Nostalgia

 

I will avoid the joke of it not being what it used to be，but in fact my thoughts about nostalgia have rather changed since reading a couple of books about cognition and time.

I am currently heading up to Manchester, where I was a student nearly 50 years ago. I have clear memories about how good the beer was in Manchester back then, and will see if it still tastes good. There are other nostalgic memories, almost always of good things but I suppose you can also have nostalgia for bad things too, like how cold the student houses were in Winter.

But I have recently read two books which made me think about the importance of memory for our sense of self. From one point of view, we are literally constructed from our memories, and all the stories that we tell about ourselves are there to support that sense of self. We write the story of our lives from between our ears, and the actual fact of what happened in the past could be a bit incidental. It's less about the past and more about the present

It's also worth considering what a 19-year-old ingenu has to do with a 66-year-old pensioner. I know we have the same National Insurance Number, but are we in any sense the same person? So even if I enjoyed things then, should I feel a false affection for things that I wouldn't enjoy now?

For a long time and since those student days, I declared that my favourite novel was Nostrimo by Joseph Conrad. But when I went back to it ten years ago, it didn't stir me at all. The same could be true of music, food, clothes and politics. People change and mature/age and they like different things.

But nostalgia is still appealing - especially for elements of our childhood. We can taste the food, remember what we watched on TV, and remember the emotional atmosphere of our childhood home, for good or for ill. We can remember if we felt bored or excited or loved. And because it is apparent that two people, even siblings, can have very different views of the same events, doesn't that mean that it is our interpretation of memories and events that really matters?

So those who own the present own the past, and the real purpose of nostalgia is to confirm who we think we are?