Reflecting on nostalgia

In the past few years this intense nostalgic crush started happening in the summertime, particularly when I cut fruit. One June day two years ago I could barely slice an apple. As soon as the blade touched the peel, I was transported to summers of my early childhood, running errands with my mother, looking for the crispest apples and sweetest plums. I called her to tell her what my brain was doing.

“You’re having a Proustian experience,” she said. (She was such a fan of Marcel Proust that she named her walker Marcel.) I thought about this as I bit into a perfect plum. 

My mother died four months later. Decorating the tree last year was soul-wrenching and cathartic. There we were, back at the flower store buying green wire and Styrofoam cones. Together. Honoring our ritual of hanging 2000 strands of icicle tinsel on the tree one by one gave me 2000 discrete moments to be alone with my mother. 

Once the tree was shimmering and sparkling, I purchased and wrapped Proust’s 6-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past (In Search of Lost Time) and put it under the tree for myself. I’ve read the first two volumes, each weighty tomes of rich and evocative memories of some life I never lived. How very strange, how touched by the divine.

What is nostalgia? The word comes from the Greek root “nostos” meaning “return to home,” and “algos” meaning “pain.” Coined by a Swedish doctor in 1688, it described the homesick condition of Swiss mercenary soldiers. Doctors concocted a cure of leeches, opium, and a return to the Alps. 

We welcome nostalgia today, especially during the holidays. We beckon it with scented candles and Spotify playlists while decorating the tree; we revel in it as we cream the sugar and eggs for the pie we make only once a year. 

As with most things worth pondering, nostalgia is complicated. Brain imaging shows that four distinct areas light up when we experience its pull. Paradoxically, the brain perceives nostalgia as both novel and familiar, giving it a double-edged superpower on our emotions. There must be some evolutionary advantage for this mystical longing, but what? 

Maybe it’s like glue, keeping our present selves psychically connected to our past selves in a way memory alone cannot. After all, a body is merely a collection of atoms squashed together at a given moment in time, with atoms constantly flowing in and out. Despite DNA’s persistent instruction, we are in a constant state of flux. 

Nostalgia also connects us to things we’ve never experienced. Did I shop on 5th Avenue, twirling in the snow, elbows bent with the weight of my Saks 5th and FAO Schwartz bags? Did I ride on a sleigh behind a team of Clydesdales, bells chiming in my ears, through a wintry landscape? Did I play a rousing game of football with my cousins after a holiday feast? No. Yet nostalgia leaves me atingle with a fuzzy longing for these events from an imaginary past.

A bond to other people and times is indeed advantageous to our health and survival as individuals and as a collective. Perhaps this is nostalgia’s advantage. 

It’s December again, and here we are. The ornaments are on the Christmas tree, and it’s time for the 2000 strands of tinsel. I look forward to walking hand in hand with my mother again during this days-long ritual. 

I’m not sure I understand the evolutionary advantage of nostalgia yet, but I am sure I understand the balm it has on the soul.

Mary Dansak is a writer and a retired science education specialist living in Auburn, AL. She can be reached at maryfdansak@gmail.com.