Nostalgia

I just started a book called Downtown, by Pete Hamill, which I am already deeply fond of, in part because the subject – downtown Manhattan – is near to my heart. (At the moment, my heart is in fact in downtown Manhattan, since I’m writing this on my lunch break at work). Hamill says something in the very first chapter that struck me as curious, and in the couple days since I read it, and this being the holiday season, has resounded further and further into my life. The title of the chapter is “The Capital of Nostalgia,” and in it he talks about the impermanence of New York. “The New York version of nostalgia is not simply about lost buildings or their presence in the youth of the individuals who lived with them. It involves an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent presence of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same.”

The part that I keep ruminating on is this thing he says later on the page: “New York toughens its people against sentimentality by allowing the truer emotion of nostalgia. Sentimentality is always about a lie. Nostalgia is about real things gone. Nobody truly mourns a lie.” I thought it was curious at first because I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant, and it struck me as a little overly semantic. But lately, I’ve been overwhelmed by the urge to watch Christmas movies, and when I do, or even when I see one of those holiday commercials specially engineered to tug at your heartstrings, I feel an ecstatic sadness well up in me. Ecstatic! I want to watch these movies, and I want to weep and weep over them, and I can’t figure out why.

But I think, now, that it’s sentimentalism (in which case, I clearly have several more years here before New York toughens me up). I’m mourning a lie. I’m weeping because there is an idea of Christmas on screen that I miss deeply, even though it does not exist in reality and never did. But it’s difficult to tell where sentimentality and nostalgia end and begin. I got emotional last night trying to recall the words of Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas,” and I couldn’t tell how much of that was triggered by the imagery it provokes and its place in our culture as a holiday classic or if it was because mine is a family that cherishes such imagery and such classics, and that owns a beautifully illustrated book of that poem that my parents would read out loud come Christmastime. It was and still is easy to picture my parents, whose version of nightwear is delightfully old-fashioned, as “Ma in her kerchief and I in my cap,” settling their brains and so on. Something mass-marketed becomes something close to home, and vice verse. (Just for fun, this is a close approximation of what we looked like on Christmas morning)

So I’m finding it hard to suss out, this December, the things I am truly nostalgic for, but I feel I should. I want to be reminded, as we are often called to do, of what’s important to me, and I want to honor it. Having said that, I’m inclined to indulge the sentimentalism as well. It’s fun. I just bought three cheesy Christmas movies online, for instance, and I do intend to watch all of them.