Subject: Re: Schrafft's or Schnapps
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 24 2000 - 09:49:33 GMT
On Thu, Aug 24, 2000 at 08:59:44AM +0100, Scottie Bowman wrote:
> It's very understandable that Tim should be nostalgic
> for a long gone version of his home town. But why
> should a youthful Brit (as I presume from her address)
> like Melinda & an ancient Scot like myself who has not
> so far set foot in the place experience something
> of the same?
Nostalgia is a funny and evasive element of life. I think Woody Allen
captured it nicely in "Radio Days," where he mixed elements of high and
low comedy in the context of looking back on growing up, when radio
shows (dramas, music, games, war news) were a key part of popular life,
and a few bars of a melody today can bring back as much a flood of
memory for the right person as could Proust's cookie for old Marcel.
I don't know how I can possibly be nostalgic for a time before I was
born, but that period holds a definite attraction for me.
Salinger's nostalgia seems to extend to the 1920s, when the Glass kids
were either children or were not yet born, and his depictions of 1940s
locales (whether here in New York or Devon or unspecified parts of
France) seem less tinged with nostalgia than with reportage. "Esme"
perhaps comes closest to "nostalgia," and it barely skirts it. I feel
compelled to say that the 1920s never had the mystique, for me, of the
1940s and 50s.
All of which were before my time, but that's what faux-nostalgia is
about, at least for me.
--tim
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