`Only a Wise Man Can Create the Past'

I first rode on a train when I was 20 years old, in France, yet I feel nostalgia for this mode of travel I hardly know. Of course, I feel as though I know it through music – blues and early country – and through Westerns and film noir. Trains seem civilized and human-scaled, and the sound of a train at night evokes pangs of American lonesomeness, which is not the same as loneliness. Eric Ormsby seems to share similar sentiments. His “Railways Stanzas,” from For a Modest God, begins as I began: “I have always found railway stations sad./The aura of departure lingers there.” The thought, inevitably, prompts further thoughts of “leavetakings I’ve known.” However, Ormsby is leery of easy reveries. He begins the fifth of his five 12-line stanzas like this:

“I do not write this from nostalgia.
I who once revered as a mercy of
certitude the benignity of fact
am skeptical of every reverie
that leads me backward into dubious time.”

This, too, I share: nostalgia mingled with suspicion of its unearned charms. After 35 years I am rereading Bend Sinister (1947), the first novel Nabokov wrote in the United States. This, too, is indulgence in nostalgia, for it’s minor Nabokov, a valley between the looming peaks of The Defense and The Gift in the past and those of Lolita and Pale Fire unimaginable in the future. But I enjoy Bend Sinister for its own modest charms and for those I discovered on first reading it. In the second chapter, as the philosopher Adam Krug, having left his dying wife in the hospital, is roughed up by government goons on patrol, he tells one of them:

“Anyone can create the future but only a wise man can create the past.”

The line might serve as Nabokov’s vision distilled. Memory is an imaginative faculty. If I wish, I can fondly recall riding on trains I never climbed aboard, and I’m reading the same edition of Bend Sinister I first read in 1972 – the Time Reading Program paperback from 1964, with stiff cardboard covers, a post-Lolita introduction by the author, and the price ($1.25) written in green ink on the first page by the proprietor of a forgotten book sale. On Sunday I cracked the spine and shards of 43-year-old glue spilled on my lap. Donald Justice, the great American chronicler of nostalgia, would have understood. His work is a career-long anatomy of the treasures and traps of memory. Here, from his first book (The Summer Anniversaries, 1960), is “On the Death of Friends in Childhood”:

“We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.”