Nostalgia: Living at Eye Level

This blog post, as with most summer endeavors, is the hopeful child of procrastination and sleep deprivation.

Stay with me.

I have a small bookcase in my bedroom. As is common of  most humans, the things that I think matter most are placed at eye level. Bookcases indulge this tendency quite well. My bookcase is no exception. At the moment, eye levelwil give you an eyeful of Markus Zusak’s Book Thief, Tina Fey’s Bossypants(as well as the underappreciated Girl Walks Into a Bar by Rachel Dratch), and an assortment of John Green.

Something got the better of me the other day and I decided to venture into my more peripheral literature. Above my sight line: Things I’d rather not worry about yet. College prep books and SAT review guides. The loftier they lie, the more irrelevant I wish they’d become.

Below sight line: That’s more fun. The Magic Treehouse, and Margaret Peterson Haddix’s digestible dystopias. They have an unfortunate little layer of dust on them. Despite being the books that made me love books, I’ll probably never read them again. The knowledge that I’ll never be transported back to those well-worn places in my mind brings on a specific kind of sadness. It’s called nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a very powerful, sneaky thing. That’s why Pepsi and Coke use the “Classic” label and Full House is on TV during more time slots than exist in the day. It’s not so much a single emotion as it is a return to such a forgotten and beloved frame of mind, that you can’t help but be overcome with raw feeling. It’s involuntary, sweet beyond words, and kind of dangerous. By all means, frame that diploma, keep the sneakers you fell in love in, make a clean cut through your hospital bracelet. Just be aware of what you’re doing.

I kind of hate the idea that whatever makes me myself at this moment can be stored away, given time, and then dredged up at a convenient moment with the guarantee that I’ll feel something. In Greek, nostalgia is literally translated as, “The pain from an old wound”. While this is a darker interpretation, I see how well it fits. Quite literally, that’s why people love telling stories of their old childhood injuries. They are pain and fear filled memories, but laying them out in your chosen words takes their power away, putting you in control of your own history. And isn't that something everyone would like to be?

Spoiler: No one ever is, and we're all a lot better off because of it.