On Nostalgia

Oh my god--I am nostalgic. In general, I mean. For the past. Which I guess is what nostalgia means, but I am a little bit shocked to discover this about myself at this late date, and to realize or be forced to acknowledge that it does have something to do with getting older, with being old enough to recall a past that is distinctly different (although of course in many ways the same) as the present. My realization came thanks to the list I was making of topics for a book idea: a book on childhood rituals--their significance, what they are now and how they have changed over time.

So I was making this list, the topic list, a sort of brainstorming of possible chapters or essays, and some of the topics were these: board games versus computer games, birthday parties (see previous posts), playdates, competition, meals, movies and television in real time versus on-demand, letters versus e-mail, reading, shopping, the Internet--those were the big ones. (Any input on this topic would be greatly appreciated--other ideas for sections, etc.) And although the point of this book would certainly not be what we have lost as we've modernized--and I don't even think it's a question of lost or gained, it's just different, and how do the differences affect children, and us--I realized that I was kind of dwelling on the things I think we've lost.

That's not right. I guess it's only natural to idealize the past, if the past is something you look back on fondly, and I do think I had a pretty nice childhood, perhaps especially in terms of these childhood rituals. But why do I think that the modern phenomenon of Webkins, which I just learned about yesterday I must confess, and researched a little online (I guess I don't feel nostalgic for the days of the Encyclopedia Brittanica), is not as nice, as special, as meaningful, as the stuffed animal Benjamin Bunny I had as a very small child, and whose bottom sported a purple velvet patch thanks to the time I sat him right down on a lit burner at my grandparents' house? Now I know that today's children may play this Webkins game (my diction sounds like an old lady's; I feel inches away from switching over to the word "slacks") as well as play with, create worlds for, make real their actual stuffed animals, and many children don't find the virtual toys or games as appealing as the actual ones, and that there are very real and even important benefits to staying on top of the current technology--not just for the future but in terms of using different parts of the brain at the same time, fine motor skills, building skills in a kind of communication network that will be a part of our children's lives whether we like it or not, to such an extent that it would be insane to deny it, I suspect.

I have never played Webkins. I was about to say that I don't play computer games, but that's not actually true, thanks to Scrabulous, whose inventors should win some kind of international prize. And now I am wondering if my nostalgia for the way things were is more style than substance, that again (one interesting thing about sevenhundredfiftywords for me is how themes are emerging on their own) it is the idea of the past I like, even as I embrace and am sometimes intimidated by the idea--and ideas--of the future. In other words, that although I claim not to want to be a person preoccupied with nostalgia, that it irritates me when my father, or others (I promise this is the last time I will refer to Andy Rooney) bemoan the "new technologies" by which they sometimes mean computers, in favor of the "good old days," I am prone to doing the exact same thing.

It has taken me a while to recognize this tendency in myself, as I am of a generation later than my father's (and about ten generations later than Andy Rooney's). Although we didn't have a computer until I was about eleven, and even then we used it to play rudimentary games such as Snooper Troops and to write "If-Then" loops in Basic code for homework assignments (one of the Wang kids went to our elementary school, and we had a computer room!), I had one in college, and then a cell phone in my twenties, and using the Internet and shopping online are not as alien to me as they are to some of my parents' generation--full fledged adults when the technology came about and was--continues to be--perfected. But I realize now that I have a visceral reaction to some of the things that today's kids in particular take for granted. When the kids I tutor talked about My Space or texting each other, I actually tsk-tsked in my head, thinking: how sad, what a waste of time. When some of the boys seemed obsessed with an online fantasy sports league, spending hours at their computers involved with it each day, I remembered the NCAA and other league pools of my adolescence, which involved complex charts and calculations on the part of one sports-fanatic friend in particular and often actually watching games together: feeling the swells of victory, the plunges of defeat as a group, the best part of being a sports fan, I think: the collective anguish and joy.

But why is my version, my memory, better? Or more valid? It's not, I guess, is the answer, the one I'm supposed to arrive at, accept. I can embrace and master each new technology that comes along, and I want to. I'd love to be more confident with all things technological, computerized, requiring me to push myself in ways that don't come naturally at all. I dread the idea of turning my back on the here and now; it has always been a fate I've pledged to avoid. But the cold hard truth is that it's not the world I come from. It may never feel like second nature, no matter how hard I run to catch up with it, and I may always have to fight off these fits of nostalgia, or at least to accept them for what they are: a feeling, a stylistic quirk, an idea.

Are the same kids who loved electric train sets, spent hours configuring tracks and building cities in my childhood, now the kids who show such proficiency, such mind-boggling ability to construct little worlds online, with the computer games that enable them to do so? Is it just the stuff that's changed, and if so, does it matter, is anything--has anything--been lost? I dig in my heels a little bit here. I can still feel Benjamin Bunny, feel the spots where his fur was flat from rubbing, feel the little nubby stitches where my grandmother had sewn his velvet patch, smell the always vaguely chemical smell of the place where he'd been singed, see the ragged edges of his pale blue coat, remember that some whiskers were bent, some gone altogether, know that he was never soft enough, plush enough to sleep with, remember how I loved him anyway. It is in a sensory way, maybe I am thinking now, that something has been lost, and if the technologies push away the time spent developing the sensory relationships then the loss is real and not just my nostalgia. Or maybe I am already too old to understand why this is just not so.

To be continued....