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I don’t want to reveal my exact age, but I am not young. I am not old, either – although, perhaps this latter claim would automatically categorize me as old. In any case, I am at an age where I can look back and have a concept of nostalgia, of memories, of childhood.

I also have an uncannily good memory – which is a blessing for a writer. This memory is in fact multi-layered: Not only do I remember the past, but I remember myself in the past thinking about the past.

The Ontology of Nostalgia

What is nostalgia, really? What is the mechanism of reminiscence that makes us think of “that evening when I was thirteen”? Other possible phrases might be “that toy store I visited when I was ten”, or “that place I saw when I was eleven”. For old(er) people, such memories invariably involve worlds that have disappeared. “Summers in New Orleans aren’t what they used to be”. “We used to play out until late when I was a kid”. “It was alright to swim here when I was a teenager”.

If you notice the sentences above, two components seem to be intrinsically connected with Nostalgia. I will use bold font to bring the matter to your attention, but only to then dispel the illusion; I will present the effigies, only to place them on the sacrificial pyre. These two pseudo-elements are time and space.

Time and Space in Nostalgia

Perhaps neither is surprising. Memories should be all about time, after all, correct? And if we’re talking about worlds that have disappeared, space also seems relevant. Perhaps we can even go a step further and in an Einsteinian (or Bakhtinian, for the literary-minded) way, we can talk of “space-time” or “chronotope”, respectively.

Nostalgia, then, is our connection to a particular space, encapsulated in a particular temporal frame. This is a description balancing very near the concept of the sublime – what Shaw referred to as a feeling stemming from “this particular mountain, in this particular moment”.

The thing is, this is only an illusion.

The Illusion of Time and Space in Nostalgia

We do not fondly recollect space, nor time. We recollect feelings. The thought of that abandoned house of your childhood is not about the house, nor about your childhood; it is connected with how you felt then.

The memory of buying ice-cream from that particular seller, at that particular amusement park has nothing to do with space or time; it’s all about how it made you feel. The entire concept of nostalgia (for either our childhood in general or worlds that have disappeared, for either time or space) is in actual fact a masked desire to feel again as we did then or there.

It is a crusade for regaining lost innocence, lost hope.