Old Things

Every so often I’ll notice a motif forming in my life, some element that comes up so often that I can’t help but dwell on it. On a day that I’m coming down with a sore throat, for example, I might also be reading an essay about disease as a symbol for internal impurity in some Victorian novel, and then I’ll be scrolling through news stories on my phone and see something about flu shots. Most reasonable people would call these coincidences, or overactive minds seeing points connect when they really don’t. My mom tends to claim them as signs from some higher power. Personally, it makes me suspect that my life is a novel and the author is going a little overboard on cheeky symbolism about the fatal flaw that will inevitably lead to my doom.

Lately, I’ve been noticing signs and symbols of the past around me (a pretty broad motif, but all of them tend to be). It’s the first week of my last year at Grinnell, and doing so many comfortable yearly rituals of this place for the final time, I can’t help but slip back into memories. Meanwhile, half my classes are focusing on what us Westerners usually consider the beginnings of our culture: Greek and Roman antiquity. In my Humanities class I’m finally getting around to] classics like The Iliad and The Odyssey, while my class on gender theory in literature has been focusing on Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love. The Invention of Love follows an early twentieth century poet and Greek obsessive as he dies and travels down the River Styx with the Charon as his ferryman. The levels upon levels of looking back in this play get a little over-the-top quickly: it was published in 1997, but its setting and constant esoteric allusions make it clear that the writer is nostalgic for the New Classicists poets and scholars called the New Hellenists, who are in turn nostalgic for ancient Greece and Rome. That’s three levels of looking back already, four if you count the New Classicists yearning for Italy in its Greco-Roman Renaissance, and it goes further when you consider that Greek classics like The Iliad and The Odyssey are set in an even more ancient Greece, when they believed gods were more present in mortal affairs. 

Picture that: five lenses of nostalgia, each obscuring the last, and ending in a time that never really existed in the first place. It’s easy to get pessimistic when you realize that the scholars we consider our greatest minds concern themselves with the even greater minds of the past, as if our future is just a long staircase down from some glorious imagined past. And easier to get pessimistic when you realize how often we fall into the same trap, how I’ll probably spend most of my last year in college missing my first three, much of which I spent missing home and high school. 

That last paragraph is essentially the blog post I pitched to my girlfriend at lunch today, and she smartly called me out for being too gloomy on the whole, too simplistic and negative about humanity’s unique ability to learn from and love the past. After all, isn’t there a special sort of wonder in the way things stay the same over time? The way that some ancient texts survive, translated and corrupted but still with the same emotional core that speaks to us like it spoke to scholars a hundred generations ago? She was right, of course, and I was mostly just beating up on nostalgia because I wanted to sound smart and cynical and was getting tired of thinking about how much I’ll miss this place. Because the power of looking back has shaken me, many times. At the New York State Summer Writer’s Workshop I went to a used bookstore and bought a used postcard, dated 1879 and costing twenty five cents. I couldn’t believe that something so old had maintained, written in a language I could read (even if I couldn’t very exactly decipher the old-fashioned swooping cursive) and that it could be mine for only a quarter. Or at the island in the boundary waters my family visits in the summer, where there are brittle, leafless trees sticking up through the rocks on shore that were there before any European on this continent. Or when I learned, in Kindergarten, that the church my elementary school grew from was over one hundred years old. That’s not ancient by most standards, but to a Kindergartener a hundred years is no less than a million, and I looked up and imagined generations of ghosts floating through the arched ceiling. Maybe that’s the most remarkable of all: how we can take nostalgia for times we know and nostalgia for times we can only imagine and fuse the two until they feel like the exact same thing.