by Rachel Robison-Greene
Last weekend in Northern Utah, the fall colors in the mountains were at their peak. The days were still hot, but the mornings and evenings were cool. The sun was beginning to set a little earlier and most of the doorsteps in our quiet town were peppered with multicolored autumn gourds. An old movie theater downtown, built in 1924 in art deco style, was showing Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. My husband and I decided to go.
Before the film, the theater featured “previews” of older Halloween movies: trailers for the original Halloween, Pet Sematary, and both of the original Ghostbusters films. The evening kicked off with a screening of the Michael Jackson music video Thriller. Clutching my cheap, overly salted popcorn and my flat Diet Coke, I sank into a comfortable nostalgia.
One straightforward way in which nostalgia is pleasant is that it involves memories of things that we once enjoyed but perhaps have not kept present before our minds. I don’t think this is all there is to it. I noticed that nostalgia, on this occasion, was not only comfortable—it felt like a relief. An escape. Being present in the current moment is hard work. One of the reasons that nostalgia is pleasant is that it presents us with all of the desirable parts of having an identity without any of the unpleasant responsibilities of crafting it. We can take advantage of the asymmetrical relation in which we stand to our past selves on one hand and our future selves on the other.
When I look to the future I wonder: will I have an identity that I recognize and endorse? In philosopher Bernard Williams’ famous paper “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” he tells the story of an opera by the same name in which Elina Makropulos, a woman born in the 16th century was given an elixir of life by her court physician father. So long as she goes on taking the elixir, she goes on living. The opera is set in the contemporary era, and Elina has become desperately bored. “It is all the same” she laments, “singing and silence.”
Williams uses Elina’s case to argue that immortality would be undesirable. Inevitably, we would all either become suicidally bored or we would change so much that we wouldn’t recognize ourselves—we’d turn into people our past selves wouldn’t relate to or endorse. In the worst case, we might even turn into people who we’d rather die than become. In the end, Elina gives up on the prospect of immortality, stops taking the elixir, and dies.
One doesn’t need an elixir of life to face the prospect of becoming someone a past version of oneself would not endorse. One faces this prospect every day within life. Will I, someday, abandon my values and end up caring more about my own financial well-being than about the well-being of others? Will I stubbornly stop listening to the perspectives of the young? Will my thoughts and actions become resistant to change? Will I come to enjoy reality T.V.?
Descartes may have been right that when he introspected, he observed a thinking thing. From that, I am not justified in believing that what I see upon introspection is a uniquely recognizable self that persists through time and change. I experience glimmers of a self, hints. Memories when a song plays. The smell of cologne. Blurry perceptions of connections between versions of someone, maybe myself.
Nostalgia is an escape because my past self is not a threat in the way that my future self is. I might still cringe at some of my past aesthetic choices. Perhaps I’ll never stop being embarrassed about that arrogant but wildly inaccurate claim I made in a seminar in my first year of graduate school. Nevertheless, I have no trouble recognizing that person as myself. I can forgive her in ways that I can’t forgive my future self, since forgiveness tends to be backward-looking. After all, for all I know, my future self might be unforgivable. I fear my own freedom.
When we take in music, art, and culture from our past, the existential risk has expired. We’re free to appreciate it all in its silly, awkward, meaningless glory. I’m no longer worried about what my musical choices say about my identity. I’m not concerned with whether my teenage peers will think that I’m cool enough, so I’ll appreciate alternative music, top 40, and musical theater with equal aplomb. Every guilty pleasure has become a genuine pleasure because none of it is labor anymore. In the theater that night, there was a sense of community because we enjoyed a shared cultural identity rooted in the past, even if that was all we shared in common. We remembered and appreciated bad hair, synthesizer music, and a motel owner who was simultaneously a boy and his mother.
When we stepped out of the theater, it could have been any decade in a century. None of them are really set in black and white. The lights on the theater glowed in much the same way they would have when it was built a hundred years ago. We just finished watching a movie that came out over sixty years ago. It was a comfortable ambiguity.
As we walked away from the theater, we saw a twenty-dollar bill on the ground. As we looked around, we saw many of them all over the sidewalk. I immediately thought of the $40,000 Janet Lee’s character had stolen in the movie. Perhaps it had spilled through the screen and out onto the street. I picked one up and quickly noticed that the bill was fake. When I turned it around, there was a sticker on the back directing unwitting pedestrians to a website dedicated to espousing white supremacy. Immediately, I returned to the present.
It can be easy to glorify the past and to try to live in it. Nostalgia is comfortable. In the haze of nostalgia our identities feel safe, secure, and settled. As a result, we may be reluctant to change if we linger too long. But there is a crucial asymmetry between what has been and what is to come. The past is over, but we’re responsible for the future.
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