The Gravitational Pull of Nostalgia
Rightly understood, nostalgia is more than a delusion about the past–it is the hope for a home we have not yet know.
Review by Wilfred M. McClay
When Oscar Wilde proclaimed that sentimentality was “the bank holiday of cynicism,” a way of indulging in deep emotions without paying the price for them, he surely was taking aim at nostalgia as one of his targets. Nostalgia has acquired a thoroughly bad odor in our times, and is widely regarded as a synonym for delusionary bad faith, for the habit of averting one’s eyes from present-day ills by looking backward wistfully to an imagined past that never was, or at least never was what some fools today like to believe it was. We prefer to think of ourselves as clear-eyed, undeceived, and forward-looking moderns who live entirely in the present, and have disciplined ourselves not to seek consolation in wishful fictions about how wonderful things used to be. To wallow in nostalgia is to live neither wholly in the present nor wholly in the past, but suspended in a dreamy and self-serving twilight zone between the two.
There is undoubtedly something to this criticism, particularly at a time when nostalgia has become a veritable industry, as it has in ours, and love of the past threatens to degenerate into a shopping aisle of commercialized kitsch. Yet as the literary scholar Anthony Esolen points out in this extraordinarily beautiful and luminous study, nostalgia has a deeper and more substantive meaning that the anti-sentimentalists miss entirely—and we deny ourselves an incalculable gift by trying futilely to escape its power.
That deeper meaning is hinted at by the word nostalgia‘s etymological source, the Greek word that means “aching for home.” The gravitational pull of nostalgia, rightly understood, is one of the profoundest dispositions in our human nature, directing us back toward the place of our origins, the place where we belong, the place where we know who we are and what we are. The pull toward that place may lay dormant in us for many years. But when it comes, it comes in strength, and comes from something inside us that is denied at only a very great price.
The pull of nostalgia on our hearts is a reminder of the persisting claims on our hearts of all these things, all tugging away at once.
This insistent pull of nostalgia is a universal and recurrent theme. For Odysseus, in what would be perhaps the great foundational epic of the pre-Christian West, it was an unconquerable longing for a return to the land of Ithaca from which he had come, and to his wife and son from whom he had been cruelly separated by two decades of wars and wanderings. It was a pull so strong that it caused Odysseus to reject the offer of immortal life with his lover-jailer, the ravishingly beautiful goddess Calypso, in preference for a return to mortal life lived with his aging Penelope. It drew him to sit every day on the shore of Calypso’s beautiful island, staring out at the sea, and weeping for what he had lost, what he yearned to regain. It was not a wistful feeling, but a searing and ceaseless source of existential pain.
For Christians, the pull is toward something even more fundamental and yet complex and harder to specify. For it is a pull not only toward an earthly home that nurtures and enfolds us, a natural affection for our forebears and our spouses and children and for our place in the world, but also toward our real home, the home we have not yet inhabited, toward the lost sense of who and what we really are and will be, but which we have not (yet) ever been. The pull of nostalgia on our hearts is a reminder of the persisting claims on our hearts of all these things, all tugging away at once.
As adherents of an incarnational faith, we love the world both for what it is and for what it betokens, for the myriad beauties it evinces even in its brokenness, and for all the ways those very beauties point beyond themselves. Like prodigal children, we are directed by Esolen to go back toward the recovery of “a heritage lost.” Nor is Esolen speaking here of “cultural literacy,” or anything as denatured and functional as a long list of books and authors and topics in which “the educated person” ought to be conversant. He is speaking of something different and higher, of culture as one of the chief means “by which man makes his dwelling in time and beyond time.” The longing to go home “is also a longing not to be alone anymore,” a longing for the company not just of our contemporaries, but of the men and women of all times and places, and finally for that cloud of witnesses whose company we yearn to join and in whose ways we wish to be more fully conversant. Compared to that glorious prospect, the condition of us moderns dwelling in the horizonless “immanent frame” seems very lonely indeed.
Esolen’s wonderful book is an antidote to that self-destructiveness, a counsel against such folly, a call to embrace nostalgia rightly understood as a gauge of our capacity for sorrow, and joy, and love.
When modernity becomes pitted against this delicate but soul-sustaining web of longings, the modern project of deconstruction and disenchantment becomes not merely short-sighted, but suicidal—a directionless renunciation of the world we have inherited with all its imperfections, an empty naysaying that proves infinitely more demanding, and infinitely less rewarding, than the renunciations carried out by the ascetic saints. Esolen’s wonderful book is an antidote to that self-destructiveness, a counsel against such folly, a call to embrace nostalgia rightly understood as a gauge of our capacity for sorrow, and joy, and love. We would not be fully ourselves without it, even if it produces in us an ache for what we do not yet have. Blessed are those that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Wilfred M. McClay is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. His most recent book is Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story.
Nostalgia by Anthony Esolen was published in October 2018 by Regenery Publishing. You can purchase a copy from their website here.
