My Nostalgia is Better Than Your Nostalgia
Why is nostalgia so potent? If you’re running around taking pictures with a Holga and I’m running around snapping photos with Instagram on my iPhone, is your nostalgia the high brow to my low brow? No. We’re both suckers in the same way, thinking that somehow this aesthetic that’s conjuring resonance with the past will help us in our search for a lost meaningfulness.
So what’s the rub? I think it probably comes down to the development of idiosyncratic personal vision—particularly with things like photography where you’re trying to separate yourself from everybody else. But if using a Holga was the one trick in your bag and that’s suddenly become democratized, you feel robbed. If a basic filter was supposed to be your recognized signature style, perhaps you were looking at your creation through rose-colored glasses.
Kant dealt with this kind of thing a lot, one of my favorite basic summations is from my intellectual fairy god-mother, Eva Brann:
The world comes to us as appearance, and we return it to itself as meaning.
It’s a hard trick and it’s why people are always enamored with the idea of secret signs in the world that will help them breath more meaning into everything (sometimes they do). And it’s a trick where it’s quite easy to be lazy and I think nostalgia is exactly that—a crutch for real meaning .
However, there’s an interesting flip side to nostalgia—which is that it’s often projected into the future as aspiration. I’ve often wondered about people that like to collect books (I’m one of them). There’s a funny dynamic where at the same time that you’re archiving these things that you may read a few times and then never again, you’re using them to build a notion of yourself and who you’d like to be as a person. Which is why I was fascinated to read about Edward Tufte auctioning off his collection of rare books (first printings of Galileo, Picasso sketchbooks, etc). In his words (emphasis mine):
My library was always a working library, with the rare books beside my computer as I was writing. But in the last few years, the books were viewed only when a visitor requested a look at the Galileo, Playfair, or Picasso books, or when I took a nostalgic look in the library. Furthermore, the important books in my library are the unread books.
