Pre-emptive nostalgia
Missing a period of life that isn't yet over, reckoning with the passage of time, maybe I am just a tree
The term nostalgia was coined in the late 1600s by a Swiss medical student to describe mercenaries who missed home or more specifically, views of the Swiss Alps. He called it mal du pays which, over time, became mal du Suisse (Swiss illness). If we break down nostalgia into its constituents, it becomes the Greek words nóstos (return home) and algia (pain), a kind of aching associated with a desire for homecoming, a yearning for its familiarity.
Semantic drift has caused nostalgia, in its contemporary usage, to mean a sort of bittersweet1 longing for the past. The spot formerly occupied by place has been taken over by a time in one’s life, though the core feeling of yearning has been preserved.
I turned thirty earlier this year and it’s brought on an onslaught of nostalgia like no other. I’m an inherently nostalgic person, just as I am an inherently emotional/sentimental person. This is why I like to write things; it’s a way of wrangling a morass of emotion into something coherent. Whenever I go home, I devote an afternoon to flipping through year books, stamp collections from my parents’ young adulthood, and albums filled with old film photos (the colors are so vivid, so soft and romantic though my parents had no idea what they were doing) and I feel quietly devastated by the passage of time.
The nostalgia associated with turning thirty feels like a different beast. It’s a feeling that emerges from being positioned on the boundary between one stage of life and the next, the number of years remaining in this stage a countable quantity, no more than the fingers on one hand. I’m thinking, lately, of how many years I truly have left in New York, my home for the last twelve years, the place where I became a tree in a forest, growing with so many other people simultaneously that our roots have become one vast, interconnected system.
When you stay in the same place for a long time and get to know a set of people deeply, miraculous things happen. For the past three years, my college friend group has organized a yearly thirty person camping trip to an island in Connecticut where we cook all our meals2, play three hour games of Avalon and Blood on the Clocktower that we then spend two extra hours dissecting, organize a field day complete with volleyball, water gun fights, relay races, watch movies, make midnight popcorn, make two a.m. cookies and ramen, watch perseid showers, gaze up at jupiter, play more games of chess and poker and mario kart and super smash and street fighter and magic the gathering than you can imagine and have many, many multi-hour conversations that stretch long into the night. We fall asleep with the taste of marshmallows and chocolate still in our mouths and wake up and smile and leave our phones in our cabins because what else could there be to do but to walk to the main cabin where everyone is wiping the sleep from their eyes and making eggs?
Of course, there are other things that have emerged from this friend group. A journal club where monthly, we get together to talk about mycology or personal finance or leukemia research or credit card rewards or ML papers or the relationship between Sleep No More and Finnegan’s Wake. BCD Tofu House, which one of my friends has been going to since freshman year of college for 2 a.m. conversations. Coffee shops, hotel lobbies, park hangouts, too many places where I’ve had four hour conversations where sometimes we’ll eat both late lunch and dinner over the course of the same hangout. Too many Central Park, West Side Highway, Randall’s Island, cross-borough runs and life chats to even count.
An eventual move to a different place feels inevitable. A lot of what I have feels fragile, though it is the greatest version of reality I could’ve possibly asked for. I constantly find myself thinking, how lucky am I, how lucky am I and what good thing did I do in a past life to find myself in this current one, and then I find myself asking how long this can last, isn’t what exists a delicate thing, a temporary construction that will naturally crumble with the passage of time which spares no one, takes no prisoners?
…
My senior year of college, I couldn’t shut up about pre-emptive nostalgia3. I’d bring it up over weekly lunches and dinners with friends and turn the thought over and over in my brain. I coined this term to describe the feeling of longing for a time that wasn’t yet fully over, simultaneously existing in the present while missing it, mourning what hadn’t yet been lost.
My best friend lived next door and at the drop of a hat I could go into her room and help her fold her laundry, ask her what she had on her toast that morning, wake her up for her ballet class. We could get lunch together every week and catch each other up on the few bits of life we’d missed. We were living most of life together so sometimes there wasn’t much. It felt like the most perfect thing in the world, sitting in a college cafeteria that had a B health rating, eating the world’s best potato wedges.
What I’m experiencing now is pre-emptive nostalgia part two. Having gone through it once, I know what lies on the other side is vast and unimaginably beautiful in a way I couldn’t even begin to articulate. How could I, when I haven’t lived it yet? How could I know what hasn’t yet come to exist? But such a thing isn’t mutually exclusive with fear. After all, the past is a known quantity, something you can wrap your mind around and narrativize because you’ve achieved a safe distance from it, whereas the future rushes up all at once and seizes you, refuses to release its grip.
…
I like this idea of thinking of yourself as a tree, as holding all past versions of yourself simultaneously, the beautiful, the mundane, the bad and painful parts. Each year of your life leaves a little bit of its influence, the periods of drought (narrow rings), the periods of plenty (thick rings). There’s an exhibit at the Natural History Museum in New York that illustrates this beautifully, with a cross-section of a 1,400 year old giant sequoia.
There are versions of you that would be unrecognizable to the you that exists today. If you encountered yourself in the street as you were ten years ago, would you see yourself immediately or might you find them strange, unfamiliar? Regardless, you carry that version of yourself with you even if the shape of who you are is radically different. Those years have left their mark by virtue of the fact that you lived them, derived the things you needed to derive, the drought, the plenty, everything.
What I’m left with, at the end of the day, is a conversation I had with the best friend I used to eat potato wedges with who told me that as long as there’s space for hope, there is some forward trajectory, that as long as we don’t succumb to despair, there are things to look forward to, ahead, both near and far. She’s right; I can’t predict the seasons of scarcity nor can I predict the seasons of plenty but I know for certain that there will be both, that the future is more vast and unimaginable than my mind could possibly comprehend, that all that’s left to do is to stretch my branches to meet the sky, take in the sunlight that each day brings, live another year, add another ring.
I prefer the Greek sweetbitter, don’t you?
Don’t worry, there’s a rotating kitchen crew schedule, though the Costco trip to prep for day 1 is horrendous, I recommend never ferrying enough groceries for 30 people for one week on a canoe if you can help it
I’ve since learned that anticipatory nostalgia is the actual word
“quietly devastated by the passage of time” </3