'And to Remember Is to Feel It'

“Is there any greater joy possible than to recall grief—and to remember is to feel it—in time of felicity? Does not the freed prisoner feel nostalgia for his prison? Does he not miss his former dreams of freedom?” 

If understood as sentimentalizing the past, a longing for a Golden Age that never existed, nostalgia is seductive and repellent. It suggests “homesickness” and in the nineteenth century was a recognized medical diagnosis. Since then, the meaning has been watered down to a “wistful yearning for the past.” Based on every conversation I have with my brother, I think there’s another way to understand nostalgia.

 

When we talk, each of us is flooded with memories, some involuntary and formerly only latent, and in that sense Proustian. Both of us are blessed with ample memories. One inspires the next, which starts a chain of associations. On Sunday, I asked if he remembered the German bakery near our house where we bought rye bread. At one end of each loaf – the “heel” – the baker stuck a postage stamp-sized label with the bakery’s name into the dough before it went into the oven. My brother and I would argue over who would claim it, for no good reason I can recall other than not wanting the other guy to get it.

 

I love these trivial, meaningless, “wistful” memories, as does my brother, but this pleasure has nothing to do with homesick yearning. I have no wish to return to that bakery. There’s no regression to a childish state. I recognize the past for what it was, and not all of it was rosy. Ultimately, even our personal pasts, including their attractiveness, remain mysteries never to be solved. These random, unattached memories are precious to us only because they are ours. Otherwise, they are worthless, of no interest to others.

 

The passage quoted at the top is from Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (1912; trans. Anthony Kerrigan, 1972). Unamuno is inverting Francesca's statement in Inferno, Canto V: “There is no greater sorrow, / Than to think backwards to a happy time, / When one is miserable.” (trans. C.H. Sisson, 1980.)