Nostalgia

908 Words2 Pages

I think I have a disease. It’s called, if I’m not mistaken, nostalgia. You know, that homesickness originally ascribed to Swiss merchants plying their wares in the lowlands of France? In a lesser form, this sickness is the over-merchandized appeal of the golden age transferred from the shining future of idealists to the glimmering past age of the cynic—i.e., Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae.

Either way, perhaps, the view that the Golden Age is somewhere distant from the now is as dangerous as longing for some philosophically abstract perfection. The Platonic Theory of Forms, for example, holding that there is an abstraction called ‘form’ that is the true reality. It is unreachable and unknowable, but it is there. We can not approach this blazing world of perfect forms, and only create mere mimics.

When hearing this argument about the abstract perfect world, I often wonder what person can conceive the perfect form. I attempt to reject the idea, arguing internally that there is no way to conceive of this perfect form, that there is not this golden double of this world. In as much honesty as I can conjure, the whole argument Theory of Forms confuses and angers me. I’ve written this paragraph out several times in attempt to explain my disdain; I still feel my explanation is weak at best.

But, despite my emotional rejection of the idea of the golden double of this world, I find myself stricken with that disease—nostalgia. My daydreams and phantasms take on the hazy quality of a Norman Rockwell poster, and all too often I find myself contemplating a Levittown of desire, or a Puritanical Country House where one is barely seen, and hardly heard between winding passages and suppers lit carefully by Dutch masters. The poe...

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...this now.

And that’s not too bad a motivating force, if we use it to change for the ideal. What ideal? The question comes to me now like the spiteful questions in William’s “Portrait of a Lady.” “The sky where Watteau hung a lady’s slipper.” The golden paintings of paradise again return and plague me with The Nostalgia! The sickness! The Theory of Forms. Who decides which way makes the world better?

The answer used to come quickly, swiftly, strongly, and with surety: I could decide.

But now my refrain becomes, as if waiting for a crack to open in the ground, a water-testing scio me nihil scire. That leads me into whiteness, like Daffy Duck railing against his god-creator in “Duck Amuck”, a blankness of vision. But most of my mind compels me to think ‘here is the sheet to draw on, here is an un-idealized possibility’.

So I take the blank sheet, and I draw.

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