The Past Is Not Past

With some frequency lately, shards of bygone times and elsewhere places, unbidden and unannounced, have arrived at my mental doorway, edged their way into the foyer, and then, with a cheek kiss and shoulder clap, stride boldly into the living room. They map the coordinates, the longitude and latitude, of a once world through which I passed and in which I left traces, ghostly connections, specters of before, that have now been aroused from their slumber to echo forth from the well of time. I have been beset by nostalgia, that peculiar archeology which reveals the truth of William Faulkner’s observation in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

I recently remembered that, at the age of six, I removed half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator, cradled them in cupped hands held against my stomach, opened the front door latch with my elbow, walked to the end of the porch, and lobbed them, deliberately, one at a time, against the gray-clapboarded side of our neighbor’s house—simply because I wanted to hear the sound, the pop and crunch, they made when they burst open. Our neighbor, a kindly older woman, was amused; my mother was aghast and embarrassed, and I tried to argue, vainly, as it turned out, and with only the language that a six-year-old can muster, what I now recognize as the aesthetic motivation of my behavior.

And I recently recalled my father, 700 miles from home, living in a company-owned dormitory while training for a new position at the home office, laid up with a broken ankle suffered from a fall on treacherous Wisconsin ice. Each night, promptly at 8 o’clock, he called my mother. Each night they chatted for 20 to 30 minutes, then my brother and I took turns, answering Dad’s always repeated question about how school went with the always repeated “OK.” And each night I wondered why Dad called so much, how in the space of 24 hours enough new events and experiences could have possibly accumulated to justify a long-distance phone call. Finally, I asked Mom. “He’s lonely, Jerry,” Mom said; “he likes hearing us,” and it took me many years to understand that the poetics of love can lie in the caressing meter of a familiar voice.

And I recently remembered that, as a young high school teacher, the physics teacher and I invented an after-school game that involved a roll of toilet paper wrapped in duct tape and a wastebasket set exactly 25 paces away. Students gathered to watch and speculate on the likely winner of this battle of literature and science. We postured and strutted and trash talked, and had an official been present we would surely have drawn a penalty flag for taunting and excessively testosteroned male display. But the delight of it, the incandescent silliness of it, the sheer exuberant kookiness of it, was galvanizing and joyous, a self-contained enclave of play simply for the sake of the ludic pleasure it provided.

Now, I know, as a Sherman Alexie narrator says, “that nostalgia is dangerous,” and can even be “terminal” if allowed to colonize the present and usurp the here-and-nowness of our passing days. I know, as T. S. Eliot warns, that nostalgia can become “fragments I have shored up against my ruins” or, as John Steinbeck asserts, a declensionist “protest against change.” And I am told that nostalgia is most often prompted by a dejected longing, by a morose yearning for some lost, tinselled Ithaca to which we cannot return. But I experience these unfastened moments of my past as cashmered in charm rather than burlaped in sadness, and if their grammar is based on a syntax of longing, it is, as Longfellow says, a “longing/ That is not akin to pain/ And resembles sorrow only/ As the mist resembles the rain.” My nostalgia, it seems to me, is not a wistful homage to an irrecoverable past, not an anguished wave of farewell, but fully in dialogue with the times, a reminder to continually return to, continually embody, now and everywhere and always, the youthful wonder, the small gestures of love, and the unreservoired silliness it reveals.

Undoubtedly, age summons nostalgia. The trick, I think, is to realize that those memories of the child, the adolescent, or the young adult are not necessarily a home from which we are exiled. They do not necessarily speak in an accent of excommunication. If we let it, age can be a close encounter of the too long kind. If we let it, it folds and faults into a tectonics of sameness. If we let it, the familiarity of it all can hoodwink us into seeing an alarming lack of novelty. The world spins on, life unspools, and the up close everydayness of it all can demystify and disenchant, can cabin us in a Prufrockian room where things simply come and go, can hobble enthusiasm, cause it to lose a step, then two, then finally lag far behind. But if we let it, age can call forth a nostalgia that quickens, rather than cuts us to the quick, by showing us what we were, what we still are, or what we can still become. The past is the past, but only if we let it be.