In 1688, Johannes Hefer identified a mysterious illness, which broke out among groups of Swiss mercenaries who longed for the comforts of home. Symptoms included a sad longing for home along with “fevers, abdominal pain, fainting, vomiting and even death.” Physicians blamed it on damage done to the brain by excess exposure to cowbells in childhood – the men were literally experiencing cowbell withdrawal symptoms and missing the past was making them ill. A century later,  the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks noted in the journal he kept throughout Captain Cook’s first voyage that members of the crew were “now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia.”¹

I read that a couple of months ago and it has resonated ever since. The idea of nostalgia as a kind of disease makes a certain amount of sense to me and it might make sense to you at this time of year. For many people the end of the year is a time of heightened melancholy – we see time slipping away and we try to grasp at it but perhaps the more we try to hold onto past memories the closer we are to what Sir Joseph Banks described – nostalgia as a disease that might not be good for us.

Of course, it is great at this time of year to recall the good times we have had – memories are a gift after all. I am, for example, grateful for a fabulous day with Tracey at the virtual Van Gogh exhibition early in the summer, which was a real celebration of the power of art to help us see the world differently. I took pictures and shot some video footage on that trip because these were memories I want to keep and it is appropriate to do that, because sometimes the past is good for us.

Being children of the Methodist manse my brother and I spent a lot of time in old, often Victorian era church buildings as teenagers and I recall after one service sometime in the early eighties it really suddenly struck me as odd that we would meet in such old buildings, and sing such old hymns, and have prayers that in the case of at least one local preacher included phrases like “thou knowest our sins,” the sort of language that just didn’t come up anywhere else.  I commented on this to Nigel. I said something like, “Don’t you think it’s odd that we come to these old Victorian buildings, and sing old Victorian hymns and have old prayers with all those thees and thous in?” Nigel thought about this for a moment and then said, “Yea, brother, verily.”

For me this is a positive memory and I don’t mean it as a criticism to say that some of these services erred towards the Victorian. There is comfort to be had in connecting to tradition, there are lessons to be learned from exploring our histories, but at what point might nostalgia be the disease rather than part of the cure for solving the riddles of life?

I can only speak from my own experience as someone who has lived in the past a little more than I ought to. I can get sentimental about the past just like anyone else, but I also have a weird nostalgia for aspects of my life that weren’t fun when they were happening! For example, I might find myself thinking about how much I didn’t enjoy my comprehensive school and the next thing I know I find myself googling it to see if it’s still there and how much it has changed. Why is that of interest? What am I hoping to find?

Perhaps a clue to this is to be found in my regular Christmas habit of watching It’s a Wonderful Life, partly because it’s a great Christmas film and partly because my nostaligia malaise is so far advanced that I now am now pining for things that happened long before I was born. I mean, modern comedy is okay so far as it goes, but what a joyful thing it used to be when George Formby did a turn with his ukulele, and if you think you know what fame is today, did you know that when Gracie Fields returned to radio broadcasts after a time of illness, it was such a momentous national occasion that the House of Commos closed early so that MPs could get home in time to hear the broadcast? That is actually true! Such happy memories as these can make me smile even as I write, and they happened thirty years before I was born.

But to return to It’s a Wonderful Life and thus only 22 years before I was born, James Stewart is about to kiss Donna Reed, but he’s taking his time getting around to it, so a man sitting on the porch who I used to consider old, but who is probably younger than I am now, shouts, “Why don’t you kiss her?” and then follows this up by declaring that “Youth is wasted on all the wrong people.”

For me in that line is some of the potentially destructive power of nostalga.  Perhaps one point where nostalgia can do us harm is when it is regretful, when it is less about good memories we share than things we did wrong or failed to do at all. A pinch of regret can help us to be our better selves but if you immerse yourself in a bathful of regret, you’re going to find it hard to get out, and the rubber duck of positivity floating by might not be enough to rescue you!

One past regret I have is the final sentence of the previous paragraph, but in the spirit of practising what I preach and not trying to change the past I will soldier on, though perhaps my next blog should be about the value of editing and proofreading. To be fair, psychologists seem to echo my dodgy “bathful of Nostalgia” metaphor, describing nostalgia as an “emotional regulation strategy” with studies showing that people tend to reach for nostalgia in more negative moments, providing a potential means of reconnecting to the meaningful when they are not naturally feeling connected. Nostalgia expresses need for connection, belonging and meaning, but in itself it can only partly meet these needs, and can do harm if relied on too much.²

My most extreme act of ‘Nostalgia” was to spend several years on my PhD in nineteenth-century Methodist history project. Looking back, the whole idea was absurd. I was studying nineteenth-century Methodism at least partly in the hope that it would help me understand who I was and wanted to be in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It was a terrible idea, with little chance of success but it worked. As I studied the past I became less sentimental and more critical about it, and the process of research put me in touch with new people, many of whom would become lifelong friends, and one of whom I married. Thus nostalgia for a past before I was even born may have been the starting point, but new experiences and people were where I found my meaning, connection and belonging.

Broadly speaking, nostalgia has been good for me. I would argue that nostalgia is good for us when, even amidst the sadness of lost times and people no longer with us, the dominant emotion is gratitude. But when we feel the past dragging us down a bit, perhaps it is time to seek out meaning and connection elsewhere. Maybe then it’s time to put on your coat, step outside and seek a new experience. If all else fails, recite this mantra to yourself:

Nostaligia: it’s not what it used to be.

Bonus: A Nostalgic poem from 1925

This poem was written by the Reverend John Hardcastle, a Primitive Methodist minister originally from Shildon in Co. Durham, England but a resident of Rewey, Wisconsin when he wrote this in 1925. Hardcastle bought a second-hand Model-T Ford but lived to regret it and this poem was meant to express, in comic terms, why he felt this way: 

This is my car,
I shall not want another,
It maketh me to lie down in wet places,
It soileth my soul,
It leadeth me into deep waters
It leadeth me in the paths of ridicule for it’s name’s sake,
It prepareth a breakdown for me in the presence of mine enemies,
Yea, though I run through the valleys, I am towed up the hill
I fear great evil when it is with me,
Its rods and its engine discomfort me,
It annointeth my face with oil,
Its tank runneth over.
Surely to goodness, if this thing follows me all the days of my life, I shall dwell in the house of the insane for ever.

References

¹Susie Dent (2022) An Emotional Dictionary: Real Words for how You Feel from Angst to Zwodder (Edinburgh: John Murray).

²Valentina Stoycheva (2020) The dark side of nostalgia [blog]. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-everyday-unconscious/202009/the-dark-side-nostalgia (Accessed 27 December 2022)