“Hypochondria of the Heart”

Today, we no longer hope for a cure (for nostalgia). The “passing ailment” has turned into “the incurable modern condition,” writes Boym. “The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia,” she writes, “and ended with nostalgia.”Globalization and the accelerated pace of modern life have deepened nostalgic longings. “Nostalgia tries to slow down time, to resist progress,” Boym says.

Politically and personally, “Nostalgia can involve forgetting trauma,” she declares. “The past can’t be recaptured, and it never really was the way you recall it. Homesickness can also be ‘sickness of home.’ We are nostalgic for our idyllic school days, but we forget that some days, we hated our school.”

Boym distinguishes two types of nostalgia. “Reflective nostalgia,” while grounded in longing, contemplating, and remembering, does not attempt to restore the past. “You don’t deny your longing, but you reflect on it somehow,” she says. “It’s a positive force that helps us explore our experience, and can offer an alternative to an uncritical acceptance of the present.”

In contrast, Boym sees danger in “restorative nostalgia,” which “is not about memory and history but about heritage and tradition. It’s often an invented tradition–a dogmatic, stable myth that gives you a coherent version of the past. Generally it’s far removed in time, even prehistoric, as in the German myths that Wagner used for his operas.”

While she favors globalization, she prefers a model that is not solely a function of popular culture and import-export economics. Such “globalization with a human face” might include time off from the treadmill of progress. One value of reflective nostalgia, Boym says, is its defense of idleness and of recapturing leisure time. “Time is money,” she says, “but we want time that is not money.”

Boym was here a while ago on the Penn campus to give a talk on nostalgia, Arendt, Kafka and Shklovsky. What struck me from the talk was that the paradox of the human condition manifests itself in nostalgia. If observation and experience are the two modes which we construct our sense of reality with, we are slung forth-and-back between closeness and distance. What distinguises the two, however, is that closeness can, in blisfull ignorance, live without the knowledge of distance, while distance always knows it lacks and lost its closeness. The more distant you feel, the stronger the nostalgia. If you allow nothing to hurt you, you effectively stop feeling – the only thing that remains then is, nostalgia, the memory of the loss of feeling.