The Past Is Never Dead. It Isn't Even Past.

In my current position, I'm tasked with the goal of convincing highly distracted, unconfident college students to write effective, argumentative essays over a variety of topics. Some days, that task is more enjoyable than others. Admittedly, I could make my job much easier by employing topics of discussion that are more accessible to a group of inexperienced 19 year-olds. I could talk about current events. I could design units around high-stakes-but-well-worn topics like abortion, gay marriage, and legalizing marijuana. I could even look to appropriate the work of my colleagues and simply try out curricular flavors of the month. I don't, though. I ask students to write about topics that produce papers I'm interested to read.

Yesterday, we framed a discussion in around the misplaced presence of revisionism in certain historical accounts, thus calling those accounts' veracity or academic usefulness into question. I'm not going to bore you with the details, but the bulk of the lesson involved discussing two wildly divergent accounts for the origin of "the separation of church and state," in the hopes that the students might see these accounts as politically motivated narratives as much as they see them as important records of the past.

What made the lesson fun for me was that we eventually worked our way around to a discussion of one of my favorite topics: nostalgia. Nostalgia comes from two Greek root words, nostos and algia, which almost literally translates into "an ache or pain to return home" or "homesick." Originally coined as a term to describe the specific sadness that soldiers felt after having spent too much time away from home, the term has broader connotations now.

In essence, nostalgia describes a bittersweet longing for things, people, and situations of the past. These constantly fall from the immediacy of the present into a vast, deep pool of memories from which most never reemerge. The ones that do are fawned over, polished, repaired, restored, and worn smooth by the constant tracing of our fingers on their bodies. Our minds are amazing in their capacity to recall, but they're still faulty when asked to reliably and completely record important moments. Our memories are incomplete, not at all safe from alteration, or sometimes even pointlessly clung to, despite having no useful purpose. Maybe that's why I remember most of the lyrics to "Mr. Wendal" by Arrested Development, but I often can't remember what I was going to the store to buy.

"Aiaiaiaiahhhaiaiaiaiahaa!" I forget the rest.

I'm fascinated by nostalgia and the romanticized past, not simply because I see it commodified all around me, but also because I feel it with greater frequency as I grow older. I'm old enough now to have remarked grimly when I saw a familiar building razed or when I endured a pop metal concert and realized how out of place I was in that scene. But there's more to nostalgia than the simple, innocuous romanticization of 90's music or old McDonaldland playgrounds.

Over Spring Break, I spent a few days back in my hometown, doing some yard work for my aging father and trying to catch up with my ever-evolving mother during her busy weekend. I don't live far from home, just a little over two and a half hours away, and yet I only return once or twice a year. After returning home from a failed attempt at college in December of 1998, I left town permanently in the fall of 1999, never to reside there again. It isn't that I hate my hometown. It's a strangely beautiful and charming place. Like most young people though, the need to venture forth was overwhelming and I couldn't resist the call away.

I fled from this place to spend the next two years with a bunch of backsliding baptists

 in the unquestionable cultural mecca that is Shawnee, OK.

Usually, I'm accompanied on these trips by my own family and my sense of nostalgia is muted and tolerated, so long as it takes the form of "taking the scenic route" so I can drive by a few familiar places on the way to our intended destination. This time, the universe saw fit to send me on my own, which allowed for a different experience than I would normally have had. Most visits back home feel like tiptoeing through a graveyard, where everything seems incredibly familiar and irreducibly out of reach. Seeing my childhood house always stings more than I'd care to admit, mostly because it was leveled in the late 80's and the land sold to a neighbor who used it to build a garage.

Happier, less complicated times, where bellies could protrude unapologetically.

And yes, I'm on the wrong side of the garden fencing. 

  What the lot looks like today. There's a little pile of bricks in the back left corner.

They're the same ones you see in the picture above. Sad-face.

It isn't that the house was particularly wonderful or worth saving. It wasn't. It was small, stuffy, and had a terribly leaky roof. There was an old attic fan for cooling parts of the house, but it was so incredibly loud and unsettling that I hated having it turned on. When we finally left the house, it was quickly condemned and razed by the bank because of its uninhabitable condition. The land itself was literally worth more than the structure built upon it and yet, every time I see the the lot, nostalgia floods my mind.

When I can, I try to take stock of whatever situation I'm in. It leads to a great deal of awkward, highly personal recollection and second guessing myself. You would think that with as often as I do that, both in the flow of life and here on this blog, I'd make more affirmative, smart personal decisions, but you'd be wrong. Usually, reflecting on nostalgia leads me to a sort of omphaloskeptical loop, where the value of the insight is inversely correlated to the time spent seeking it. I felt like this time needed to be different. While it's true that I did my share of driving about and even a little bit of aimless walking after seeing the old lot, I mostly took the time to engage in a different type of quiet, solitary reflection.

Nostalgia is dangerous. It makes us believe that the past was better and brighter than it truly might have been. Time passes and our shifting contexts lead us to the idea that there was some better time, back in the expanding fog of our past, that marked a high point. Over time, we come to hold that idea to dearly that it becomes a belief. A brick, stolen in the dead of night in the summer of 1999, takes on almost magical qualities as it becomes a focal point of a mistaken belief in a golden age, a paradise lost in the painfully unfair process of growing up. A process which, to many, feels final and irreversible.

The first task my students had in class today was to respond to a famous Faulkner quote, from Requiem for a Nun, that states "The past is never dead. It isn't even past." Most students responded by saying that the past is a part of each of us individually because we're built from our past experiences. A smaller percentage of students responded with notions about the past always being an active part of how we make decisions in the present, thus keeping it from passing, being irrelevant, or truly dying. This response also makes a great deal of sense and I'm proud of their insight. In nearly every class, there's always one student that reads the aforementioned quote and reaches a different conclusion about the past not being dead.

 Faulkner, on the other hand, is as dead as disco. But onward, dear reader.

Instead of the past being built into our emotional genetics or an omnipresent phantom guiding our decisions, they see the past as always available for revision and alteration. Because of nostalgia and our need to inscribe upon the past our current reevaluation of it, our recollection is always subject to change and reinterpretation. This doesn't necessarily mean that individuals are given free reign to fabricate an entire past that has only the most tenuous connection to reality, but it does mean that the past is open to new understanding and therefore, transformation.


For just as much as we can revisit the past and feel its bittersweet venom poison our ability to enjoy living while we can, We're also able to use nostalgia to rescue ourselves from being stuck with solely one version of our past. The only story of my past doesn't have to be one marked by homesickness and longing for the good ol' days. There's another story, a brighter past, one that doesn't sting as badly at times. There's a story of trying to sell old socks and random junk to passersby on an old card table, as if I were a little misguided entrepreneur. There's a story of how I consistently ate roly-poly bugs off the sidewalk or climbed on top of the house, only to jump off and land in the soft, green grass that awaited me. There's a story of how my bell bottom jeans became entangled in the chain of my bike, which turned my first solo ride around the block into a spectacular and painful crash. There's even a story about how I vividly and sincerely believed that King Kong was just behind the trees in my backyard and if I was too loud, he'd hear me and come eat me.

There are a thousand other stories, all equally nostalgic, and all equally infused with the power to save the past from its solitary confinement behind the walls of one single, bittersweet recounting of events that didn't even originate in my own mind. Perhaps, instead of all this indulgent electronic reflection, it's time to tell a few of those stories and reanimate the past.