Remembering Nostalgia

I found a lot about Tobias Wolff’s “Last Shot” moving. Reading George Orwell’s essay caused a great deal of emotion to come about in Wolff, and as he wrote “It stopped me cold.” I felt I could relate to this; often times something in my day will take me back to a past memory. A song will make me feel strongly a certain way—some Tracy Chapman songs make me think about my ex-boyfriend.  The smell of apple-cinnamon candles makes me think of my best friend.  For Wolff, what he reads brings him back to his friend Hugh Pierce, who died in the Vietnam War. I found the quote “We are made to persist, to complete the whole world tour. That’s how we find out who we are” related to our task of writing personal essays. The more we write, the further we push, the more we discover about ourselves. “Last Shot” also showed how so many things in our day-to-day lives are in some way capable of making us remember. I find this comforting, but also I wonder—what about the things you don’t want to remember? Do they get buried? Or do you just not focus on the thought as it approaches? For me, when something I don’t want to remember pops into my head, I try not to dwell and quickly think about something else.

I was not a fan of Joe Brainard’s “I remember.” To be honest, I kept trying to figure out what he was trying to accomplish by the repetition, but then it would just annoy me and I would forget the literary purpose. I guess I have a more traditional taste in personal writing, because I found that I missed the weaving of memories and analytical thought together; it was too bare for my liking.  With that said, I felt similarly about Andrei Codrescu’s “Nostalgia for Everything” but to a lesser extent. To me, I felt like it was almost as if his life was a whirlwind of travel, and therefore he classified his time based on these fleeting moments that he later would feel a sense of deja vu about. I also thought it was interesting that he used the word nostalgia (from my count) at least six times in a somewhat short passage.  I liked this type of repetition though—unlike Brainard’s—because to me, that’s what nostalgia is: it’s something that occurs often. I also really just like the word, and I thought it was interesting that he described the upcoming year by saying“…for which I already felt nostalgic though it hadn’t even happened.” Sometimes, if I know that my current surroundings and situation is one where feelings are running deep, I have similar sentiments and wonder if later in life I will feel nostalgic for the present time.