A friend of mine is moving to her own apartment today. Changing habitat from the house she lives in with her parents and was was born in 24 years ago in the Bronx, to a place in the City suitable for a 24 year old business woman.
She called me in tears around 2am last night, her room a mess of boxes and books, hangers and dangling wires. She didn't know why she was so sad: "I feel home sick" she wailed, her life too easy to objectify. everything was here and is now moving and she could imagine, maybe dimly, other boxes and other places, marriages and children, futures still spinning into age, and childhood's end so irrevocable.
She was feeling for a nostalgic for a time that was more unhappy than otherwise, all sad families and all that. But still, pictures and talisman and an empty bedroom where your entire most private "In My Room" ness once was has the power of a death. It is a death and a remembrance, the smell, the feel, the images on a screen and so clear that when she pushes her brain to its limits, she see herself younger, a tender innocent young girl: safe in the foolish way children feel safe. In a word: she misses the past.
When I was younger I would feel the sweet sting of nostalgia of the turn backwards but two thinks happen with nostalgia:
1. If we return to a memory too often, like listening to a song over and over again, at some point we lessen it, dilute the emotional punch.
2. It weakens over time. Our memories falter and what we miss is the memory of the memory.
When I was a baby, I used to taken around in a big ol' pram and I remember it because when I was little older, maybe seven, I saw it rusting in the shed. Now when I remember it, I remember remembering.
But as a man, songs are sometimes memories of memories.
1. My brother-in-law died in 2005, but I remember riding in the back of his car when I was fifteen years old listening to Simon And Garfunkels Greatest Hits on 8 track. I actually asked my sister about it, but it left no impression. But for me, not listening to the songs as such, but listening to the songs in a specific order, brings me back to a late Sunday drive in late Summer where I was returning to boarding school the next day.
2. In early 2005 it was snowing in nyc but me and this much younger girl felt like hanging out. I was very very in love with her and we were close friends. We went to an Italian restaurant on 8th avenue and drank way way way too much. It was freezing outside, warm inside and, much older now, I was trying to slow down my heartbeat, stop the moment to savor it, to feel how I felt, the closeness, the attachment and I was just very, very happy and I told her this: "I can't explain how I feel about you, I love you more than anything in the world, when I look at you I am so happy. I don't care about anything else. I don't care about how I maybe hurt, I just know you are the greatest person in the world and I love you with everything I have to love with". As we walked to Penn Station we held hands and she sang Billy Joel's "The Longest Time" softly to herself. If I could return to any one moment in my life, it would be that one.
Oddly enough, I would have disastrously fights with both my brother-in-law and my ex within a few years. I didn't speak to my brother-in-law for eight years and my ex I will never speak to again. That pre-shadowing of events both changes and leaves the memories unchangeable.
Laura Marling knows what I mean. In a song that also makes me nostalgic (for two months ago… I work fast), "Goodbye England (Covered In Snow)" is elegy to the past. Written about her Daddy and about moving away from her home, Laura is remembering being a seven year old girl walking with her father in the English countryside, Many years later her terminally ill parent asked Laura to take her back to the hill before he died so he could see one final time how beautiful the world is. So this is a nostalgia song. And an elegy, And also, homesickness and the sadness, even if you've just been in a hotel room for a weeks holiday, of packing your bags. Perhaps packing your bags is too strong a metaphor for our own finite selves.
Maybe that's why my friend is crying as she packs up and leaves her home.