In defense of the value of nostalgia

To The Lighthouse, impressionism, homesickness, and the lure of the coastal beach town

I can’t remember who taught me that nostalgia is a form of sentimentality not worthy of artistic attention. I do know that it was someone I revered, an off-handed comment by an author in an interview somewhere regarding the self-indulgence and dullness of overt nostalgia. I also remember the sting of humiliation it provoked in me and the defensive desire to quietly clawback every nostalgic sentiment I had ever thought worthy of being memorialized in writing. And there were a lot, prone as I am to dwelling on moments in the past of seeming perfection or innocence.

Nostalgia was an early, secret impulse. Long before I experienced love or lust or other private desires, I discovered that a longing for another time and place could be strangely satisfying to turn over in my head and wiggle like a loose tooth. On drives home from my grandparents’ house on Sunday afternoons as a child, I would squint out the windows of our Chrysler Town & Country at the stone walls lining the rolling hills of the back roads of Fairfield County, and long to be in a horse-drawn carriage, like the ones in the antique prints that lined the walls of their house. Later, it was nostalgia that first moved me to write, in an effort to capture the banal wisps of memory from childhood that would flit and flicker like fireflies—the heady excitement of riding the train to Manhattan with my father and the smell of The New York Times’s newsprint on his hands next to me, the sound of windchimes in the distance while flopped listlessly on a lawn chair at my grandparents’ house.

In the last year it has also become more obvious to me that nostalgia is a privilege. While searching my inbox, I came across an interview with Cord Jefferson, the writer of The Watchmen, in which he explains why most people are not afforded the luxury of nostalgia:

“Looking back in the 1930s, that was a much worse time to be alive for everybody that wasn't a straight white man. . . . And so this longing for the past is not something that exists for people who look like me.”¹

I recognize now that my obsession with colonial America (buoyed by the propaganda of the American Girl Doll franchise) as a six-year-old was, to say the least, misguided. With each passing year, the world only becomes an easier place for plucky girl children, and there is but a slim chance I would have enjoyed 1776 any more than 1994. But while I fully appreciate and share Jefferson’s rejection of political and social nostalgic, I selfishly wonder whether there exists a more politically-acceptable form of nostalgia. Nostalgia need not be a militant demand for a return to the power structures of yesteryear. Can’t it be smaller and quieter, more personal? Perhaps this too is a privilege—the ability to reside, albeit momentarily, in a memory of beauty and innocence, is predicated on the ability to have at one point in time experienced the world as a beautiful and less complicated place, and to have maintained those memories without the disruption of trauma. But I contend that a whiff of an adolescent deodorant shampoo gives many of us the power to momentarily time-travel, a power which, I maintain, is thrilling, even if we have no desire to reside in the locker rooms of our past for another minute. The ability to be yanked back through time and then deposited firmly back in the present moment by something as ethereal as a smell feels nearly mystical, even as my dog’s daily olfactory revelations remind me that this is one of our most animalistic senses.

Even as it revealed enormous fractures in our political, economic, and social fabric, the unique uncertainty of 2020 was a breeding ground for certain forms of nostalgia. As we emerged from the initial terror and disruption of the pandemic last spring and rounded the corner into the pseudo-summer of 2020, I suffered an intense longing for the trappings of East Coast summer that were inaccessible to me in California: verdant hills and forests, pink hydrangeas, yellow corn, farmstand ice cream, and of course, my family. I especially longed to retreat to the beach, which unlike in California, is a separate place, a summer place, a place that manages to exist seemingly unchanged to perpetuate and satisfy nostalgia for ice cream parlors and fudge shops and boardwalks and mini golf.

As spring bloomed around me and I longed to be elsewhere, in a place where the seasonal turn can provide a necessary annual sense of rebirth and rejuvenation, I also longed for a time in more recent memory when reading was a source of inspiration and comfort and not merely distraction from our living nightmare. By late spring, my COVID-anxiety had simmered down enough that I missed—and craved—literature that could make me gasp with recognition and awe and dog-ear the page.

I’d like to believe that some sort of higher power placed Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse within my reach when I was finally ready and desperate to experience beauty again. While I usually have a fastidious memory for where my books have come from, I have no recollection of purchasing or receiving To The Lighthouse, but there it was, in my stack of unread British literature, when bookstores and libraries were closed and I needed something to read. To The Lighthouse transported me even further east, past Cape Cod to the Hebrides, to summer holidays, and green lawns, and late evenings, and paths through the bramble to the beach, and dressing for dinner after a long and salty day, stirring up a deep nostalgia for an extended experience of leisure that feels unattainable in the paradigm of modern adult life. To The Lighthouse spawns the same longing for lazy, breezy summer days as do the early Impressionist paintings and their depictions of sailboats and towpaths and fields of poppies. Perhaps my first experience of being moved by art was in sixth grade, when a wintertime exhibition at the Wadsworth Athenaeum featuring Impressionist paintings from the vacation town of Argenteuil stirred in me a restless desire to be relaxed elsewhere.

While recognizing that its génie drew from Woolf’s ultimately untenable trauma and grief, I want to argue that To The Lighthouse is a powerful rebuttal to the suggestion that nostalgia is not worthy of artistic attention. To The Lighthouse, perhaps one of the greatest exemplars of Modernist literature, is nostalgia embodied. The first of the novel’s three parts, The Window, is a wistful reaching back to a simpler, gentler time before World War I, to a time when Woolf’s parents—represented here by Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey— were still alive and a single day spent in anticipation of a trip to the local lighthouse encompassed enough to fill the better part of the novel. But then, in the very brief second part of the novel, the summer house sits empty for years and Time Passes. We experience ten years in less than twenty pages, and I can’t think of another piece of writing that manages to so fully capture the speeding up of the passage of time as we age, the tumbling losses that can occur in those intervening years, and the additional sense of loss that accompanies the passing years themselves. In the final part, The Lighthouse, we return to the Ramsey family’s summer house in the Hebrides years later. The children are grown and finally the weather is good and the family will make the trip to the Lighthouse, but the family is smaller. Mrs. Ramsey has been lost to the passage of time and the Great War has torn through the family.

It is hard not to feel like this stage of life, filled as it is with major Life Transitions and Decisions, is Time Passes.I read To The Lighthouse and wept for my own mother, at home 3000 miles away, while the possibility of spending a week in Cape Cod with my family receded. Time passes. And yet another summer goes by without stepping foot in the Atlantic. As will next summer. Though I can still summon up the sensation of stepping outside on a summer morning into the steamy heat, suddenly it is my sixth summer in California, and the first that I will not make it back to touch the fixed pseudo-permanence of my parents’ house in Connecticut, to ground myself against the passage of time.

There is so much more to say about this masterpiece’s reflections on time and memory and disintegration and art, and particularly the relationship between these universal truths and Woolf’s inability to bear them. To The Lighthouse is a book that I look forward to rereading, which I imagine will feel somewhat like returning to a summer house after years away, and finding it both exactly the same, while finding yourself not fitting in it in the exact same way. But because this piece is about nostalgia, I didn’t want to reread To The Lighthouse to write about it here. I wanted to luxuriate in my nostalgia for the experience of reading it for the first time, and so I write about my memory of its perfection and the way it made me feel.

2020 was a year of extreme emotional experiences. I fell in love and enjoyed the high of all of the attendant chemical reactions, but also suffered consistently from anxiety and depression. Reading To The Lighthouse reawakened in me a more subtle interior landscape, including the ability to appreciate poignancy and the gentler gradations of light and emotional experience. To appreciate bittersweetness and the lived experience of longterm grief and banal wistfulness. Looking out the window on a beautiful day. A house growing dusty.

I wonder what the impulse of nostalgia serves and why we have evolved to long for a blurry sense of what we once had. Perhaps in some strange way the ability to cherish what has elapsed and been lost to the passage of time contributes to a desire to keep moving forward, in hopes of coming across that view or that sense of security again. I find myself tentatively trying to resist the denigration of the nostalgic. Perhaps the artistic impulse comes from an urge to concretize the intangible into a form that we can carry with us, to convince ourselves that it was real, even as our power to travel back there remains limited to the imagination. But in doing so, I recognize that we can inadvertently cheapen the sacred. Think of the flimsiness of our vacation photo albums in capturing what we saw for the first time. What Woolf intuitively grasps is that realism is limited when it comes to depicting memory. It is the photo of sailboats bobbing the harbor that lacks artistic value. To The Lighthouse’s brilliance, like that of the Impressionists’, lies in its abstraction. Just as Monet knew the dappling of summer light could not be captured head-on, Woolf knew that to embody the passage of time she had to dissolve traditional Western narrative and formal structures. Woolf resists sentimentality by capturing not merely memories, but the experience of memory itself, and in so doing, elevates nostalgia to an emotion worthy of artistic attention. At least that is what I will choose to remember until I next revisit To The Lighthouse.

Turtleneck Season has been on hiatus because it is not, in fact, turtleneck season and I was out and about enjoying hot vax summer in tank tops while it lasted. I hope you enjoyed this return to “2020 in Books I finally got around to reading.” Thank you for your continued readership and support! Please share with any nostalgic bookworms in your life!

1. https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/a34100877/cord-jefferson-emmy-win-interview/