Someone once said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. It's a phrase that is repeated over and over by historians who, for some reason, feel the need to justify their subject and the study thereof. Personally I don't think you need a practical reason to learn anything. I'm learning Swedish for God's sake. Sweden's days as a nation of any real influence were found not to have survived the end of the 1600s and the limp corpse of their empire was to be found by Peter I, dripping in the gory afterbirth of the eighteenth century. The ascension of Russia to the top of the northern European food-chain was one which left little chance for a Swedish comeback...unless one counts an admirable success rate in the EuroVision Song Contest (and I don't...ABBA are all very well and good, but come on...). I'm learning it because I thought it would be interesting. I may or may not go into deeper detail regarding my views on learning at a later date but, as you can see from the rather austere title above, this is a little discussion on nostalgia.
I suppose it's only natural that I, well known to be an emotional and, dare I say it, sentimental chap, would experience levels of nostalgia bordering on obsessive lunacy after leaving home to live in Edinburgh. Amidst an inescapable maelstrom of change my thoughts naturally drift backwards, sifting through the sands of time, every crossroads, every new discovery, every bare-faced cliche.
I'm quite terrible at keeping nostalgia under control. Maintaining healthy levels of nostalgia, treading the line between an aloof disregard for all things passed and drowning in the violently frothing rapids of reminiscence, is challenging for some. Never the athletic type, I have serious problems with my balance, and I always seem to fall headlong into the latter. In many ways this makes little sense.
I am the first to admit that the majority of my teenage years, as with many adolescent boys, was comprised of regular self-administered inoculations of the most concentrated solution of angst and hormones. This resulted in me becoming a perfectly abhorrent teenage boy. Hooray for puberty!!!
Yet my view of these times leans towards a rose-tinted bias worthy of a holocaust denial! I was a contemptible turd of a boy! A moaning, self-absorbed ball-sack living in a world which I turned against myself as much for the purpose of justifying my own self-pity as for engendering that of others! What kind of a Utopian era is that to remember fondly? But there it is, lording it over the present from its ivory throne in its ivory tower, safe in the knowledge that it can't be changed by any act, choice or gross disregard for the laws of physics.
An objective view, or a view as objective as I can muster, would surely be that my life only really became worthy of nostalgia about a year ago. Before then it was, as mentioned, a pretty pitiful thing, a crumpled and discarded post-it note on the crumb-laden floor of God's office cubicle.
Why then, given everything I have just said, is the past such an alluring notion? Heraclitus said that the past didn't even exist! Something along the lines of the only time being the present and the past and the future being only concepts devised to lend definition to the present itself. Then again he also said that Pythagoras lacked general understanding and that Homer should have been beaten. Hefty views for a man famed for crying all the time. But how appropriate an addition to this staggered jumble-sale of thoughts and musings.
I think I have a theory as to why the past, with its voluptuous curves of memory and experience, its enchanting gaze of wisdom and knowledge, is so much more effective a temptress than the future, that history's warm bosom is so much more inviting a place to rest one's head than the sparse, anorexic and angular chest of the future. I crave security. I don't like sudden changes, and the present and the future are always being ripped apart and reassembled by sudden changes. The past is set in the concrete of time. The future is constantly being obscured and revealed by the shifting sand-dunes of possibility. To live in the past is to walk around an enormous museum built to the specifications of your own desire, housing exhibits procured by your own actions. To live in the future is to have this museum change with every second, its elegant structure writhing and twisting like some new-born creature gasping to fill its lungs. The exhibits are intimidating and ever-changing, everything you learn is rendered obsolete within minutes. It is difficult to adapt to an uncertain future where your constants are changing and your changes are constant. But living in the past has its disadvantages.
Dwelling on the past and viewing it as a simpler, idyllic time when pollution wasn't a problem, when people were honest and united together against the ruskies, banks had money and HMV hadn't mercilessly crushed small music businesses into paste beneath the fleshy mass of their financially bloated feet. This removes appreciation from the present which, in time, will become the past and be added to the vast collection in your private museum, under the benevolent gaze of you, the curator. Sooner or later what you're doing now will be in the past. When it is it becomes a potential subject for nostalgia and reminiscence. But memories are finite. Like radioactive material they lose potency over time. To not utilize them now is to waste their power. You will never truly experience the present as it is meant to be experienced. You will live in a shadow world of dying thoughts, a sprawling mental necropolis housing the mummified remnants of your experience. Suddenly the comfort of your museum will be gone, the elegantly panelled walls, once a warm, varnished brown, will become ghastly and pale.
Besides, the very foundation of modern society is the desire to improve ourselves, to make great leaps in the fields of science and art. We strive each day to make the world a better place. As soon as we become too focused on the past we become impotent, unable to impregnate the future with the seed of our creative and intellectual loins. How that analogy can be made valid for women is unclear right now and I'm not really up to the task of writing a female-friendly version...not in any great detail at least. You shall simply have to ask your parents. Or Google it...
So there we have it chaps and chapettes. My silly thoughts on nostalgia. A pleasant and valuable human emotion but one to be kept in check with the same severity as one one's lust or even one's anger. Surely the main use of nostalgia is to learn from the past to allow an efficient and unhindered journey into the future which can be enjoyed as fully as possible as it happens.
Or else what will you have to consider on your death-bed other than all the moments you missed rushing by, catching only a brief glimpse of their pert buttocks disappearing round the corner.
With that I must leave you. My sleeping patterns have been highly erratic of late and I must take every possible course of action necessary to prevent full-blown nocturnalism. If you've made it this far without becoming lost either in the labyrinthine corridors of my perplexing rhetoric or the decaying halls of your own private museum then I bid you a fond adieu. If you are lost then you have my sincerest condolences. In this day and age, you will probably be raped by a god-damned ruskie.
Jamie.
P.S. Why not give Hector Berlioz a try. Mad as a spoon but underrated nonetheless.
I suppose it's only natural that I, well known to be an emotional and, dare I say it, sentimental chap, would experience levels of nostalgia bordering on obsessive lunacy after leaving home to live in Edinburgh. Amidst an inescapable maelstrom of change my thoughts naturally drift backwards, sifting through the sands of time, every crossroads, every new discovery, every bare-faced cliche.
I'm quite terrible at keeping nostalgia under control. Maintaining healthy levels of nostalgia, treading the line between an aloof disregard for all things passed and drowning in the violently frothing rapids of reminiscence, is challenging for some. Never the athletic type, I have serious problems with my balance, and I always seem to fall headlong into the latter. In many ways this makes little sense.
I am the first to admit that the majority of my teenage years, as with many adolescent boys, was comprised of regular self-administered inoculations of the most concentrated solution of angst and hormones. This resulted in me becoming a perfectly abhorrent teenage boy. Hooray for puberty!!!
Yet my view of these times leans towards a rose-tinted bias worthy of a holocaust denial! I was a contemptible turd of a boy! A moaning, self-absorbed ball-sack living in a world which I turned against myself as much for the purpose of justifying my own self-pity as for engendering that of others! What kind of a Utopian era is that to remember fondly? But there it is, lording it over the present from its ivory throne in its ivory tower, safe in the knowledge that it can't be changed by any act, choice or gross disregard for the laws of physics.
An objective view, or a view as objective as I can muster, would surely be that my life only really became worthy of nostalgia about a year ago. Before then it was, as mentioned, a pretty pitiful thing, a crumpled and discarded post-it note on the crumb-laden floor of God's office cubicle.
Why then, given everything I have just said, is the past such an alluring notion? Heraclitus said that the past didn't even exist! Something along the lines of the only time being the present and the past and the future being only concepts devised to lend definition to the present itself. Then again he also said that Pythagoras lacked general understanding and that Homer should have been beaten. Hefty views for a man famed for crying all the time. But how appropriate an addition to this staggered jumble-sale of thoughts and musings.
I think I have a theory as to why the past, with its voluptuous curves of memory and experience, its enchanting gaze of wisdom and knowledge, is so much more effective a temptress than the future, that history's warm bosom is so much more inviting a place to rest one's head than the sparse, anorexic and angular chest of the future. I crave security. I don't like sudden changes, and the present and the future are always being ripped apart and reassembled by sudden changes. The past is set in the concrete of time. The future is constantly being obscured and revealed by the shifting sand-dunes of possibility. To live in the past is to walk around an enormous museum built to the specifications of your own desire, housing exhibits procured by your own actions. To live in the future is to have this museum change with every second, its elegant structure writhing and twisting like some new-born creature gasping to fill its lungs. The exhibits are intimidating and ever-changing, everything you learn is rendered obsolete within minutes. It is difficult to adapt to an uncertain future where your constants are changing and your changes are constant. But living in the past has its disadvantages.
Dwelling on the past and viewing it as a simpler, idyllic time when pollution wasn't a problem, when people were honest and united together against the ruskies, banks had money and HMV hadn't mercilessly crushed small music businesses into paste beneath the fleshy mass of their financially bloated feet. This removes appreciation from the present which, in time, will become the past and be added to the vast collection in your private museum, under the benevolent gaze of you, the curator. Sooner or later what you're doing now will be in the past. When it is it becomes a potential subject for nostalgia and reminiscence. But memories are finite. Like radioactive material they lose potency over time. To not utilize them now is to waste their power. You will never truly experience the present as it is meant to be experienced. You will live in a shadow world of dying thoughts, a sprawling mental necropolis housing the mummified remnants of your experience. Suddenly the comfort of your museum will be gone, the elegantly panelled walls, once a warm, varnished brown, will become ghastly and pale.
Besides, the very foundation of modern society is the desire to improve ourselves, to make great leaps in the fields of science and art. We strive each day to make the world a better place. As soon as we become too focused on the past we become impotent, unable to impregnate the future with the seed of our creative and intellectual loins. How that analogy can be made valid for women is unclear right now and I'm not really up to the task of writing a female-friendly version...not in any great detail at least. You shall simply have to ask your parents. Or Google it...
So there we have it chaps and chapettes. My silly thoughts on nostalgia. A pleasant and valuable human emotion but one to be kept in check with the same severity as one one's lust or even one's anger. Surely the main use of nostalgia is to learn from the past to allow an efficient and unhindered journey into the future which can be enjoyed as fully as possible as it happens.
Or else what will you have to consider on your death-bed other than all the moments you missed rushing by, catching only a brief glimpse of their pert buttocks disappearing round the corner.
With that I must leave you. My sleeping patterns have been highly erratic of late and I must take every possible course of action necessary to prevent full-blown nocturnalism. If you've made it this far without becoming lost either in the labyrinthine corridors of my perplexing rhetoric or the decaying halls of your own private museum then I bid you a fond adieu. If you are lost then you have my sincerest condolences. In this day and age, you will probably be raped by a god-damned ruskie.
Jamie.
P.S. Why not give Hector Berlioz a try. Mad as a spoon but underrated nonetheless.
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