I am not outdated or unhappy or tearful.
But sometimes I get nostalgic.
Even if nostalgia is often abused, devalued, even condemned, I can’t help but sincerely wish it rehabilitation.
Like many people, I found myself over the holidays with a group of old friends (my “close guard”, as I like to call them) to simply reminisce. Instant cliche and rather banal, you might say, and you’ll be right. But this precious moment swelled our hearts. He confirmed to us that time passes with his sweet moments which alternate with the more difficult episodes. And in these times when we need reassurance more than ever, it was, reassuring.
We were nostalgic and it was tender.
I admit it, I like to bask in my nostalgia. She comforts me. I like rocking myself in what Marcel Proust calls “the immense edifice of memory”.
And I find it quite useful in those moments when you wonder where the joy has gone.
It reminds us that it can always come back, this joy, because it has already existed. Life is, after all, just one big circular motion.
And here I am reassured once again.
François Cheng wrote in his very moving novel The saying of Tianyi “If despite everything I keep this capacity for astonishment and wonder intact within me, it is because I am constantly carried away by the echoes of a very distant nostalgia whose origin I do not know. »
It’s true that it can be mysterious, this nostalgia. And above all multiple.
Its origin is interesting and easily explains its negative connotation.
In the book Nostalgia, story of a deadly emotionThomas Dodman explains to us that at the end of the XVIIe century, some soldiers, exiled far from their families, sank into an incredible sadness that made them sick. This disease was then called “nostalgia”. It is a fascinating read that also tells how nostalgia has been transformed and adapted from one era to another, up to our current society where capitalism has taken it over with “its psychology, its social relations, its cultural traits”, continues the author, making us consume, among other things, objects that reconnect us to our memories.
Because indeed, we live in a society of object fetishism.
But these objects, relics to which we entrust the function of reactivating a memory, are ultimately only the transmission belt, the triggers of this memory which is inscribed in our head and our heart.
Remembrance is the very essence of nostalgia. And that’s what matters.
So I tell myself that all means are good to do good. Nostalgia is one.
And after all, when we stop at a part of the etymology of the word, “nostos” (return), we realize that it is a derivative of an Indo-European root: “nestaï”, whose first meaning is “happy return, hello”.
My grandfather, an immigrant who had known the wounds of being uprooted, often happily took up songs from his childhood, from his native Italy. It didn’t make him sad. He was joyful because, as Jane Austen wrote, “When the pain is past, the memory of it often becomes a pleasure.” »
Nostalgia, it must be said, will also have given us the most beautiful songs that we collectively carry in our hearts, such as The Manic by George Dor:
“Sometimes I think of you so strongly / I recreate your soul and your body / I look at you and marvel / I extend into you / Like the river in the sea / And the flower in the bee”
I am also thinking of the immense Serge Bouchard, who writes in The Black Spruce Prayer in reference to this famous ball from our childhood, the one that refers to “baseball in summer” and “street hockey in winter”:
“Today, sitting all day long in my armchair, motionless, looking out of the window, staring at the street in front of me, I spend hours shut up in myself. One could believe that I pray or that I meditate. You might even think that I think. But no, I just have a blue-white-red rubber ball in my head. »
I therefore wish us moments when nostalgia, cleared of customs, bearer of comfort and messenger of hope, will remind us that beauty has existed, has shaped us and will always return.
The poet Jean-Paul Daoust affirms that “melancholy is a sadness that rests”. I say that nostalgia is a joy that remembers.
And it’s very good like that.