“Looking back on life is such a retrospective thing.” – Pete Shelley (“Yesterday’s Not Here”)
It’s Friday night, and I took my time coming up with an idea for this week’s Substack. The following is an expanded version of a journal entry I wrote this morning.
A few weeks ago, I bought a used filing cabinet. It’s an old, dark greyish-green three-drawer unit with enough room to hold files for a small office. It’s not beautiful. But it’s not ugly either. In October, my old files from America finally arrived from America and when added to the dozens of file folders I’ve accumulated here in Finland, I needed more room.
I’m not a pack rat, mind you. I went full Marie Kondo on all my stuff before I moved in 2012, but I still had an entire tub full of hanging file folders in the stuff I shipped from the States, and now I need somewhere to put it away. Much of it is old notebooks, clippings, things written by and about friends, etc. I’m not ready to part with it.
The amount of effort I went through to find a decently priced three-drawer cabinet of its size (good quality new file cabinets can cost hundreds of euros! Who knew?) made me wonder about the lengths people will go to hold onto the past.
Lately, I have variously spent time digitizing old cassette tapes and photos, writing a memoir, and cataloging all of my father’s classical vinyl that I grew up listening to that came to Finland in the same shipment as my tub of files. Regular readers know I fancy myself a poet, and some might argue poetry itself is a fancy invention, a filing cabinet of its own, for saving time itself.
Do we struggle to hold onto things because of the inevitability that we will lose them all?
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” ― T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
Recently, I read an article in the Atlantic that suggests nostalgia can be a buffer against both unhappiness and the fear of death. It struck me as insightful. Nostalgia is one of the strangest and most powerful feelings we encounter in our lives and can provide a sense of continuity and give our lives meaning. The comforter knitted for me by my grandmother who died forty years ago not only comforts me but keeps me and my family warm. It shores up my belief that it’s possible to leave positive reminders of your presence behind, even when you are gone.
The older I get, the more I seem to want objects from my past back in my life, both originals and copies of them, not just to hold them up to the light and peruse them like old photos but put them on full display or even use them daily. I'm thousands of miles from where I grew up, yet the vinyl records and stereo speakers of my teens are visible from where I sit on my sofa in Espoo, Finland. I’ve actually thought of trying to reassemble the exact stereo components that sat in my teenage bedroom, Realistic FM receiver, and Technics (maybe?) cassette deck. On my piano are the Diller-Quayle piano book I used when I was sixteen, and the Mussorgsky “Pictures at an Exhibition” sheet music that still has my piano teacher’s name in pencil on the front (Ramer.) Physical artifacts are important since memory so easily alters things, which is why the real object can be useful. The coffee cup on the coffee table is from the I-80 truck stop in Iowa I would drive past on the way to college. Its pattern is that of an Iowa license plate.
There’s so much more not visible from where I’m sitting but still close enough to give me comfort. My bookshelves in my downstairs office contain the books I read growing up: Lord of the Rings, Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, C, S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Richard Adams’ Watership Down.
Why do we surround ourselves with objects from the past? Or revisit things from so long ago that they’re nearly forgotten? When we merely brush up against them, we often find them to be fresher in memory than we had imagined. I recently started rewatching the original Planet of the Apes film from 1968 because I saw it was on Netflix. It was a lot worse than I remember it, and the soundtrack is downright awful, but I intend to finish it just to see if it still makes me feel anything like that young person who experienced it for the first time so many years ago.
In 1988, I wrote a phrase into one of my songs: "You can never really leave, you can only come back." In 1988 I was already feeling nostalgic for 1983 and earlier periods of my youth. You can, after all, only experience something or be somewhere for the first time once, then the rest are returns, whether physical, in one's mind, or in dreams. People who die come back to us in this way. And our own deaths become the ultimate going back to our own origins, to what Roald Dahl called Minus Land in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, that place of nothingness before we "existed."
In the meantime, it’s Friday night as I finish this essay, and I realize sitting here at the dining room table that these are the days I hope I will someday be saying “Those were the days” about. And, funny thing. These thoughts of nostalgia have gotten me thinking about the weekend ahead.