'An Emotion I Must Have Been Inventing'

“I am a nostalgist. More susceptible to the pull of the past than many of those around me, I am also aware of my condition, even somewhat ashamed of it.” 

Rarely does someone speak so precisely for me. Boris Dralyuk is writing in “On Nostalgia: Ever Cleaner, Ever More Pillowy.” Few states leave me as conflicted as nostalgia. Every day my thoughts turn to the past. It’s as involuntary as a heart attack. Is this associated with aging? Of course. Nostalgia is misunderstood as a wish to return to the past or at least flee from the present. That’s not my desire. In fact, nostalgia is made more piercingly bittersweet by the knowledge that you can’t return, that even the sweetest, most vivid memory is a dream.

 

In 1968, in a mall bookstore, I bought three Washington Square Press paperbacks in a series devoted to Great American Thinkers: John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen and George Santayana (75¢ each). The first two I quickly discarded. They had nothing for me and still don’t. I was learning from scratch and chose these books for no reasons I can solidly remember. The Santayana volume was written by Willard E. Arnett.

 

Now I’ve ordered a used copy and I'm rereading it. The first printing is dated March 1968. Thus far I’ve experienced two moments of nostalgic déjà vu: Arnett’s mention in the introduction of Santayana’s problematical American identity (he was born in Spain of Spanish parents and never became an American citizen), and the epigraph he places at the top of Chapter 9, “Art, Beauty, Meaning, and Value.” It’s from Reason in Art (volume IV of The Life of Reason, published in 1905): “. . . the effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.” It’s Santayana’s choice of “eternal” that thrills and bothers me.

 

As I read, I see that odd, under-socialized sixteen-year-old kid reading in his bedroom, in an otherwise nearly bookless house in the Cleveland suburbs. Santayana welcomed me to the literary life that year, as did Eric Hoffer and Bernard Malamud. Just writing their names, writers I’ve loved and reread for almost sixty years, floods me with warm nostalgia – the good stuff, not the delusional. I sympathize with that kid. He had no idea how fortunate he was and how he was changing his life forever. I’m still reading Santayana.

 

In his essay, Boris quotes two of my favorite American poets – Edwin Arlington Robinson and Donald Justice. Four years before his death in 2004, Justice conducted a lengthy interview with the English writer and scholar Philip Hoy, and in 2001 the edited interview was published as a book by Between the Lines. He spoke softly in an age when too many poets shrieked. The interview is thoughtful and nostalgic but never toothless. Here is n anecdote he recounts that comes close to defining the nature of nostalgia for some of us. It’s a memory of his 1982 return to Florida, the state where he was born, that sounds like the germ of a Justice poem:

 

“I have a distinct memory of walking out onto the golf course behind our house late one night, walking our dog, and standing there looking up at the moon as it flooded the fairway with light. Very nice. I felt touched by an emotion I must have been inventing.”