What is the appeal in loneliness? What is the attraction in sadness? Many of us spend a not inconsequential amount of time seeking out emotions and experiences which are not naively pleasurable. Nostalgia is one of the most accessible of these contradictions, and when I hear people use it, the word most often has negative connotations. It’s “living in the past.” To be honest, that is exactly what it is. Our melancholy experience of nostalgia is that it is a memorialization of the past; we can’t go back. It’s done. It’s gone. Whatever delight we experienced in that moment has been buried. But the “pleasure” in nostalgia is that it proves relevance. We see connection and implication, admirable and maybe heroic words and deeds, and any shame is never unmitigated. We know that this is so, because these are the moments that penetrate the filter of nostalgia. If such moments didn’t have positive aspects, we wouldn’t feel nostalgia for them. It is this assurance of heroism and relevance that inspires our nostalgia. Our fixation turns on that common adage about “it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all,” one of the grand trite truisms. In other words: we delight in nostalgia because we had the privilege of experiencing something worthwhile, but we grieve in nostalgia because that worthwhile experience has left our lives.
Sometime when I was a teenager, I devised a maxim to live life by avoiding future regrets. This included both an avoidance of regrettable actions and of missed opportunities, so I had the obvious bases covered. And I think that, all things considered, I’ve done a not half bad job of following this advice. What I missed, in my youthful naivetè, is that following this advice is not a recipe for a life of unencumbered joy. For starters, our bodies and minds just aren’t built for such an experience. Our varied emotions are a function of our evolution to survive. But even if this were not so, my maxim is insufficient to avoid negative values. Because I conflated the possibility of engaging the best available opportunities with engaging all available opportunities, or ever worse, all opportunities.
The world is just too big. Our experience is just too limited. I will probably never live in Buenos Aires or Sana’a. If I do it will be at the expense of a different experience. At some point I had to choose to pursue the arts instead of Physics (not so much a choice; I couldn’t handle advanced math), and later on, I chose to pursue writing instead of theater. There is a price to engaging any opportunity.
Or to put it into terms of my own experience: In junior high and high school, I valued the extreme intensity of emotion, the charged smell in the air, and when I moved away to go to college in Chicago — file that under “best available opportunity” — I memorialized my childhood and teenage years and they became precious. This is valid, it is fair, my observations were correct. College was spent with a lot of hard work, hard study, coming to better understand humans and human relationships, and the joy of more fully discovering the world, and when I graduated into a much tougher life than I had previously known, I memorialized college. This was also valid. And after college, I spent four years in a series of dull, poor-paying, irrelevant jobs, and I learned a lot about getting by and surviving, and enjoying simple, unexpected pleasures wherever available. When the time was ripe, I moved on and memorialized all of this. Ditto my years in New York as a young husband, and the following years in Chicago, publishing my novel and preparing to have a child of my own.
Now I’m back in Flint, and in many ways it is a different place than the place I left. It faces different threats, but offers different promises. And then again, not so much. Other things (me, for example) have changed much more quickly, and drastically.
The thing about loneliness, melancholy, nostalgia, what have you, is that they are truly inescapable. You can’t outmaneuver them because they are the necessary consequence of every action. If we wish to exercise our inalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness,” we need to recognize that happiness only ever coexists with sadness, and to make that melancholy kinetic, participatory, dynamic; to build it into our day-to-day lives in constructive ways, so that when we memorialize it and put it to rest (as our friends and family will someday do for us) we can say that not only did we avoid regret by seizing opportunity and avoiding disaster, but that we understood the profound transience of each moment as we experienced it.