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The Continuous Vibration of Animal Spirits:

On the Why of Nostalgia

Nostalgia has an air of total irreconcilability. There is the feeling the word describes, of course: a fundamentally impossible yearning, a longing to go back even as we are driven ceaselessly forward, pushed further away from our desire even as we sit contemplating it. But it’s the actual feeling, too, that ceaselessly resists any attempt to give it shape or sense. If we say we feel nostalgic, in general or about something in particular, it rarely needs an explanation, and there likely isn’t a good one anyway: Why should it be the smell of our grandmother’s cookies or the feel of a particular sweater or the sight of a certain tree in a certain playground, and not something else, that sends us searching backward? Why is it welling up now, on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday? Why haven’t I felt this way for a long time? Why does it matter? And that assumes it even occurs to us to interrogate this sudden rush: one of nostalgia’s more persistent qualities is its ability to elide reason, to be felt deeply without prompting any further inquiry.

It’s this strange aura of elusive profundity that makes nostalgia seem less like some sort of modern condition than a universal feeling that took us some time to put our finger on. If feelings in general are internal experiences that demand expression whether or not we have the means for it, our inability to actually do anything with nostalgia might be what kept it ineffable for so long. Most kinds of longing can be settled in one way or another, if not necessarily to the satisfaction of the yearner. Nostalgia can only be lived in or abandoned: it is yearning distilled to its essence, yearning not really for its own sake but because there is nothing else to be done. Maybe it resisted definition so long because naming it doesn’t help resolve anything anyway.

Appropriately for the elusiveness of the concept, the word nostalgia did not originally mean what we now consider it to – also appropriately, it was coined with a longing for a time when there was no word for what it described. Specifically: in 1688, a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer gave the name nostalgia to a malady he had noticed in young Swiss people who had been sent abroad – chiefly mercenaries, one of Switzerland’s prime exports at the time, though also household servants and others who found themselves in ‘foreign regions.’ As was the style at the time in the nascent field of ‘medicine more complicated than bleeding humours,’ Hofer used a portmanteau from an indistinctly highfalutin form of Ancient Greek: nostos roughly means ‘home’ – although it more often means ‘homecoming,’ which incidentally was also the name for an entire subcategory of Greek literature, most notably the Odyssey – while algos means, more simply, ‘pain,’ derived from Algea, the personifications of sorrow and grief, and a common classification at the time, attached to a variety of maladies that have since gotten either more precise or more vernacular names. (If you ever want to stoke excessive sympathy from, say, your boss, tell them you have cephalgia or myalgia – a headache or sore muscles, respectively).

So nostalgia literally means ‘pain associated with home’ – or, in slightly more familiar terms, ‘homesickness.’ This is not a coincidence, but more relevantly, it’s also not a case of fancy medical-speak being dumbed down for popular consumption. At least not generally: the English word homesickness is a more or less direct translation of nostalgia. But the original term is French, maladie du pays, and not only does it specifically refer to the tendency of the Swiss to powerfully miss their home country, it precedes Hofer by at least thirty years. Hofer’s coinage brought a specifically medical dimension, insomuch as medicine as we know it existed in his time: Hofer’s observations were quite detailed, but still entirely anecdotal, and subject to a lot of conjecture. What he lacked in scientific rigour he made up for with linguistics, attempting to legitimize medicine’s dominion over the concept with multiple coinages, including nostomania (obsession with home, which, as you’ll see in a second, is probably more accurate to the ‘disease’ as he conceived it), philopatridomania (obsessive love of one’s homeland), and, years later, in the second edition of his thesis, pothopatridalgia (pain from the longing for the home of one’s fathers, which certainly has the advantage of precision, if not rhythm).

Though the difference between mere homesickness and medical nostalgia was mostly a case of ancient language, Hofer nevertheless describes a serious disease, one that could progress from simple physical ailments like ringing in the ears or indigestion to near-catatonia and even death. Its root cause, according to Hofer, was ‘the quite continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibres of the middle brain in which impressed traces of ideas of the fatherland still cling.’ As Helmut Illbruck explains in his book Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease, essentially what that means is that the nostalgic suffers from a powerful obsession with their home that eventually makes them entirely insensate to any other experience or stimulation. Illbruck points out that the action Hofer describes does loosely capture how the brain seems to store, process, and recall memories – we’ll get into that in a bit – which may explain some of why his concept caught on, at least in the medical circles in which it persisted for the next few hundred years.

As it happens, though, a primordial understanding of the structure of the mind isn’t the only key insight that would stick to nostalgia even as its conception developed. There are two other big ones. First, Hofer recognized that nostalgia was less about whatever the nostalgic claimed to be missing than about ‘the strength of the imagination alone’: it seemed to have less to do with any material differences in the patient’s circumstances than with the collective weight of their memories, even though those were centred on a very real and specific place. Hofer’s final, curiously potent observation is his suggested cure, which he meant quite sincerely, but which elegantly captures the futility of trying to tame nostalgia, disease or otherwise: ‘Nostalgia admits no remedy other than a return to the Homeland.’ In all his observations and diagnoses, Hofer does not seem to fully appreciate that home is often more time than place. The proof of this will reveal itself as nostalgia evolves into something so incurable that it stops being a disease entirely, and its longing begins to be associated specifically with times past – but we are getting slightly ahead of ourselves.

Doctors proceeded to speculate about the causes of and potential cures for nostalgia until roughly the twentieth century, often ignoring Hofer’s observation about the imagination’s effects, causing some curious mutations in the idea. Nostalgia did remain almost the exclusive province of the Swiss for the first few hundred years after its naming – one of the original German words for homesickness, in fact, was Schweizerkrankheit, or ‘the Swiss illness.’ Hofer’s near-contemporary Johann Jakob Scheuchzer – a Swiss naturalist who was chiefly interested in rescuing his countrymen’s reputation from accusations of weakness – suggested that it was the change in air pressure (and maybe even quality) that made them so prone to debilitating longing. He suggested that a brief stay at the top of a tower or on a hill might restore some of their strength. There isn’t much proof Scheuchzer’s conception of the disease or cure ever really worked, but there is some indication that this sort of thinking is where Switzerland got its reputation as a healthful place to recover in a sanatorium or spa. Well after Scheuchzer, eighteenth-century physicians spent some time looking for a physical locus for nostalgia – a specific brain structure or bone – which was just as futile, with even less of an impact on Swiss tourism.

Gradually, the notion of nostalgia attached itself almost exclusively to soldiers – Swiss mercenaries being very popular hires in armies across the continent, and doctors being a regular part of army life. It would take a little more than two centuries for doctors to figure out that there might be something more than a mysterious nerve disorder causing young men whose sole job was dismembering other humans and dying gruesomely to yearn for the comforts of home; in the meantime, cures and coping methods grew a little more creative. There are stories, including one from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique, of foreign officers banning the playing of Swiss ranz-des-vaches – cow-based folk songs, historically played by herdsmen on horns as they drove their cattle down from the mountain pastures – and even the sound of cowbells, lest it paralyze their troops in nostalgic reverie. (It became a tenet of folk wisdom about the Swiss that the ranz-des-vaches had this power over them; it featured as metaphor or plot point in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical dialogues, dramas, poems, and operas, particularly by German Romantics, who were constitutionally interested in a disease that spoke so acutely to our conceptions of self.)

By the 1800s, the terrors of nostalgia finally spread to other countries’ soldiers. Russian physicians recommended burying alive anyone who started showing symptoms, to stop the spread of the disease – which apparently did prove quite effective. On the other side of the Atlantic, the American Civil War saw several outbreaks among the young fighting men, even though they technically had never left their homeland, per se. Their physicians were a bit kinder, suggesting occasional removal from front-line fighting would bolster their spirits (not that the doctors didn’t also suspect that the nostalgia betrayed a deep flaw in their character). The American army did apparently continue furtive explorations of the concept all the way up to the Second World War, chiefly as a way to reduce desertion, and nostalgia did maintain some interest for psychologists and psychiatrists in the first half of the twentieth century, albeit in a downgraded form: it became less disease than symptom or even disposition, usually of people who had far bigger and more immediate problems (a 1987 survey of its common historical-psychological invocations cited ‘acute yearning for a union with the preoedipal mother, a saddening farewell to childhood, a defence against mourning, or a longing for a past forever lost’). Despite these last tendrils, the Civil War was really the last time anybody was diagnosed as a nostalgic, as such: nostalgia was largely abandoned by the medical community by the last decades of the nineteenth century. This seems to have had less to do with any particular breakthroughs regarding brain structure or mental health than with the general inability of anyone to make meaningful headway on understanding, let alone curing, nostalgia.

As it moved out of the medical realm and into the cultural, though, nostalgia did not fully shed its strange stigma. It first took hold in the worlds of philosophy and theory, albeit used interchangeably with the idea of homesickness, where it tended to be classed as a symptom of disorder – if not of the individual, then of the society they had built. Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, is indicative of this line of thought: ‘One is no longer home anywhere, so in the end one longs to be back where one can somehow be at home because it is the only place where one would wish to be at home.’ From almost its earliest non-medical considerations, nostalgia was regarded as a kind of reaction to the modern condition, a port in the discombobulating and alien storm that was modern life. Philosophers, critics, and theorists are still exploring variations on this theme, though as an object of critical theory nostalgia has gradually lost any meaningful sense of place (or even, arguably, a time) and gotten more tightly entwined with the notion of authenticity and our search for the same (as such, its usefulness and meaning spiked slightly with the waxing and waning of postmodernist thought). This is what underlies something like Baudrillard’s observation in Simulacra and Simulation that ‘when the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning’: the underlying implication is that if we were awash in some sense of the authentic, we would not have much occasion to look backward to find it – let alone yearn for a return.

It took some time for the popular conception to catch up to the cultural theorists. Homesickness as an idea percolated through the first half of the twentieth century, but it wasn’t until the fifties and sixties that nostalgia, as both concept and preferred term for that concept, really started to insinuate itself into the popular consciousness. Like much about nostalgia, the precise reasons for its sudden surge in popularity are fuzzy and elusive: Fred Davis, in his 1979 study of contemporary nostalgia, noted that even in the fifties nostalgia had been considered a ‘fancy word,’ limited to professionals and ‘cultivated lay speakers,’ but by the sixties it was in common enough parlance to be the subject of consideration in popular books and magazines. One theory Davis alludes to is that, as the notion of ‘home’ became less potent – as people moved around more frequently, gained easier access to increasingly widespread sources of information, and became less creatures of a specific place – homesick lost some of its power, and nostalgia slipped in as a way to capture the same feeling without being tied down: essentially, nostalgia became a better metaphor for the feeling it was trying to describe. The concept of home became a time, not a place, so we needed a new word for it.

This seems entirely plausible: to modern ears (and even at its coining), nostalgia is itself a nostalgic word, an evocation of some more glorious past, a time when they knew how to name these feelings, if not actually deal with them. You can see some evidence of this in the way nostalgia was popularly defined in the time before we had dictionaries in our pockets: broadly. Its hint of classical, distant authority allowed writers to indulge some poetry, misdefining it in ways that nevertheless captured the ethereal import of the subject: a generic ‘overwhelming yearning’ or the ‘tragic pain of loss.’ (The TV series Mad Men, set in the sixties, captures this perfectly when its central character, Don Draper, claims nostalgia is Greek for ‘the pain from an old wound.’) Windbag Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley was purported to have told a crowd at the ribbon-cutting of some major project in the sixties that he was ‘looking to the future with nostalgia,’ which either suggests that the word was widely understood enough that he thought he could be clever or – more probably, based on Daley’s reputation – that it was widely known but still vaguely understood as a kind of longing.

Even if people were fuzzy on the exact Greek roots, nostalgia as a concept was solidified in the popular consciousness by the time of Davis’s book: he neatly summed it up in his title, Yearning for Yesterday. It was a strong enough force that Davis openly wonders if the seventies represented some kind of peak in nostalgic feeling. Though he himself admits that this would be impossible to measure and that nostalgia was probably universal anyway, he makes a compelling case that the seventies was at least a boom time for open use of the term: ‘nostalgia shops,’ a sort of midpoint between antique stores and thrift stores, were a staple of retail streets; book clubs and sports memorabilia suppliers openly branded themselves with ‘nostalgia’ in their names; there was even a periodical, Liberty, whose tag line was ‘The Nostalgia Magazine’ and that consisted solely of reprinted articles from its original run, which had ended in the early forties.

If the word nostalgia is no longer novel enough to be used as branding, its presence in our collective consciousness has certainly not diminished any since Davis’s day. If we complain about Hollywood strip-mining our nostalgia for an easy buck, or if we post pictures of nineties toys under a hashtag, everyone knows roughly what we’re talking about. We don’t even really need to conjecture here: nostalgia is ubiquitous enough to have been repeatedly studied by psychologists around the world, and their findings confirm that we all think the word means roughly the same thing. The largest study, pulling in more than 1,800 students from seventeen culturally and geographically diverse countries, found that people associate nostalgia primarily with memories and the past, and that these memories are almost all fond ones. Underneath this surface understanding, nostalgia generally provokes a certain sense of happiness, but for almost everyone it is strongly tinted with a sense of longing or loss – and often, of course, a desire to return. If asked, most of us basically define nostalgia as bittersweet memory.

Even that, though, is not precisely accurate: the tastes aren’t properly mixed, except in retrospect. They are more shot and chaser than one large gulp. Nostalgia is sweet, finding its undertones of bitterness only when we become aware again that it is about our memories – snapshots of a time we can never relive, outlines of a home that has been wiped from the map. It’s this aspect that gives nostalgia both its mystery and its meaning: why on earth should we feel this way? What part of our humanity demands that we should be not just drawn toward our past but pulled so hard that it pains us? Why is this phenomenon so important that we had to rehabilitate a disorder just so that we might adequately express it?

However much we like to claim that it’s a modern condition or the sole province of the wilfully deluded, there is every evidence that nostalgia is indeed a universal part of the human condition: a setting to be toggled, not a trait that can be picked up or discarded. Eckart Frahm, professor of Assyriology at Yale, estimates that nostalgic writings started showing up about two hundred years after Sumerians developed a codified language – just enough time for sufficiently old records to accumulate that people might start feeling like their own time was missing something. And that’s only nostalgia on a societal scale: as we’ll explore in more depth in Chapter 3, art is littered with nostalgic feeling from its earliest days – it was prevalent enough to make up a whole subcategory of Greek storytelling, after all. And being aware enough of the feeling to name it has done nothing to diminish its prevalence: another batch of psychological studies found that roughly three-quarters of people feel nostalgic at least once a week. They’re the median of a population that leans heavily toward nostalgia: more than a quarter of people reported feeling nostalgic at least three to four times a week, while only 4 percent claimed it happened less than once a month.

What is it, though, that sends us yearning backward? Often as not, it is simply interaction with something from our past: sometimes that is as simple as the smell or taste of a madeleine, though slightly more often it is the presence of another person – many nostalgic memories are centred on family, friends, and other significant people in our life, although that probably has more to do with how we value social connections than with some underlying quirk of our memory. This is understandable but feels a little inadequate: of course we will remember things, but why should we yearn for them when we know we can’t ever get them back? The answer might lie in what actually appears to be the most common trigger for nostalgia: feeling bad.

It would be wonderful to have some grander explanation, but here we are. In terms of the spectrum of bad feelings, loneliness seems to be the most common trigger, but really any sort of vaguely baddish mood will do, from anger or feeling threatened right on down to simple boredom. (Perhaps I shouldn’t sell boredom short: psychologist Clay Routledge theorizes that it might prime nostalgia because bored people are tapping into the grander existential angst that comes from lacking purpose.) The basic idea is that by casting our thoughts backward to a time when we weren’t feeling bad, we find some comfort, or maybe more importantly some steel, to help us carry on. To use loneliness as our example, it seems that when we’re feeling isolated, we have a reflex to think back to fine times with friends and family, reminding ourselves that we have been surrounded by love and companionship before and presumably will be again. We are, in effect, turning our past into our present – even giving ourselves a tenable future – by reminding ourselves that we are still that person who was not so lonely, not so long ago.

As far as we can trust the psychologists, their findings are a curious reversal of nostalgia’s origins. In labelling it a disease, Hofer assumed nostalgia was the cause of its subjects’ physical maladies and psychological distresses, when, even then, it was the result of them. People felt bad and so longed for the last time they felt good – which, given the limits of sixteenth-century life, was almost inevitably the last time they were at home; their problem wasn’t necessarily that they were away from home, just that they were currently miserable. The psychologists’ conception of nostalgia does fit in quite nicely with several of the reigning theories of nostalgia from more contemporary figures, though: the postmodernist search for authenticity tracks, for instance, if we’re to assume that lacking authenticity would leave us in some sense distressed. In mildly less airy terms, Davis – who was by trade a sociologist, and included anecdotal but deep interviews in his studies – theorizes that nostalgia works as a way of helping us consolidate our identity, and we are especially prone to it when that sense of identity is under threat. There may be a bit of a chicken-and-egg question with regard to threatened identity or diminished authenticity and feeling shitty, but either way the outcome would presumably be the same: nostalgia as a balm, a way to get us back on our feet.

Whichever level we are considering it on, the fact that nostalgia is as much coping mechanism as reflexive condition might help explain why modern nostalgia, despite having shed its diseased origins, is often treated dismissively or with suspicion. Nostalgia can be a fairly benign reaction – a warm memory at the smell of freshly baked cookies – but just as often it might be properly understood as a sign of distress: a lonely, depressed person flailing about for their last notions of happiness. That is slightly overstating things: by most accounts, nostalgia is a fleeting experience, a few short moments or maybe a night of reminiscing among friends. It works its restorative or melancholy magic and moves on. But that’s all the more reason why someone or something who seems pervasively nostalgic might make us uncomfortable: somewhere deep down, we know they are trying to cope with some void of meaning or motivation, and it’s easier for us to mock the crutch and keep our distance than to confront their despair and risk having it provoke a similar void in ourselves. Or perhaps it burrows down even deeper than that. Maybe the mere existence of a pervasive and inescapable tendency to fling ourselves into the comforts of our past is a general reminder that meaning and identity are more elusive than we are willing to admit, hard to grasp and harder to hold on to, and so we have plenty of reason to feel disconnected from our very selves, without even getting into the rest of humanity.

In fairness here, it’s not just impending existential crisis that leaves us uneasy with our tendency toward nostalgia (though that’s probably the way I would vote). Even among those who defend nostalgia, even as a coping mechanism, there is a pervasive sense that, whatever nostalgia’s benefits, it involves an inherently blinkered view of our own past. Nostalgia is in a real sense dishonest – if not actively, then in that slipperier lie-by-omission way, not really giving us the whole truth about what came before. This is a more solid charge, if only for the fact that almost everyone is nostalgic about their past, even if those pasts strike us as objectively horrible: people who lived smack in the middle of the Depression, the Blitz of London, rampant civil unrest, meaningful threat of nuclear war, repressive police states – almost anything up to genocide (depending which side you were on) – will often describe those times in glowing terms, or at least pluck the tiniest shard of rose-coloured glass from the ashes and let it redeem the rest (‘Sure we were starving, but people stuck together back then’). Davis found nostalgic recollection inherently dishonest; he noted that most of his subjects at some point engaged in what he called ‘reflexive nostalgia,’ wherein they openly questioned their own nostalgic recollections – usually immediately after sharing them. He didn’t seem to fully appreciate how the presence of an accomplished sociologist openly probing them might affect how people try to be perceived: relatively few sessions of reminiscence, with or without other people, end with us disavowing the whole thing as BS to make ourselves feel better. (Davis also detailed a further layer of nostalgia, interpreted nostalgia, which he described as analytical questions about nostalgia – ‘Why am I feeling nostalgic now? What is the purpose of nostalgia?’ – which I can say from personal experience is profoundly rare among people who are not actively researching nostalgia or being questioned by people who are actively researching nostalgia.)

Regardless of how reflexive we ourselves might be, we are acutely aware of how warped other people’s nostalgia often is. This is not without cause: if anything, we are probably not nearly suspicious enough of how inadequate our memories really are. The most common demonstration of our faulty recollections is flashbulb memories, the tendency people have to vividly remember major events while also somehow getting virtually all of the details wrong. The most studied event in relation to this phenomenon is 9/11; there have been at least two dozen studies of people’s memories of that event and how they have changed since. In these and related studies, researchers will talk to people relatively soon after an event, having them record what they were doing; the researchers will then return after a year or two or five or ten, and ask them to share the story again. Almost inevitably, the stories have changed dramatically – but the rememberers are so sure of their current version of events that they tend to accuse the researchers of lying, right down to forging handwriting or faking voice recordings. Their memories are not just supplanted, they are supplanted with impossibly vivid but wildly inaccurate ones – at least outside the basic facts of planes hitting buildings and the like.

Though they are generally attached to significant collective experiences, flashbulb memories are not so different from anything we would call a memory. For almost anything to stick in our head for any length of time, there has to be a reasonably strong emotional experience attached to it. Partly this is because the more apparently meaningful an experience is, the more we will return to it, and that repetition, the frequent firing of neurological pathways, is important to storing memory. (This is the sense in which Hofer was generally right about how the mind forms memories, and in particular why memories that are frequently revisited will be so vivid they might seem to block out more recent experiences.) But it appears that powerfully emotional experiences will also retroactively enhance memories, bringing what had appeared to be background information to the fore. If one of your coworkers unexpectedly asks you out, for instance, that experience will cause related things that might have escaped your notice before to seem more vivid: you will remember an awkward elevator ride, or a compliment in a meeting, that had previously faded into the background hum of life. It’s an idea that rings true if you attempt to plumb your memory – try to vividly recall a specific day’s commute from three years ago, or eating an average sandwich. Outside of the things we don’t generally consider memories – reflexive, rote stuff like riding a bike or tying a shoe – there really isn’t any such thing as an unemotional memory.

In and of itself, this would be a biasing factor for our past: our memory is all extremes. We are naturally going to forget the humdrum, and even for that matter the mildly to majorly unpleasant or the only somewhat exciting. Barring the most traumatic experiences, which force their recollection on us, we are likely biased toward generally pleasant memories, too, as we’ll tend to replay those more often. But as the flashbulb memories demonstrate so clearly, it increasingly appears that not only do we plainly forget a lot of our experience, but we profoundly alter what is left. Recent research by the likes of Karim Nader and others, in fact, seems to suggest not only that we have the potential to alter our memories almost every time we recall them, but that it might actually be impossible for us to recall something without altering it in some way. The brain, far from remaining fixed, apparently returns to something like the original state it was in the first time the memory was recorded, with the potential to be subtly rewritten if it’s given the appropriate cues: say, another person sharing their experience on 9/11, or maybe, as has been attempted with PTSD patients with some success, a therapist helping throttle the emotions associated with the memory. It’s akin to walking across a snowy field: the first time you do so, you create an obvious path. The next day, the wind has covered it with a light dusting: the outline may be obvious, but because your balance is a bit shakier or you’re walking with a friend or you’re looking at your phone, you can never quite replicate the exact steps. Walk it enough, with enough tiny shifts, and the path ends up in an entirely different place, but still looks, from the end, like the same one you started with.

Considering all this, you’d be absolutely right to accuse nostalgics of yearning for a past that isn’t there. Between our need for reassurance and our tendency to subtly and (mostly) unwittingly alter our most meaningful memories – which is to say, virtually all of them – we are left with a feedback loop that would gradually but persistently turn our own past into a perfect shining gem, precisely the memory we need to get us back on our feet and out in the world, regardless of its relationship to what ‘actually’ happened. But mistrusting our nostalgic tendency in this case seems entirely beside the point. Left to ourselves, we have no meaningful way to separate our basic, unyearned-for memories from the rose-coloured memories we associate with nostalgia; limited by its mechanics and our need to maintain a coherent, motivated self, our memory inherently creates a past where everything is deeply meaningful. Not necessarily pleasant or perfect, mind you, but sufficiently comforting that we can turn to it whenever we need (which is at least once a week, for most of us). Our memory is built for nostalgia: it may not force us to yearn to go back to the experience, but given the choice between the abject chaos of our present and a reasonably ideal past – presented to us as our actual past – nostalgic longing hardly needs the help.

And that, of course, is only if we are left to our own devices, which hasn’t really been the case since we invented external media. Whether you want to mark the starting line at cave drawings or would prefer to wait until we managed to put together entire systems of writing capable of clearly explaining complex ideas, making records of our worldly concerns – from the particulars of goat trading to the innermost thoughts of **~~iceprincezz420~~** – is such a profound thing that we may not be entirely capable of handling it.

Whatever myriad tasks we might currently use our multimedia cornucopia for, memory is the essential spark of media – the why and what of it. Wherever it pops up, the first things we try to write down are all those that presumably mean disaster if we were to forget them: the oldest instances of systemized Chinese characters we have, for instance, are inscriptions on oracle bones, literal attempts to divine the actions of the gods (some people also think some cave paintings served divination purposes, if you want to go back even further). The original Sumerian cuneiform tablets, probably the first thing humans did that could properly be called writing, were basically accounting ledgers, tracking the commerce and contracts necessary to keep a city of thousands fed and not feeling excessively homicidal toward one another. However our blinkered memories muddled through before, we eventually reached a point where an external, verifiable source was needed, and so we created it.

Whatever its uses for the collective, though, the invention of media creates two pretty serious problems for the individual that are particularly relevant to nostalgia: fallibility and mutability. By creating a history that transcends us, we reveal not only that our understanding of things – our memories – might not really be true but that our understanding of ourselves may not be as solid as we would like to think. Of these problems, the extent to which we misremember things is the more obvious: we may not be entirely incapable of recognizing our own failings without an external prod (or proof), but having one certainly has a way of focusing the issue, if only because it makes it harder to deny that we might be wrong. The reaction of the subjects of the flashbulb memory study is some proof of how profoundly uncomfortable this dissonance is for us.

But the internal dissonance that external memory – media – provokes is ultimately more troubling. The great lie of our self-identity is its consistency: we are effectively trapped in a permanent presentism, a belief that we are fundamentally the same, enhanced and emboldened by a memory that selectively edits our past to conform with that notion. The external record enabled by media reveals that there are times when we felt differently, when we experienced the world differently. Whether through an express record of our feelings (say, a diary or a piece of art we’ve created) or just an external nudge that forces us to re-experience our feelings, rather than merely live with the memory of them (say, watching a favourite movie from childhood), we are forced to confront the fact that we change, that we are less solid than our necessarily solipsistic movement through the world would have us believe.

In both of these cases, external media reveals our boundaries, how limited in our understanding of the world we truly are. Nostalgia is, I think, one of the most powerful tools we have developed to help us reconcile those boundaries. Though it’s a phenomenon that exists well beyond external media, it is thoroughly enhanced by it, in the sense that nostalgia is a powerful coping mechanism. Media does not create the longing, it creates a real past; nostalgia is what allows us to reconcile it to our present, to give it meaning and allow ourselves to carry on.

In the sense that nostalgia is a modern condition, it is only because the modern age is so thoroughly mediated – increasingly, it seems, with every generation. Illiterate peasants might go their entire lives without being forced to square these particular circles; an endlessly wired world, one where even most social interaction is inescapably mediated, will be forced to confront it endlessly. A world awash in media is a constant test of our memory – and as such a constant test of who we are, or in any case think ourselves to be. Confronted with evidence that there is more to the world – more to our self – than how we feel and experience it in this moment, we scramble to find firmer footing, to reconcile how we feel with the way things are. Trapped as we are in ourselves, this solidity is only ever available in retrospect – and because it is impossible, all we can do is long for it. Nostalgia is a form of reconciliation: not just of who we were with who we are, but with the idea that that either of those questions has a settled answer. It helps us believe we might be more than just this longing.