Nostalgia v Memory (and The Whistling Season)

Oct 8

“The Rembrandt light of memory, finicky and magical and faithful at the same time, as the cheaper tint of nostalgia never is.” — The Whistling Season (Ivan Doig)

I write about nostalgia sometimes as I explore homesickness. After all, “nostos” = “home” and “algos” = “pain.” You know, that sort of tuggy feeling you get in your heart when you think of a place or person. A yearning, a longing, a sense that something’s missing or — conversely — yet to be realized.

And I do think Ivan Doig is on to something here. “Nostalgia” can be self-serving and false. Nostalgia (ie “the good ol’ days”) can act as a booster to propaganda, and it can be simplified and commodified. But memory? That’s ours to keep. Our memories may (surely!) be faulty, but they’re mediated by ourselves instead of outside influences…such as technology.

I’ve slowly been posting excerpts from my writing on homesickness to my website. I put up the latest — titled Incorporate — about a month ago, and it’s a bit about those once-ubiquitous location-specific Facebook groups (“You knew you grew up in X if…”) and how our ideas of what constitutes the “best” era of a certain place is informed not just by what our own experiences were/are, but also as a reaction to progress — whether that progress be positive or negative. (Eye of the beholder and all that…) You can take a look-see at alifelyread.com; the other essays I have posted are titled Motherlands, Banana Yoshimoto and E.B. White are in Our Heads, and Me and Jeff Bezos. Take a gander! (I also find that I’m writing more and more about Amazon in this project, so that seems appropriate to mention given that today is yet another Prime Day?!)

{But back to Ivan Doig: If you read my parents’ ‘Shelfies’ — you can read that on my website too! — you’ll see that they are both Ivan Doig fans. I read The Whistling Season at their recommendation, and I now recommend it too…particularly if you’re a fan of Leif Enger, Marilynne Robinson, Wendell Berry, Kent Haruf…)