June 20, 2025
A quick definition of “nostalgia” is longing for the good old days, and to some people the good old days were when words expressed what Descartes called “clear and distinct ideas.” In the good old days, each word expressed one idea, precisely and logically distinguished from all others. What was called analytical philosophy went to great lengths to refine the sloppiness of ordinary language into something clear and distinct, and there are periodically suggestions for the reform of language along such lines, or even the creation of a new, totally logical language. This form of nostalgia, like so many others, imagines a time that never was, longing for an ideal that can never be, because it is based on a false premise.
Language does not work that way, because the human mind does not work that way outside of some specialized, narrow disciplines having to do with logical, often quasi-mathematical relationships. The human mind as it emerges from the unconscious is primarily associative, seeing holistically in terms of patterns and connections. Much prejudice to the contrary, that does not mean it ignores or suppresses differences, at least not necessarily, merely that it perceives differences contextually, as being aspects of a larger pattern. The word “nostalgia” is not a clear and distinct idea but an associative cluster, some of whose elements seem to contradict one another. To “deconstruct” the associative cluster is not necessarily to debunk it: there is a reason certain emotions and values have been associated. The associations may be “irrational,” but the rejection of anything that isn’t rational is not motivated by high principle but rather by an anxious need for control and a reassurance that everything is predictable.
Looking at common dictionary definitions of nostalgia, we see that they seem to unite two things that seem opposites: nostalgia proper, the yearning for another time, and homesickness, the yearning for another place. That was true from the start. The word is a fairly modern coinage, contrived in the 17th century by a Swiss medical student to describe the extreme homesickness suffered by Swiss mercenaries on deployment abroad. The noun root is nostos, meaning homecoming or return, a word with an eminent literary history, as we shall see. The -algia modifier means “pain,” as in “neuralgia.” So “nostalgia” was invented to signify a kind of painful separation anxiety, a yearning for home by those who are somehow exiled from it. But the idea of past time resides within this primary meaning of spatial separation, as what the deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida would call a trace, something that is hidden beneath the surface meaning of a word or text. The trace acts as what Derrida called a supplement, adding something to the surface meaning that has been suppressed but which is actually part of the word’s total significance. Here, to homesickness is added the idea of time: our yearning for home is the yearning for a condition in the past when we were at home. We want to return to a place, but also to a lost time.
A second aspect of “nostalgia” is not so much its denotation as its connotations. Is nostalgia good or bad? Here too lie many contradictions from which we may gain insight. Originally, the connotations were negative. Nostalgia was regarded as a pathology, essentially as a form of melancholia, what we would call depression, from which people could actually die. Death by nostalgia? That seems extreme. The idea of Swiss mercenaries, who were presumably as tough as it gets, pining away because they were away from home seems weird to us, but I guess they don’t make Swiss mercenaries like they used to. We think of homesickness first of all in terms of young people leaving home for the first time: kids away at camp or the like, and young adults newly at college. I encounter the latter regularly, and in some cases the homesickness is bad enough that the student is not able to function, and in a few cases withdraws from school, often planning to enroll somewhere close to home. I will always remember a girl in freshman comp who sat in the front row, center—along with her stuffed animal. I wouldn’t have laughed at her for the world. We associate homesickness with the young because for adults the world has shrunk There are no longer any distances which cannot be crossed in a small number of hours, and thus no situations producing homesickness, but historically journeys took a long time.
Some Internet sources say that nostalgia is a product of Romanticism, but the Romantic movement only gave modern forms to an age-old aspect of the human condition, one that manifests itself across the history of literature, beginning with the word nostos itself. The nostoi were the returns of the Greek warriors after the Trojan War. There used to be a whole epic about the returns, part of what is called the Epic Cycle, a series of epics that expanded the story of the Trojan War and its aftermath beyond Homer. But the gist of the nostoi is contained in glancing references throughout the Odyssey, set ten years after the end of the war, at a time in which everyone who was destined to return had done so except for Odysseus. The returns were a kind of trial that ended differently for different people. Nestor, the wise counselor, says that he got home without mishap, but others were not so lucky. Menelaus and Helen, re-united, were waylaid for seven years in Egypt due to lack of wind, but used the opportunity to accrue a vast amount of wealth. “Big Ajax” committed suicide after he lost the contest for the armor of dead Achilles. “Little Ajax” was killed by Athena and Poseidon for having raped Cassandra. But the most important return, that of Agamemnon, was a lesson about being careful what you wish for. Agamemnon arrived home to be murdered by his own wife and her lover. Odysseus took longer than anyone else, an entire 20 years, to get back home, half of a lifetime. His first appearance is delayed until Book 5, and in the first camera shot, so to speak, he is sitting in Calypso’s island paradise, staring out to sea, weeping for home. Hermes “went to find Odysseus / in his stone seat to seaward—tear on tear / brimming his eyes. The sweet days of his life time / were running out in anguish over his exile” (5.158-60, Robert Fitzgerald translation).
When we turn to the Biblical tradition, we arrive at versions of nostalgia that are what Northrop Frye called undisplaced—that is, fully archetypal. Nostalgia for various homelands are displacements of nostalgia for the two original homelands that we have lost, heaven and paradise. The title of Milton’s Paradise Lost has potentially a powerful emotional resonance. Whenever people yearn for a time or place they have lost, they tend to employ imagery that is paradisal, even if they don’t know the Bible, much less Milton. Any untouched nature is not only beautiful but poignant, because we know all too well that its survival is threatened by the human greed we call capitalism. Joni Mitchell says in “Big Yellow Taxi,” “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” The moral is, “Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” Some of us do know, and do what we can to prevent it.
I was 18 in 1969, the year of Woodstock, for which Mitchell wrote the theme song, so to speak, although ironically she was not actually there. But she had her mythology right: it was an attempt to “get back to the Garden.” Of course, we live in fallen nature, and the festival actually took place in rain and mud: it no doubt helped if you were stoned. The paradisal yearning appears in literature as the “pastoral” convention, which originated in Classical literature, where the nostalgia was for the original Golden Age, but which was enormously popular in the Renaissance. Most people prudently confined their pastoral yearnings to literature: Milton’s twin poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are a delightful compendium of pastoral imagery. The attempt to actually live a pastoral life was satirized by Shakespeare in As You Like It, in which the court’s foray into the Forest of Arden comes up against the realization that, hey, it gets cold out here. But a conflict between naive idealism and skeptical resignation, typical of ironic literature, is not the only possible resolution of the pastoral dream. Romanticism gave us a new pastoralism that grounded the artificial Renaissance conventions in a sense of realistic nature. The theme of Wordsworth’s epic, The Prelude, is the growth of the poet’s imagination, but that imagination was nurtured by an upbringing in the very real Lake Country. We have a National Park system because of the pastoral dream, and many Americans are not content to hand it over to the oil companies and right-wingers who want to “drill, baby, drill.” A lot of effort has been expended showing that Thoreau’s picture of his life at Walden Pond was carefully selective, but his attempt to live a life in close harmony with nature remains an inspiration to some of us. I speak as someone who just sold a house with 3.8 acres of beautiful natural property, surrounded by woods and a creek. Potential buyers converged on that property with such enthusiasm that even the realtors were a bit startled, but I knew why. Leaving it, for financial reasons, was for me an experience of losing paradise.
As we project our nostalgia spatially upon nature, we project it temporally upon childhood. In Blake’s terms, we pass from childhood Innocence to adult Experience, and in doing so repeat the Fall. Just growing up is a loss of paradise. The tension between imaginative idealism and skeptical realism exists here too. One of the most beautiful poems about childhood as paradise is Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill,” the title referring to his aunt’s farm, where he used to play. But Thomas also has a short story, “The Peaches,” set on the same farm, but seen from an ironic perspective. He was not naively blind to the difference between mythic truth and realistic truth, and was able to code-shift. A second focus of nostalgia, after childhood, is youth. Nostalgia for the age in which our bodies were young and our spirits high informs many a high school reunion. Nostalgia for young love, which may be naive but has a purity envied by those who are older and wiser, may still be alive in the nursing home. It can unfortunately become a trap for those, especially women, whose lives were at their peak at that moment and who have no new phases of growth to compensate for the loss of beauty and popularity. Literature is full of such sad cases, such as the mothers in Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. Nostalgia is all they have left.
The Bible shows that the Fall does not happen just once but repeats itself cyclically throughout history, and each new fall renews the feeling of exile and nostalgia for something better that has been lost. The next exile after Adam and Eve was that of their son Cain, who killed his brother and thereupon became a homeless wanderer. Or that is one version of the story. Once again the image is not simple but polyvalent, because Cain went on to become the founder of the first city, and his descendants were the inventors of technology, such as metallurgy. But the image of the cursed wanderer haunts later literature. In Beowulf, Grendel is said to be of the race of Cain, and his hatred of Hrothgar’s hall Heorot is fueled by spiteful envy. He wants to destroy everything he is excluded from: the light, the festivity, the music, the bonds of love and friendship. We are presently learning how easily thwarted nostalgia, the sense of exclusion from a great, good place, turns to hatred. This was of course the most original of all sins, the sin of Lucifer, expelled to become Satan. Paradise Lost gives Satan tremendous speeches filled with a bitter nostalgia for lost happiness:
Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime, Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom For that celestial light? (1.221-24)
Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner finds himself exiled and excluded because of the loveless selfishness symbolized by his killing of the albatross. The power of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein derives from the deeply poignant portrait of a “monster” excluded unjustly, by no fault of his own, yearning to be part of the family in whose life he has to participate vicariously, listening to them while he remains hidden and out of sight. He is “homesick” for the home that exists just beyond the barrier he must hide behind.
Nostalgia hardly seems an adequate word to describe the anguish of the speaker of the Old English poem “The Wanderer,” a man who has lost his lord and therefore his place of belonging. It must surely be the loneliest poem in the English language. At night,
he dreams he clasps and that he kisses his liege-lord again, and lays head and hands on the lord’s knees as he did long ago, enjoyed the gift-giving in days gone by. Then the warrior, friendless, awakens again, sees before him the fallow waves, seabirds on the water spreading their wings, snow and hail falling and sleet as well. Then the heart’s wounds grow heavier, sadness for dear ones. Sorrow returns. (lines 41-48, translation by Alfred David)
The second half of “The Wanderer” expands the poem’s perspective from the personal to the historical and universal, expressing a theme of historical decline that is remarkably widespread in early literature. It is not merely the wanderer that suffers, but all humanity. The shape of history is that of decline and fall:
just as in our own day all over middle-earth walls are standing wind-swept and wasted, downed by frost, and dwellings covered with snow. The mead-hall crumbles, its master lies dead (lines 75-78)
A line appears in “The Wanderer” that occurs elsewhere in Old English poetry, eald enta geweorc, the ancient work of the giants. This refers to the Roman ruins still standing in England, works so impressive to the Anglo-Saxons that they seemed to be the work of giants. The idea that the past was greater than the present, that “there were giants in those days,” is nearly a defining feature of the heroic epic tradition, which is predominantly tragic. Homer sang of an age of heroes from which his own age was in sad decline, and Tennyson speaks of the sunset of the Arthurian ideal of the Round Table as “The darkness of that battle in the west, / Where all of high and holy dies away.” Translated literally, the title of Spengler’s Decline of the West would be “the going-under of the evening lands.” The Spenglerian vision of history is cyclical: all civilizations rise, decline, and fall. Ours is no different, and now the hour is late. Nostalgia locates the zenith of Western culture either in the Middle Ages (for Catholics) or the Renaissance (for Protestants), but there is a widespread feeling that, for all our fancy gadgets and consumer comforts, we are living in a period of cultural decline. The genre of fantasy reflects this decline in what critic John Clute calls “thinning,” the sense that a fantasy Otherworld is in decline, as particularly seen in the exhaustion of its magic. Even though Sauron is defeated, Tolkien’s Middle Earth is a realm in decline in many ways. There is a pervasive feeling that an old world is passing away, to be replaced by a modern one. Magic similarly begins to fail in The Farthest Shore, the third volume of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Tolkien-influenced Earthsea trilogy. The poem that opens Yeats’s Collected Poems, bearing the ironic title “The Song of the Happy Shepherd, begins:
The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed; Grey Truth is now her painted toy....
The British tradition of science fiction stemming from H.G. Wells managed to expand the vision of decline to the entire universe. The idea that we should be melancholy about the “heat death of the universe” billions of years from now always struck me as neurotic. Nevertheless, it became a scientific metaphor for inevitable decline and the triumph of entropy, not only in science fiction but in the early work of Thomas Pynchon. We can say it is a neurotic overreaction, but it is realistic in the sense that all we know is decline. All human lives eventually diminish and end. This is the ultimate source of nostalgia, the sense that we are belated, that we are late in the game, perhaps just before the end. And how we desperately yearn for a renewal! This desire for renewal and rebirth is the source of the genres of comedy and romance. The fairy tale, a subspecies of romance, ends, according to its greatest critic, J.R.R. Tolkien, in a eucatastrophe, a sudden turn towards a happy ending.
I was surprised to see how prevalent online is talk about how nostalgia’s bad reputation is undeserved, that it may be a positive gift rather than a moral failing. The opposite attitude is an ironic skepticism constantly on guard against the temptation to take refuge in some comfortable lie. One form of irony inoculates us against nostalgia by “demystifying” the past, showing us that there is nothing to be nostalgic about. Nostalgia depends on distance. Since my first wife Bonney died in March, there are moments when I am shaken by intense feelings of nostalgia for the days, 55 years ago, when we were young together. It is not a matter of still being in love. We were amicably divorced 45 years ago, remaining good friends. What I mean is expressed by the extraordinary song “Beat the Drum” by the legendary Scottish band Runrig, though the version I first knew and loved was by the Newfoundland group Great Big Sea. Hearing the drums—“Like a heartbeat, lonely and strong”—reminds the speaker of the same drums when they were young:
Across the bay I can still hear the strains The two step loud and blaring We walked hand and hand to the beat of the band It's good to be young and daring It's good to be young
At the same time that I remember the good moments—exploring ramshackle, legendary Kay’s Bookstore in Cleveland, Bonney being yelled at by grumpy old Kay because her round face made her look too young, in Kay’s view, to be handling a $50 art book; making a repeated pilgrimage to the New Mayfield Cinema to see Ingmar Bergman movies, in an age before video, each film introduced by a witty, informative talk by my old professor Sheldon Wigod—at the same time I had to remember that we were miserable much of the time in those days. Bonney clinically depressed, with back pain, dropped out of school after a year; me graduated with no job prospects. There were not just ups and downs. It was pervasive unhappiness, punctuated by wonderful moments. So which is the truth and which is the lie? We are forced to choose. Are you an idealist or an ironist? You may be a qualified idealist who tries to admit enough of the reality principle to escape being in la-la land, a qualified ironist who admits enough idealism to avoid being a cynic. But in the end you must choose, and either choice is an act of faith, not proof.
The same is true of the idealizing of historical periods. Those who romanticize the Middle Ages risk being quixotic—that is, they risk becoming like Don Quixote, whose nostalgia drives him mad, fighting mighty giants that are really just windmills, seeing a knight’s fair lady in some commoner. But nostalgic idealizing of the past may have serious social consequences. Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) to satirize a romanticized version of the Middle Ages, particularly as evident in the novels of Sir Walter Scott, which were used as models by the plantation-owning Southern gentlemen, nourishing their sense of innate superiority and deserved privilege on Scott’s supposed idealizing of “rank and caste,” to the extent that Twain says in Life on the Mississippi that Scott is partly responsible for the Civil War. This is an idiotic view of Scott, but the question is whether the idiocy is Twain’s or the Southern gentlemen’s.
Yet there is no doubt that nostalgia fuels reactionary social movements, including the one destroying America right now. MAGA means “Make America great again.” It is in effect a form of nostalgia fermented into the acid of revenge. Its claims to be Christian are hypocritical—lately, the mask has fallen, and the MAGA faithful have taken to saying that the Pope is wrong and that empathy is a sin, whereas Trump is God’s instrument. To be sure, he is someone’s “instrument”—a word employed with savage irony in Macbeth—but it is beginning to be clear what supernatural figure the MAGA faithful are really faithful to. In fact, their desire to do as much damage as possible, lacking all pity for innocent lives ruined, is not Christian at all but the old pagan spirit of revenge that Christianity did its best to eradicate. Achilles says he wants to hack dead Hector’s flesh and eat him raw. That is the kind of sentiment spreading like an epidemic over the population. Oh, it’s traditional, all right. When it was time for the Israelites to take the Promised Land, Yahweh demanded holy war. He turned upon his own king, Saul, because Saul mercifully spared the captured enemy king Agag. Jesus came to say that those who live by the sword will perish by it, but who is listening to that advice now?
In Outclassed, Joan C. Williams makes a compelling case that there is something good at the heart of the Trump voters’ resistance to change and to the dismantling of American traditions. Too much change these days is mindless change, change for its own sake, or, more likely, change for the sake of greater profits for the shareholders. But it is time to make the other side of the case. Liberals and progressives, who stand for change, need to become better able to articulate the difference between the kind of useless, capitalist-driven change that only produces future shock in us all, not just in the working class, and the type of change that represents the vitality of life itself. We cannot give in to what is clearly a desire for stasis on the part of the left-behinds. An archetypal image throughout literature is that of the false paradise: an image of a land without conflict because it is without change, homogeneous, without difference, always the same through generation after generation. This is not “tradition”: it is a rejection of life.
There is a stunning passage in the 5th book of Virgil’s Aeneid in which Aeneas encounters Hector’s widow, Andromache. Aeneas has been given a mission by the gods to found a new Troy, and Andromache tells him his search is over. For she and her new husband have recreated Troy down to the last detail, like a Disney theme park. Aeneas politely but firmly turns down her offer and sets sail again. Thomas Wolfe, centuries hence, will be right: you can’t go home again. When Aeneas finally does found a new Troy, it will be radically different—it will not even be called Troy, but rather Rome, and Aeneas’s people will be assimilated into the population of a new people, the Latins. And it needs to be different. The Aeneid is condemned these days because it glorifies imperialism. It does, but a kneejerk rejection is thoughtless. Over and over again Aeneas is driven by his poet’s conviction that the world needs a new form of government, one that will be ruled by law rather than by “glory,” meaning the mindless heroic code of revenge that brought down the first Troy. Virgil may have been wrong that empire could produce such a just state, but the dream was noble and the need was real. The world needed something new. The Aeneid remarkably mimics both the Iliad and the Odyssey time after time, but the intent is revisionist. It is anything but mindless repetition out of misguided reverence for the wisdom of the ancients.
In the same spirit, 2500 years later, the Founding Fathers rejected empire in its turn, deciding that the world needed something new. Democracy was born out of a Promethean spirit of change—a change, yes, that brought chaos and a whole new way of life, upsetting proper “rank and caste.” In the same way, Lincoln decided that the South’s reverence for tradition was a fraud, disguising the profit motive and a ruthless elitism, a Social Darwinist style elitism which said that some people—themselves, of course—are superior to others and so deserve to rule, and that the laws are good insofar as they enable us to get our way. For what world is it that MAGA is nostalgic for? The nostalgia is often painted in working class terms as a nostalgia for a way of life exemplified by the 1950’s. There is one valid reason for that nostalgia: that was an era in which the non-college educated could find good, secure, well-paying jobs in order to raise a family. But, as I have said recently, in many other ways the 1950’s was not a period to idealize, even if you were male and white, certainly not if you were a woman, Black, or non-heterosexual. The 60’s weren’t just a temper tantrum: they happened for good reasons, many of them.
Moreover, I have begun to wonder whether 50’s nostalgia is not itself a blind. Because the main efforts of the Trump administration, catering to its voters, is to undo the New Deal—in other words, to return to the Gilded Age of robber baron capitalism. Why would people who will never make within half a dozen zeroes’ income of qualifying as one of the oligarchy want to return to the least democratic period, it may be, of American history? Perhaps for that very reason. There is a hatred of democracy abroad—the “No Kings” slogan is aimed at Trump, but in fact the Trump voters are clamoring for a king, for a dictator. They seem to admire any hotshot pipsqueak with a lot of money and boundless arrogance, seeing wealth and aggressiveness as “strength.” Perhaps we are playing out an old story here. When the Puritan revolution collapsed and the monarchy was restored in 1660, Milton, the revolutionary in the name of liberty, said bitterly that the English people had chosen “a captain back for Egypt.” Most people, he said, do prefer tyranny. Liberty is hard and demands knowledge and discipline. What a lot of people want is not liberty but “license,” meaning I can do whatever I want, and Trump’s kind of unbridled individualism, his lack of impulse control, to put it politely, is a role model to his followers. It’s an even older story than the English Civil War: when in Rome, give the people bread and circuses, and then they will not mind that the big shots rule over them and oppress the downtrodden.
The need for change begins with the individual. It may be the deepest imperative of human nature. Socrates defined wisdom as learning how to die. A deeper way of understanding that statement is to extend its reference beyond merely death at the end of life. Every moment we live is a death, a death to the moment that came previous to it. The present cannot come into existence except through the death of the past. The wager that Goethe’s Faust makes with Mephistopheles is that his life will be prolonged until he gives in to the temptation to say of some moment, “Stay! Thou art so fair!” He gets to 100 that way, but it is worth thinking about. If you summon to your memory whatever you consider to be your most precious moments, you might be tempted, if Mephistopheles were close at hand (and he is always close at hand) to say to any one of them, “Stay! Thou art so far.” But that would mean that other, later, just as precious moments would never have happened. We are back at the theme of last week’s newsletter about the Bardo: we have to learn to let go. As usual, the Odyssey is my pagan Bible, about this as about so much else. The theme of temptation runs through the Wanderings section of the Odyssey, and Odysseus’s temptation is always the same: to linger. He resists lingering in the land of the Lotus Eaters, though his men do not because they love license and not liberty; he resists the joys of wallowing in the mud as one of Circe’s porcine menagerie, though his men do not, for the same reason; but he has to be pulled away from Circe by his men after a year. The temptations are all false paradise temptations of passive happiness rather than active striving.
If everyone can stand listening to an aged hippie about all this, let me gently urge that parents should teach their children how to leave, not stay. Leaving is the American Dream. You cannot find the better life without turning your back to some extent upon the old one. One of the great songs of the 60’s says this in better words than mine:
You, who are on the road Must have a code That you can live by And so become yourself Because the past is just a goodbye Teach your children well Their father's hell Did slowly go by And feed them on your dreams The one they pick's The one you'll know by
I have just learned from the Internet (it has its uses) that Graham Nash explains the genesis of “Teach Your Children” in his recent autobiography. He saw a Diane Arbus photo of a young boy in a park holding a toy grenade in each hand. The boy’s look was so angry that Nash felt that he would have thrown them if they were real, and he felt that someone needed to teach that boy a better way. But the second half of the song reverses the lesson, for in it the children must teach the parents:
And you of tender years Can't know the fears That your elders grew by And so please help Them with your youth They seek the truth Before they can die
Another song from the 60’s, less known but equally great, is Murray McLaughlin’s “Child’s Song,” popularized by Tom Rush, who said it was a long time before he could perform it without breaking down in the middle. I have had the same reaction. It is the voice of a young man leaving home:
There ain't no use in shouting at me pa I can't live no longer with your fears mamma I love you but that hasn't helped at all Each of us must do the things that matter All of us must see what we can see It was long ago you must remember You were once as young and scared as me I don't know how hard it is yet mamma When you realize you're growing old I know how hard is not to be younger I know you've tried to keep me from the cold Thanks for all you done it may sound hollow Thank you for the good times that we've known But I must find my own road now to follow You will all be welcome in my home
My father told me, years later, that he and my mom cried all the way home after dropping me off at college the first time. My generation exploded away from home like dandelion seeds, and, I admit, not always so feelingly as in “Child’s Song.” But we had to leave, just as my parents’ parents had to leave Italy and Poland and seek a new life in an unknown land, with no guarantees. But of course Trump voters don’t want to hear about immigration either, because those newcomers are different and change things.
It was also in the 1960’s that John Kennedy inaugurated the American space program by referring to space as the “new frontier,” a phrase soon to be echoed by the famous opening words of Star Trek: “Space. The final frontier.” We have become obsessed with the revisionist impulse to debunk the myth of the American frontier, and the revisionism was and is in the service of truth and justice. What Manifest Destiny did to the environment and to native peoples is a horror that should never be forgotten. Nevertheless, I think the time will come, or should come, that we will recognize that the human race needs a frontier to challenge it, to beckon it towards “new worlds and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” The end of the frontier shut down something in the American imagination, something that has festered ever since. The 60’s tried to revive it as the spirit of the open road (“Song of the Open Road” is a title of a poem by Whitman). Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the film Easy Rider celebrated a new spirit of adventure, as Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn and the Leatherstocking Tales had in a previous era. But American science fiction from the 1920’s through the 1960’s gave us the dream of a frontier more wonderful perhaps than the human race had ever encountered before—at least outside of the genre of romance, whose whole basis is wandering adventure.
The Odyssey, yet again, is the great exemplar: ostensibly an epic, it is really the first romance in Western literature. And once again the images are polyvalent. Odysseus is on the one hand the man possessed by nostalgia, by the relentless drive to return home to wife, family, and homeland, a desire so great that he renounces immortality for it. Yet Odysseus is at the same time possessed by what the title of a science fiction novel by John Wyndham called “the outward urge.” He is described as polytropos, the man of “many turnings,” and some of those turnings are geographical. His wanderings took ten years, and he went everywhere, boldly going even to the underworld, where no one had gone before and returned. So much is Odysseus the wandering adventurer that people find it difficult to imagine him content to stay back in Ithaca very long, enjoying his retirement. In our time, Nikos Kazantzakis wrote a sequel twice the length of the original Odyssey, sending Odysseus out on a new series of adventures lasting until his old age. However, the two most famous portrayals of Odysseus outside the Odyssey represent exactly the contrast between the conservative and the progressive views. Ulysses (his Latin name) is in one of the deepest circles of Dante’s Inferno, that of the givers of false advice. The bad advice was his persuasion of his men to sail through the Pillars of Hercules out into the unknown Atlantic—to go where Columbus would boldly go two centuries after Dante. This is a transgression of divine limits, a desire for forbidden knowledge, and Ulysses has abandoned his responsibilities to his family and kingdom. The other portrait is Tennyson’s great dramatic monologue, “Ulysses.” This Ulysses has now arrived at old age, and he has had his fill of life in Ithaca, where
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole Unequal laws unto a savage race, That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
So one day he says fuck it: “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink / Life to the lees.” He swears “To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” The goal of his old age is “To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die.” Robert Heinlein, who wrote novel after novel about space flight as the new frontier, made To Sail Beyond the Sunset the title of his last novel, published at the age of 80. The new frontier spirit does not have to make all the old mistakes of racism, genocide, the greedy exploitation of the environment, and the like. We can learn better, but still follow the advice of T.S. Eliot in East Coker:
Home is where one starts from.... Old men ought to be explorers Here or there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion.
This progressive spirit of adventure, for which you are never too old, needs a Contrary, however, and such a Contrary would be a recreated nostalgia, refined of its reactionary tendencies. This would be the proper use of memory, not a self-deception denying the bad parts of our past, whether personal or historical, but the use of memory as a kind of alchemy, refining substances in the hermetic vessel of the self until we can separate the pure from the impure. Maybe what memory is trying to do is to free what is valuable and deserves to be deathless from those aspects of the past that are better off dead. This would be a purgatorial process, if purgatory could itself be liberated from its ideological captivity as a device serving a hierarchical authority system and instead seen as something more like Jung’s process of individuation—for which Jung saw alchemy as an analogue. It gives meaning to Blake’s aphorism, “The ruins of time build mansions in eternity.”
Outer space, at least for some of us, still retains some of the sense of numinous mystery that the heavens had back when medieval people looked up at the night sky and beheld an unfallen world. I tell my students, imagine being able to go out into your backyard at night and look up at heaven, at the spiritual world. The final nostalgia, beyond the nostalgia for paradise, is the cosmic nostalgia for what in Christian symbolism is heaven. But of course the kingdom of heaven is within you: quite true. But Jesus did not seem to speak in terms of either-or. That may be the reductiveness of a later age. The imagery is polyvalent to the last. Heaven is “out there,” beyond the farthest star: heaven is within, deeper than the deepest memory. One of the epigraphs of Eliot’s Four Quartets is from the philosopher Heraclitus: The way up and the way down are one. More than that. All life is cyclical, a nostos, a return to where we began. But the cycles, whether of history or of each new phase of our life in which we die to the old and are reborn to the new, are never simple repetitions, the eternal return of the same. They are rather, in the luminous phrase of James Joyce, “the same anew.” There is renewal, yet there is also difference. The image for “the same anew” is therefore not a closed circle but a spiral. Put it all together: an ascent quest and a descent quest which are somehow one, with each ascent or descent being not a circle but a creative spiral What you get is a double spiral, a double helix, the image of DNA, the scientific symbol of all life. Within that double helix, nostalgia for what is past and distant and excitement for the next adventure down the yellow brick road meet...and are one.