'The Past Is a Work of Art'

An unlikely, seemingly trivial premise can inspire a memorable essay (or poem, or novel, I assume). In “The Duke and the Butcher,” Theodore Dalrymple laments the retirement of his butcher in France and feels “almost aggrieved” by the news. “Even small changes,” he writes, “now disturb me,” which prompts the following meditation:

“[N]ostalgia generally has had a bad reputation, especially among intellectuals, who regard it both as a refusal to face reality head on and as a dishonest romanticisation of the past; but this seems to me quite wrong. A man who can reach a certain age—I cannot be precise as to what age—without experiencing nostalgia must have had a pretty wretched existence. He cannot recall the irrecoverable past with that mixture of pleasure and sorrow that is nostalgia; he can regret the passing of nothing good.”

I remain skeptical of nostalgia but seduced by it with growing frequency. Last week my  brother sent me a photograph I didn’t know even existed – Miss Gertrude Martin’s fourth-grade class photo taken on the stage in the gymnasium at Pearl Road Elementary School on September 29, 1961. I am, as usual, being the tallest kid in class, in the back row. Of the twenty-six kids in the picture, I remember the names of twelve. To my right is the first boy I knew who was sent to “reform school.” To my left is the first girl I knew who got pregnant, four or five years later. I remember both of their names and haven’t seen either of them in almost sixty years.

Seeing these familiar faces reminds me that many are probably dead. Drugs, Vietnam, cancer and age have no doubt claimed them. As Donald Justice writes: “Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.” There’s a small part of me that wishes I could talk to some of them and ask about their lives, the proud moments and failures. This is nostalgia – not a wish to live in the past but to hear from it and learn some of its secrets. In the front row, standing behind the sign identifying our class, is a boy I remember only as Terry, who had polio and wore heavy legs braces of cast metal held in place with leather straps. And there’s Lynn Kilbane, the first girl who ever kissed me and whom I met again almost two years ago at my fifty-first high-school reunion. In “Lytton Strachey,” Max Beerbohm finds “a great charm in the past” and writes:

“Time, that sedulous artist, has been at work on it, selecting and rejecting with great tact. The past is a work of art, free from irrelevancies and loose ends. There are, for our vision, comparatively few people in it, and all them are interesting people. The dullards have all disappeared—all but those whose dullness was so pronounced as to be in itself for us an amusing virtue. And in the past there is so blessedly nothing for us to worry about. Everything is settled. There’s nothing to be done about it—nothing but to contemplate it and blandly form theories about this or that aspect of it.”