Our brains have a time machine. We can look forward, around and back at will.
As young children, we spend most of our time in the NOW. Kids don’t need to take mindfulness courses to stay in the present. They are the masters of that domain. Adolescents spend a lot of their time dreaming about their futures as well as worrying about the present.
In later life, with a fully loaded memory bank and diminishing future, people often spend time looking in the rear-view mirror. Depending on the memories they recall, these time travels into the past can be regretful, wistful or joyful.
Nostalgia
There is a special brand of time travel into the past that focuses on happy memories of things that no longer exist. As we reminisce about those tender moments, we experience a special blend of joy and sadness. That feeling is called saudade in Portuguese and nostalgia in English.
A beautiful representation of nostalgia appears in the series Mad Men. In a scene from season 1 episode 13 (“The Carousel”), the protagonist Don Draper pitches an ad campaign for the new Kodak slide projector using photos of his wedding and young children even as his marriage is falling apart. Watch Jon Hamm’s nuanced performance closely in the video below, as well as your own reactions. ⬇️
Another powerful evocation of nostalgia, this time for the lost paradise of childhood, can be found in the poem Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas.
There is a sharp lash of pain running through our recall of the beloved people, other beings (aka “pets”) and places we know we will never see again. And yet we willingly tolerate that suffering in order to reconnect with them through memory.
Oh! I remember something else from this adolescent years. My grandmother who taught literature at the university in the forties, gave me a slim blue black hardbound volume of poems by an English poet, A.E. Housman. I was just starting to get into poetry, but Housman never became a favorite of mine. Anyway, there was a poem in there that resonated.
"Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again."
College was on the horizon and I wondered if there was to be any returning to my small Midwestern town, once I left its cramping quarters..
I love Dylan's "chains" line and have quoted it many times over the years. It used to get me teary eyed! Also stirring to me was the Green Fuse poem of his with
"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever."
I first encountered Thomas in my sixteenth or seventeenth year and it was more transformative than the Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens I was reading. Thanks for your essay!