Rebecca Watson wrote that nostalgia can be an antidote to loneliness. As an introvert with many pursuits, a few close friends and family, I seldom feel lonely. Still, I am drawn to the feeling of nostalgia. Revisiting places where I once lived, studied, or worked puts me in a contemplative mood and invites me to reflect on my past experiences.
Excerpts from the article:
It’s a curious thing, seeking the site of memories: like a dog chasing its own tail. It’s impossible to meet the memory. Those spaces live on in your mind, edging towards unreality, becoming dreamlike.
I was connecting memories back with the world, pulling them into reality. But the task, of course, was impossible to achieve: the present only reinforced memory as individual, intimate, unrepeatable. Each spot was united by there being no sign that I had been there previously. Time having passed was part of the pleasure, so was the fact that I was irrelevant to these places — that they belonged to me only as much as the series of people who had since passed through them.
Nostalgia can become negative when you wish for a reality that probably never existed — or romanticise a past state in order to attack the present. But in its best form, nostalgia is an antidote to loneliness — it un-collapses time, which is by necessity condensed, drawing out your life behind you like a snail’s silver trail. The feeling is of being both magnified and a speck amid a vast landscape.
Nostalgia, on the other hand, is a phenomenon of layers: the passage of time, our relation to it, how others intersect with that memory or point in time.
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