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At a certain distance, vision fades and imagination takes over. Try as they might, imitators never succeed in exactly reproducing the past. The eye of memory takes in 1936 and the elegance of an Astaire dance or the froth of a Lubitsch comedy; it is blind to Depression breadlines. It catches the shapely legs of Rita Hayworth in 1944's hot pants but neglects the 500,000 U.S. war casualties of that year. It is amused by the crew cuts and slang of 1953 but forgets the anti-Communist hysteria and the fear that followed detonation of Russia's first hydrogen bomb.
In time, nostalgia will dim or even erase memories of assassinations, wars, racial hatred and student riots from its vision of the '60s, just as it has long since done away with the slime, the stench and the wanton slaughter of that noblest of human conflicts, World War I. Nostalgia is like Marie Antoinette, who commissioned the finest artists and architects of France to build eight picturesque peasant farms beside her Petit Trianon. They were perfect—right down to porcelain vases from Sevres used for milking the cows. Nostalgia selects only what is agreeable, and even that it distorts or turns into myth.
"I dreamed there was an Emperor Antony," Shakespeare's Cleopatra soliloquizes after his death. "His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear'd arm crested the world; his voice was propertied ... as all the tuned spheres. Think you there was, or might be, such a man as this I dream'd of?"
"Gentle madam, no." -
The original definition of nostalgia, which few recognize today, is "homesickness." Illogical though it may be, many people in their 20s and 30s do feel a longing very much like homesickness for a time they never knew. Indeed, there seem to be two kinds of nostalgia, one for youth and one for middle age and beyond. Most often, those who were adults in the ancient days before 1960 glance back with either fondness or sadness, but rarely with bitter regret. They look at the past with the secret sense of triumph that comes to all survivors. Besides, nostalgia gives them a spurious sense of sophistication; it enables them to feel superior by laughing at simpler times.
It is their children, members of a supposedly radical generation, who genuinely hunger for unexperienced past, as if they were hearing some melancholy autumnal horn summoning them through an undiscovered hallway to a place they can search for but can never find. It is as if they felt cheated for being given their maturity in the sad and sinister world of the '70s. For them, as for Wordsworth, there truly "hath passed away a glory from the earth."
No one in his right mind would argue that 1971—with its recession and its exhausting and hateful war—is the best year this country has ever seen. Given a choice, many Americans would put on a blindfold and pick out of a hat another year in which to live—any one of the past 500. But as Marie Twain, Lord Byron and countless other writers suggest, they would soon repent upon discovering that there is no such thing as a golden age. The past is an illusion just as much as the future; it is Utopia in reverse.