'Our Self-Important Postures'

My middle son, a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, is visiting for a few days. The conversation turned to nostalgia. He’s young and contemptuous, as I used to be. He used the verb I would have used: “wallow.” The young believe in the future. Nostalgia represents a used-up yesterday, a distraction from today’s important business. 

The word arrived in English in the eighteenth century, though our modern sense evolved late in the nineteenth. The OED defines that usage as “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past.” In other words, an unearned longing for something that likely never existed, a comforting pipedream.

 

But memories are precious as we get older. I don’t cherish some mythical Golden Age in my life or the world’s. Memories can be a goad to gratitude – the teachers who encouraged us, friends and lovers, family now gone. In the closet are boxes of old letters, photographs, clippings of newspaper stories I wrote almost half a century ago, a copy of the underground paper that published my review of Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973. I keep these things, in part, to remind me how fortunate I have been. And how foolish.

 

Timothy Steele concludes his poem “Old Letters” (Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986) after warning us “to adjust / Our self-important postures,” like this:

 

“Likewise, to return the letters finally

   Back to wherever they belong

Is to admit how much of life's gone wrong

Because of vanity and discontent,

   And is as well to envy

Those who refuse to hunger for event

And who accept the wisely unbegun,

Just wishing decently to get through life

And trying not to injure anyone.”