Nostalgia

Or something like it.

Last week, a customer at our store who was back visiting college friends lamented how Harvard Square had changed so much since she had graduated a few years ago, how it wasn’t what it used to be. Of all the ways to describe Harvard Square, this is what I hear the most—it’s just not what it used to be. It doesn’t matter when it used to be was, the feeling that something special has been irrevocably lost is the common denominator. I could see it in the customer’s face, the ache of nostalgia, or something like it.

I have a memory fantasy of being in Cambridge sometime in the early 90’s. It’s autumn. The air is crisp. The sun is bright. The leaves have just started turning red and gold. Someone is busking with a guitar and a harmonica, and singing in the tiny park on JFK. I browse the shelves at Tower Records, then find a dark corner table in a sleepy underground pub to write moody poetry while I slowly drink whiskey and somber jazz fills the room.

I have experienced some of this fantasy and some I have not, not all of it at the same time, and definitely not all of it in the 90’s when I was a child.

September is for firsts. First days of school. First new experiences. First time meeting new people. First time in months feeling a cool breeze on your skin.

When my wife and I were preparing to move back to Massachusetts from Portland, OR in 2014, I connected with an older friend over lunch who had just visited Cambridge with a young relative and she said, “Does it get any better than Cambridge in the Fall?”

I knew exactly what she meant. The light, the architecture, the bustle, the anticipation, the beginning. And I also knew since it was her first time visiting, she had no reference for what it used to be and therefore had nothing to lament. She died recently and I don’t know if she ever had the chance to visit and notice what had changed. Think of all the firsts that have been experienced in a place like Harvard Square.

The Welsh have a word, hiraeth, that doesn’t have a direct translation in English. It’s like nostalgia but not. It’s an emotional longing for time, place, and company that one can never return to. Though I have Welsh ancestry, I am not Welsh and cannot speak to exactly what it means for the Welsh people and their relationship to their land. For me though, my understanding of the concept speaks to how I feel often. I not only long for moments of time and space from the past, I long for those that might never have existed in the first place, some I know for a fact never existed. Fantasies so familiar I can almost… just about… reach out and touch them.

The Luran Islands is an archipelago nation roughly five hundred miles off the west coast if Ireland. For centuries they were untouched by human hands, surrounded by unnavigable geology and merging currents that made landing on their shores nearly impossible. There’s a University that sits atop a hill in its carless capital city. On the southern half of the main island, there’s an old-growth forest that continues to expand. Tall granite peaks rise from the center of the island and in-between there is a wide swath of rock, moss, and meadow where the greatest diversity of pollinators remaining on earth buzz between wildflowers. Dense clouds and thick fog settle upon the islands for much of the winter, but when the wind blows from the west, it can nudge the clouds and the fog just offshore allowing for brilliant views of some of the darkest starlit skies in the world. In late summer and early fall, it’s possible to have long stretches of windless days that the people of Lur call a still.

It’s a place I long for constantly and it’s a place I’ve entirely made up. It only exists within me and on the five hundred plus pages I’ve written of the stories that take place there.

I watched and interview with the musician Jacob Collier recently who relayed the advice he had been given to make the music you hear in your head, the music you want to listen to but doesn’t exist. Toni Morrison said, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

Maybe all creation and expression is some sort of longing for something other than your current existence, some combination of time, space, light, colors, sounds, words that cannot be found. For the first novel I wrote and continue to revise, its place, the Luran Islands, came first, fully formed as complex sensations that were just as strong and evocative as memories from any place I’ve ever physically been. I don’t even have to close my eyes, I can just be there. I’ve had to imagine myself there to hear its stories.

And that’s the sadness of nostalgia, or something like it. Just like how we can never return to those times and places of the past, I’ll never physically set foot in this place I’ve spent thousands of hours writing about.

I wonder how other writers feel about the places they conjure. It can’t all be craft. There must be longing too.

After seeing on her website that she enjoys receiving letters, I wrote to the author Susan Cooper whose beloved (by me and many others) The Dark is Rising Sequence, has this quality I seek. The five books in the sequence are set across Great Britain, in rural Buckinghamshire (where she grew up), the Cornish coast, and the hills of Wales. I asked her about this quality of her writing, this thing that’s like nostalgia but not, and if she could name it. Here’s what she wrote:

“I understand the tone / mood / feeling that you talk about, but alas I don’t have a name for it. Perhaps there isn’t one. It’s a bit like trying to describe being in love.”

I’ve since learned that she wrote these books missing home. She’d actually moved to Cambridge, MA from the UK and longed for home. And, much of her beloved landscape where she grew up in Buckinghamshire and wrote about in The Dark is Rising has been developed, its lushness paved over.

If nostalgia is a longing for the past what do we call this longing for what might come to be in the future. In the documentary, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, the question of whether we can dream places into being is posed.

The novel Always Coming Home is Le Guin’s exploration of how a human culture (the Kesh) might exist in a distant future ecological utopia in the Napa Valley region in California where she spent time with her family as a child. In the documentary, she talks about how when writing the book, she was at times living in two worlds. She would hear songs and poems from the Kesh as she moved through her own time and place and write them down.

Here’s one of my favorite passages:

“When I take you to the Valley, you’ll see the blue hills on the left and the blue hills on the right, the rainbow and the vineyards under the rainbow late in the rainy season, and maybe you’ll say, “There it is, that’s it!” But I’ll say. “A little farther.” We’ll go on, I hope, and you’ll see the roofs of the little towns and the hillsides yellow with wild oats, a buzzard soaring and a woman singing by the shadows of a creek in the dry season, and maybe you’ll say, “Let’s stop here, this is it!” But I’ll say, “A little farther yet.” We’ll go on, and you’ll hear the quail calling on the mountain by the springs of the river, and looking back you’ll see the river running downward through the wild hills behind, below, and you’ll say, “Isn’t that the Valley?” And all I will be able to say is “Drink this water of the spring, rest here awhile, we have a long way yet to go and I can’t go without you.”

I wonder if we all, to some degree, live in multiple worlds as we move through time and place with our memories, fantasies, or some imagined future. I do.

I had to run all over the city last week on my birthday, but I stopped in Harvard Square to walk around. I got a coffee at one of my favorite new cafes and bought a stack of books at my favorite poetry bookshop, now nearly one hundred years old. As I walked along the sun dappled brick sidewalks, reflecting on my forty-one years, I felt my memories and fantasies beside me like shadows. I wasn’t lamenting a change nor anxious for what might come, I was living then and there, but those longing shadows were still tethered to me, there was still a subtle tension.

This ache—I feel when writing, what the Welsh grieve and long for, Susan Cooper’s memories of her home translated into story, and the future Ursula K. Le Guin imagined for a place she loved, might be the fact that those times and places cannot be recreated or might never come to be in our lifetimes. So I suppose what I’m saying in all of this is that there is beauty in the longing.

-Caleb

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