The Wit’s Guide to Nostalgia

Or, seeping sepia

Even babies get the blues, Mary Beale, 1690-1730

In the good old days, nostalgia only affected the Swiss. Johannes Hofer coined the term in 1688 to diagnose Alpine mercenaries with unrequited homesickness, even though both “Toberlonely” and “Matterhorny” were there for the taking. Proposed treatments included putting patients in tall towers to simulate their native altitudes and ringing cowbells in their ears. And that’s where the phrase “more cowbell” comes from.

“Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.”
— Peter de Vries

Things seem like they were better back then (well, maybe not in 1688, but in, say, the 1990s) for one main reason: We know how they turned out. Any anxiety of what was about to occur has faded away — at the very least, you lived long enough to look back. In the end, the Soviets never nuked us! Yet somehow, those intervening years softened your brain into thinking dial-up internet was better.

“Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”
— Franklin Pierce Adams

How bad do the olden times have to have been to make them nostalgia proof? Otto Bettman, the inventor of the photo archive, was so irritated by golden-age reminiscing that took it upon himself to publish a book called The Good Old Days — They Were Terrible!  

“It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia”
— Frank Zappa

“I have always felt that our times have overrated and unduly overplayed the fun aspects of the past,” he wrote in 1974. His survey of wretched history covers winter (“smoking stoves or no heat at all”), summer (“buzzing bugs never ceased to bleed man and beast”), cities (“nothing dingier or more dispiriting can be imagined”), country (“haunted by loneliness and its twin sister, despair”), and everything in between (“unremitting hardship”). His point: “We are going forward, if but slowly.”

“Any day that Cossacks haven’t burned your home should start out a happy one, overflowing with optimism.”
— M.L. Plano

Bettman was fighting the last war when he wrote that book in the 1970s, an era that would soon be drowned in nostalgia for the 1950s. In his memoir Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarantino recalls his childhood as a “large wave of romanticized fifties nostalgia, which at one point threatened to engulf the entire decade. A nostalgia that I, as a little boy, was especially susceptible to (back then I loved everything fifties and prided myself on my wealth of fifties trivia knowledge). During this tsunami-like wave of fifties ephemera came oldies-based radio stations, and fifties hit collections sold on TV (most people my age first learned who Chubby Checker was from these commercials).” Which eventually gave us the Jack Rabbit Slim’s Twist contest.

“Tradition is just nostalgia walking about fully dressed in public.”
— Andrew Marr

The French have the phrase “nostalgie de la boue,” nostalgia for the mud, to describe a craving for depravity, or decravity. Tom Wolfe avoided getting any mud on his eight-piece white suit when he used the term to describe Leonard Bernstein’s hobnobbing with the Black Panthers in Radical Chic, and, well, it makes the new journalism feel awfully old.

“Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson. You find the present tense and the past perfect.”
— Owens Lee Pomeroy

There are specific words to describe nostalgia for times that didn’t exist, but these are unnecessary: All nostalgia is for fictional eras. That’s why Ken Burns had to invent the sepia tone. According to several eyewitness accounts, the past actually happened in full colour.

“We’re way past tense; we’re living in bungalows now.”
— Groucho Marx

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