The other day, I saw on social media that my 40th high-school reunion will happen next spring. I felt a pang. This sensation passed, and while it lasted, it offered some sweetness along with a sense of loss. I would not swallow a pill that prevented similar reactions in the future. Still, it was an interesting feeling that might tell me something about my personality or even about the nature of time and identity.

I suspect that my nostalgia reflected a mistake: a desire for something impossible (backward time-travel) or a failure to appreciate the living present sufficiently. Although I would refuse a cure, I might want to assess my response critically and direct my mind differently.

Marshawn Brewer offers a brilliant “Sketch for a Phenomenology of Nostalgia” (Brewer 2023) that has influenced the following thoughts, but I’ll concentrate on exploring my own experiences and won’t try to compare my first-person account to his broader (and better informed) study.

First, I notice that nostalgia focuses me on one period from my distant past, and the rest of my life seems to vanish, in a mildly distressing fashion. When we middle-aged people think, “High school seems like yesterday!”, it feels as if there weren’t many days between then and now. This is because we cannot think about many times at once. I could make myself nostalgic about virtually any intervening year–but only one at a time. I have the momentary sensation that I’ve thrown away the intervening years; they are somehow gone.

We might assume that experiences and settings are harder to recollect the longer ago they happened, much as objects tend to be smaller and fuzzier the further they are located from our eyes. But that analogy doesn’t hold. Distant memories often come back more forcefully than recent ones. Indeed, “middle-aged and elderly people [tend] to access more personal memories from approximately 10–30 years of age” than from other times in their past (Munawar, Kuhn, and Haque 2018). From my perspective, the decades of the 30s and 40s have a disproportionate tendency to fade away.

If I pause to focus on my teenage years, a certain scene comes into my mind. The first image happens to be a meeting of the Latin Club in the cafeteria after school. This is probably a composite or partial invention, but it is based on memories. I can move from that image to innumerable others from the same period in my life, but (as Brewer notes), nostalgia quickly adopts one setting or another–a physical location that is suffused with a certain atmosphere. It would be hard to feel nostalgic without this sense of place, which connects the word to its etymology (nostos plus alpos = home-pain). Insofar as the feeling is bitter-sweet, the bitterness is a sense that one cannot go back to a place that one recalls. And if I were to return to the high school cafeteria, it would not seem to be the place that I remember.

By the way, I don’t see myself in the cafeteria; I see that room from my perspective, as if I inhabited my 17-year-old body again. I think my recollection is mostly visual, although I wonder if I am also summoning other senses. Certainly, a sound or smell can trigger nostalgia.

I was enrolled in high school for the standard four years, a brief period. However, Brewer notes that nostalgia has “an aeonic temporality” (from the word “aeon,” meaning an indefinite or very long period of time). Here Brewer cites J.G. Hart, who is worth quoting:

the time of my nostalgic past does not know a passing or fleeting character. Nostalgia is not about passing time but about eras, seasons or aeons. It is not about dates but about “times” (which in actual historical fact might have been quite long or quite short) which are enshrined in a kind of atemporal (i.e., non-fleeting) dimension : “the three days vacation with you in Wisconsin,” “our time at college,” etc. This “aeonic” character of the nostalgic world resembles the time of the mythic world. … In the nostalgic having of a non-fleeting aeon the themes of death, aging and illness are out of place (Hart 1973, pp. 406-7).

Childhood seems to have this aeonic character, perhaps in part because we gradually emerge into full awareness and the ability to use language. We cannot remember the beginning of our own childhoods. Regular events, such as birthdays, feel as if they recurred endlessly, even though we can actually celebrate no more than a dozen of our own birthdays between the onset of memory and adulthood. Parents and siblings take on an outsized and permanent or recurrent (once-upon-a-time) character. Like the gods in myths, these relatives have “back-stories” about how they came to be, but while our own story unfolds, they do not seem to change (cf. Hart, 414-15).

I write here of “we,” but I realize that experiences vary. I happen to have had a stable childhood, which would encourage my feelings of timelessness. Later, I had the opportunity to be a parent; and since then, we have watched the years when we raised our children recede–in turn–into memory. While I was a young parent, my own childhood seemed like the template or baseline reality, and I self-consciously inhabited my new role of fatherhood. At that time, my childhood seemed “aeonic,” while parenthood was a matter of specific events and changes that we adults planned or dealt with. But now that second wave of life increasingly has the same character as the first, echoing it. It is another once-upon-a-time.

Indeed, the things that I recall and miss are often my identities. At one time, I was a young guy, a novice at everything, a learner. Later, I was the dad of young kids, someone who played with Legos and read bedtime stories. I am not entitled to think of myself as either of those things anymore.

A Victorian house on a stately street,
Formal, ornate. The bell breaks the silence.
Would a gift have been wise--something to eat? 
When to shift from pleasantries to science?
A ticking clock, long rows of serious books,
China, polished wood, a distant dog barks.
Pay attention, this might have some value.
It's rude to seek help without taking advice.
Now say what you've really come for, shall you?
Then: time to go? Did our talking suffice?
Not for years now have I been the visitor.
This is my parlor and I am the grey one,
The host, the ear, the kindly inquisitor.
How can it be that it's my turn to play one?
    ("The Student," 2021)

For me, nostalgia is not really a feeling that things were better in the past. My life has tended to improve. Rather, it’s the feeling that I used to have one set of identities in one context–for instance, as a graduate student–and those are now gone.

I agree with Brewer that nostalgia involves regret for a whole situation that feels harmonious or integrated, which suggests some alienation from the present. But I can remind myself that I was mildly alienated in the past–and frequently already nostalgic in those days–and I would guess that I am more comfortable in my current identities than in my previous ones. It’s just that I can’t inhabit the old roles as well. I cannot be both the deferential but ambitious graduate student and the avuncular advisor, and I should learn to accept that reality.

We can even be nostalgic about the present. I take that to be the meaning of Basho’s lines (as translated here by Jane Hirshfield):

In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.

This is an example of mono no aware, that cultivated sense that the present is sublime and also transitory. It is a sad longing to experience what one is (in fact) experiencing.

Perhaps nostalgia-for-now is a desire to see the present in the simplified, comprehensive way that we recollect our own distant pasts. I feel that I know what it was like to be 17 years old: that identity comes to me in an instant. But what is it like to be me, now? I perceive a whole set of changing experiences, emotions, moods, and beliefs, and I’m not sure what they add up to. I want my “now” to resemble how I (falsely) imagine my past–as coherent. Hart writes:

Nostalgia is an instance of one of these unique moments of “gathering.” In it the dispersed projects of life find their unity …. We do not thematically have ourselves together; we are not perpetually in possession of ourselves. But there is a “synthesis in the making” and there are especial moments when I come to grasp my life more or less as a whole (Hart 1973, p. 405).

Nostalgia-for-the-present is a temptation for me, and I am not sure whether to accept (or even nurture) it or to learn to avoid it. Is it a way of appreciating the living moment, as Basho seems to? Or is it a neurotic distancing from the only thing that’s real–the now?

A final point of self-criticism: I believe that my pang of regret at the passing of 40 years is not only nostalgia for the past. At least as significant is my alarm that the future is shortening. Nostalgia looks backward, but one motivation (I believe–at least in my own case) is a desire to travel back to those times so that the end of my life would be further in the future. The ambitious graduate student has more years ahead than the kindly old mentor. To regret that difference is a kind of greediness, an unwise stinginess about time.

See: Marshawn Brewer, “Sketch for a Phenomenology of Nostalgia,” Human Studies 46.3 (2023): 547-563; K. Munawar, S.K, Kuhn, and S. Haque, “Understanding the reminiscence bump: A systematic review,” PLoS One. 2018 Dec 11;13(12); J.G. Hart, “Toward a phenomenology of nostalgia,” Man and World 6, 397–420 (1973). See also: “nostalgia for now,” “there are tears of things,” “the student,” “Midlife,” “when the lotus bloomed,” “to whom it may concern,” and “echoes.”