mundane moments, we seem to be so stuck in, and to be allowed to appreciate it from outside – from a place where all the bad stuff can no longer reach us, and as a result suddenly doesn’t seem so bad after all.
As I mentioned, I’m still a practicing nostalgist. And the real reason I have such an over-large collection of books and knick-knacks in my home and my office is because I’m still learning to cope with the fact that I no longer have access to drugs and alcohol to achieve that journey OUT of time and the world that they once provided.
Now, as ever, I long to be “delivered from time.” But I’m also slowly getting used to the idea that there’s something to be said for learning to live down here IN time, in the present – and for not constantly seeking to be pulled up and out of it, into a past that – when I was actually there – was really just as much of a puzzle for me as this present moment is.
Recovery literature – I was quick to notice when I first got sober – dwells all but incessantly on this matter of the present, and the importance of living in it. Experienced rightly, there’s a way – if you believe all this literature – of inhabiting the present moment in such a way that we don’t yearn, constantly, to be rescued from it.
Have I figured out how to do this? One look at all the dinosaurs on my desk here at work will tell you I haven’t. But I'm trying. Though I may still not be entirely at home in the present, I believe I've put down some tent pegs. With a little more time and effort, I might just be able to call it home.
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