Nostalgia

Tonight I watched Midnight in Paris, which is a movie starring Owen Wilson as a writer visiting Paris who somehow travels back in time via a time slip scenario into the Paris of the 1920s, and hobnobs about with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemmingway and Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali and a bunch of other 1920s folk.  Like any movie set in Paris, the opening montage of Parisian scenery made me all squealy and sentimental.  Seeing repeated footage of Parc Monceau, where I passed many an afternoon reading and writing and people watching, actually caused me to abandon my pumpkin pie momentarily, leaving my fork hovering in midair while I went all reminiscent and sappy.  It takes a lot for me to abandon pumpkin pie.  But it's ironic that these opening scenes should cause such a rush of nostalgia, since that's actually a major theme of the film.

You see, Owen Wilson's character wishes desperately that he could have lived in Paris in the 1920s.  But once he ends up there, he meets a girl who finds the 1920s to be dull and wishes desperately that she could have lived in Paris in the Belle Epoque.  But of course, one can imagine that the people living in the Belle Epoque would have wished desperately that they could have lived in the Renaissance.  It's a pattern...looking for a Golden Age outside of our own.

I know I've definitely been guilty of such nostalgia...just look at my sappy reaction to those opening shots of Parisian streets.  When things get rough in my life, I immediately wish that I was back in Paris, wandering the streets with an ipod and a guidebook and being surrounded by beautiful architecture.  I forget all the times that being abroad was difficult, because memory makes everything all golden.  Take this quote from the film:

Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present...the name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one's living in.  It's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.


I think there might be some truth to this idea.  But that kind of escapism isn't just limited to thinking about the past.  Watching the movie put me in mind of another quote that really resonated with me in the past, from author John Green:

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia...You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it.  You just use the future to escape the present.

Thinking on these things made me start to think about the present.  I'll admit, sometimes the present gets me down.  Advertisements bug me, news stories horrify me, and my own personal stress often makes everything seem like a big ball of weariness.  And so I'll escape off by thinking about other places, other times.  But here's the thing...we shouldn't not appreciate the present just because it's the present.  The present is remarkable.  In the present I can talk to my best friend face-to-face even though she's 500 miles away.  In the present I can sit comfortably inside a large metal contraption that flies through the air, reading a book and sipping a ginger ale, and be in an entirely new location in a matter of hours.  The present is full of things that would blow the mind of people of the past, and things are being created and written that will be sources of nostalgia for people in the future.

In my life of 23 years, I have traveled to 10 different countries.  I've stood in places where kings were born, where kings were imprisoned, and where kings were beheaded.  I've been educated for a whooping 19 years and am about to attain a masters degree.  I've read books by amazing authors and written things that have been sources of inspiration to others.  As a young woman, I sometimes think about how my daily life is filled with things that women in the past were not privileged with.  Even driving my car to and from work every day, I think about how "undignified" it would be for a woman of the 17th or 18th century to climb into a metal horseless carriage and go gallivanting around town at 60mph, completely unescorted no less.  It would be shocking.  I go to work in a church consisting primarily of Filipino people, and think about how the different cultures of the world used to be so closed-off from one another by vast geographical differences.  Even the grinding academic study to which I have devoted nearly my entire life would have been denied of me because of my gender in centuries past...and education is still denied of women in many countries.  I think of all of this, and I come to realize that, yes, my "present" is remarkable.

The moral of all this is simple: appreciate the past, acknowledge the future, but live in the present.  Appreciate the present for what it is.  Stop wishing for a different time, whether past or future, and know that the past was once present and the present will soon be past, and the future is nothing more than a present laying just beyond the horizon.

Still, if a carload of 1920s folk comes crawling down the street and they invite you to come along, I suggest you take them up on the offer.