I believe nostalgia [is] a model of unanimous eternity. The exile who with melting heart remembers his expectations of happiness sees them under the aspect of eternity, completely forgetting that the achievement of one of them would exclude or postpone all the others. In passion, memory inclines toward the intemporal. We gather up all the delights of a given past in a single image.

— Jorge Luis Borges

I / Every living creature on Earth dies alone

 

I stood on the balcony and surveyed the courtyard with a mite of disapproval. Disapproval of what I didn’t know. The people. No. Not quite. The unrecognized irony in the ordinariness of upper-middle-class family vacations. That’s what irked me.

Hundreds of people, all of them heedless. A proudly corporate, and thereby conspicuously generic, resort property isn’t an “escape” from the nondescript tedium of semi-affluent American suburbia, it’s the same bourgeois banality, only with bigger pools, better amenities and a beach.

That’s not an accident. The hospitality industry knows about well-to-do Americans what well-to-do Americans don’t usually recognize about themselves: They don’t want an escape from their comfortably undistinguished lives, they just want a coastal version differentiated by the scenery and a staff whose job it is to cosplay the sort of servile obsequiousness normally reserved for the actually rich.

“Should’ve got the ocean view,” I muttered, watching the aimless meander below, where overfed men in vineyard vines trailed wives in one-pieces who in turn followed the zigzag romp of small children in puddle jumpers. “Maybe I can still switch.”

I’d been there for four days when I changed rooms, and that was already two days longer than I’d planned for. By the time I finally left, I’d been there a full week. I travel an unreasonable distance to see my long-time physician for semi-annual checkups. Better that than get a new doctor. I’m the same way with doctors I am with friends: You have to have a history with the “real” me for us to have an in-person relationship of any kind. It’s part and parcel of the pathological nostalgia that makes me question the reality of my present tense self.

If you haven’t known me for at least a dozen years you’re not going to. Not going to know me, I mean. I’m determined on that point despite understanding all too well that it’s immeasurably injurious to my mental health — it means the perpetual absence of present tense anchors and thereby reinforces the almost preternatural sense of limbo which defines my (non)existence.

Past a certain age, regular doctor checkups cease to be the immediately forgettable formalities they are when you’re young in a strict, non-relative sense of the term “young.” Beyond 40, something’s always off, even if just by a little bit. If you’re an obsessive like me for whom the slightest deviation from the recommended range on the hodgepodge of indicators included in routine blood work merits further investigation, the aging process is a maddeningly anxious affair, characterized by near constant catastrophizing and imagined brushes with death.

This time, it wasn’t in my head. Or not all of it, anyway. I asked the “wrong” question about some indicator, inviting a referral for a scan which, as scans are wont to do, turned up something that was probably nothing but might be something, and in the event it was something, that something would be demonstrably bad. So I extended my stay to accommodate another scan. And then extended it again for still one more. Then I waited.

The resort wasn’t all that bad, really. It had a decent restaurant and a little cafe where you could get espresso drinks and gelato. The island’s organized into a series of what are essentially large subdivisions called — quite unfortunately given the preponderance of minority labor — “plantations.” An initiative to have that term removed from the local lexicon has failed I don’t know how many times over the years, so still to this day thousands of black workers tend to the every want and need of white vacationers in neighborhoods called plantations. It’s like an antebellum-themed amusement park where today’s whites immerse themselves in a historical reenactment of chattel slavery. You don’t get to beat anybody with a bullwhip, but you do get a voucher for unlimited putt-putt, so it all works out.

By day three, I’d settled into a routine: Takeout from OKKO (the sushi and hibachi spot where I met Blerina, the “bright-eyed twentysomething from the Balkans” who starred in some of my earliest public writings circa 2016), a sunset beach walk and gelato from the resort cafe, where a staff member with some manner of Caribbean accent attended to her menial duties with heartbreaking diligence.

One night, as she scooped my dessert, I asked how she found American society — her opinion on social mores — expecting to hear a whispered complaint about the interminable condescension she surely endured. Instead, she pined for a communal approach to child-rearing which she found conspicuously wanting in America compared to her native country.

“It takes a village,” I said flatly, handing her a fifty for a $13 cup of frozen goodness. By day six, I didn’t have to tell her to keep the change anymore. She just gave me grateful eyes and pressed her hands together like a prayer. “Don’t pray to me, but do maybe pray for me,” I half-joked.

On day five, I squinted through a late-summer beach sun at the “X” tab on my browser where a red dot was either a notification of a new follower, a retweet, a “like,” a direct message or, more likely given my near complete disengagement with the platform formerly known as Twitter, a hallucinatory afterimage from a celestial body burning bright enough to overwhelm my laptop screen. It was, against the odds, a direct message. And another kind of semi-annual checkup.

Once every six or so months, the mainstream media reporter whose name is forever bound to my own reaches out for proof of life if I haven’t reached out to her lately. I’ve tried different mental frameworks for our relationship — big sister, psychotherapist, pen pal — and none of them work, least of all “friend.” She tries, God bless her, but I make it impossible. She both knows me and doesn’t. And I don’t know her at all.

“How are you? Everything feels so surreal.” She meant the domestic political environment in the US. I told her I was probably sick, that I don’t care one way or the other about America’s national melodrama and that the specter of terminal illness made me even more inclined to living mentally in the past.

“I’m not really here anymore,” I said, both aware and not of the irony in surrendering completely to a mental disorder for fear of succumbing to physical disease. “Oh my gosh. What can I do?” she asked, in most respects sincerely. “Nothing,” I thought aloud, but didn’t type. “Obviously nothing.”

II / The disease

 

“Nostalgia is a killer,” reads the first line of an article I’ve been waiting years for someone to write. The piece, published in May by Foreign Affairs, reminds a world increasingly disposed to the political siren song of populism that nostalgia was once considered a disease.

The term itself was coined in 1688 by a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer. The root words are the Greek “nostos” (which means “homecoming”) and “algos” (which means “suffering” or, more apt in this context, “grief”).

Except in cases where the sick could be returned to their homeland, Hofer considered the affliction largely incurable. Early therapies were harsh, to put it politely. A Russian soldier diagnosed with nostalgia in 1733 was buried alive, according to an account conveyed in 1966 by Jean Starobinski, who also noted that French physician Jourdan Le Cointe in 1790 prescribed “pain and terror” as a possible cure. Soldiers sick with nostalgia should be “told that a red-hot iron will be applied to their abdomen,” Le Cointe modestly suggested.

Writing in 2013 for The Atlantic, Julie Beck traced the malady back even further, to the Thirty Years War, when half a dozen troops were “discharged from the Spanish Army of Flanders with ‘el mal de corazón.'” From then on, the mysterious disease “came to be associated with soldiers,” Beck said, noting that the risk of infection was deemed so high for Swiss troops that the playing of an especially wistful Swiss milking song “was punishable by death.” It’s thus a good thing, Beck mused, that nostalgia in modernity is merely “a blanket term for fondness for anything that existed more than thirty minutes ago” rather than an immedicable sickness.

In the Foreign Affairs piece, Harold James and Marie-Louise James noted that in fact, what would be dubbed “Swiss homesickness” two centuries later was already evident in China as early as 1433, when Zheng He completed the last of his legendary treasure adventures. With the blessing of the Ming Dynasty, Zheng sailed as far west as Africa. Over seven expeditions, he and his men gathered an impressive collection of souvenirs including, famously, a giraffe which on some accounts was presented to the second Ming emperor as a living, breathing chimera specimen.

Alas, the age of Chinese exploration was cut short by isolationism born of a yearning for the past. As the two Jameses wrote, the Chinese government eventually “concluded that [Zheng’s] effort to globalize had been nothing more than an indulgence in exoticism, bringing no real benefits.” Indeed, Zheng’s engagement with the world “risked compromising China’s core values and historic mission,” in the estimation of subsequent emperors for whom “globalization… simply meant that other countries would take advantage of China’s prosperity.”

Scholars of Chinese history might quibble with the details, but that’s the gist of it. And so China turned inward to its own eventual detriment. In 1792, Emperor Qianlong wrote to King George III of England. China, the emperor insisted, possessed “all things in prolific abundance within its borders” and as such had “no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians.”

The commercial overtures of George Macartney, who the king dispatched to China around the same time, were roundly rejected, prompting Macartney to describe China as “an old, crazy, first-rate Man of War, which a fortunate succession of able and vigilant officers have contrived to keep afloat for these hundred and fifty years past,” a back-handed compliment if ever there was one. As Yale PhD Matthew Lockwood wrote in 2020, “in the wake of Macartney’s mission [China] began to be stereotyped as backward, rigid and blinkered, an enemy of progress rather than its embodiment.”

The Jameses went on to discuss the onset of Japanese isolationism under the shogunate, whose “chained country” doctrine significantly curbed cultural and other exchanges with certain parts of the outside world. That era of Japanese history’s the subject of much scholarly debate, and I have no academic standing to pronounce upon the veracity (or not) of what some historians describe as woefully oversimplified narratives. Suffice to say “closed” isn’t necessarily the best description of Japan during the period, or at least not on a strict definition of the word.

But whatever the benefits of the policies — and whatever analytical nuance may go under-appreciated by posterity — it’s fair to say that by and by, Japanese isolationism came at the cost of relative backwardness vis-à-vis a rapidly industrializing world. So, even if the Foreign Affairs piece omits a lot of the finer points on the way to form-fitting the Edo period for the purposes of deriding isolationism, the Jameses weren’t wrong to assess that Sakoku had “a cultural component”: The policies represented “an assertion of the values of a traditional society threatened by change.”

In both cases — i.e., the case of the Chinese and Japanese — attempts to preserve civilizational purity and otherwise guard against the corrupting effect of outside influence came to naught, at best. The Foreign Affairs piece was less generous. “Nostalgic policies greatly endangered” China and Japan, the authors wrote.

Europe, as a center of industrialization and an enthusiastic participant in exploitative globalization, didn’t close itself off from the world (certain parts of the world might’ve been better off if they had), but “nostalgia still crept into its politics,” as the Foreign Affairs article put it, noting that the economic downturn beginning in 1929 made some Europeans yearn for “an idyllic, agrarian past.” Adolf Hitler capitalized politically on that nostalgia.

The Nazis, the Jameses wrote, were masterful at playing to “agrarian romanticism” with enchanting “rural propaganda.” It was Richard Darré, Reich Minister for Food and Agriculture, who popularized the phrase “blood and soil” in a 1930 volume on eugenics. Two years earlier, in 1928, he published a tract called “Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race,” a title which speaks for itself.

Earlier this month, Ezra Klein interviewed political scientist Suzanne Mettler, whose new book Rural Versus Urban traces the arc of what she and co-author Trevor Brown describe as “a growing divide that threatens democracy” in America. The book itself’s long on quality analysis but, if I may, a bit short on revelations. That’s not a criticism, it’s just to say that if you’re steeped in the socioeconomic history of the last three decades — i.e., the hyper-globalization era and the period economists call “The Great Moderation” — you don’t need Mettler’s trenchant account to explain what she calls “place-based” polarization.

The urban-rural fissure’s just another manifestation of the same divide that animates all political debate in America post-2016. It’s a function of the same “left-behind” dynamics we encounter again and again in any discussion of modern American politics, defined as it is by the GOP’s success in courting disenchanted former Democrats who feel betrayed by a party that’s by now a dogmatic clubhouse for the well-educated and the urbanized, whose priorities and cultural preferences are increasingly detached from working people and rural voters. Again: It’s the same divide.

The figure above gives you a sense of how place-based polarization is playing out on Election Day. Simply put: Rural voters are getting more red all the time.

One of the main takeaways from Mettler’s exposition is that this wasn’t always the case. As she told Klein, “the rural-urban divide did not exist nationwide in the past in the US.” As recently as 1992, the gap was just a couple of points. It started to widen out thereafter, and as noted above, it’s no secret why: The mid-1990s marked the onset of what Ruy Teixeira and John Judis described in Where Have All the Democrats Gone? as the “Great Divide.”

To recapitulate from the March 2024 Monthly Letter, on one side of that divide are “the great postindustrial metro centers,” as Teixeira and Judis put it, which flourished during a period of tectonic macroeconomic shifts, including globalization, financialization and a succession of technological epochs. On the other side of the divide are the hollowed-out remains of America’s manufacturing sector, the soot-covered residuum of once-viable mining towns and the anachronistic (if nostalgic) remnants of the country’s farming communities.

Mettler’s absolutely correct to assess that disaffection with, and defection from, the Democratic party among rural and blue collar voters is primarily attributable to economic outcomes, not policy differences — as one county chair told her, “We’ve been in a recession here for 30 years.” But it’s easier to play on people’s emotions when they’re disaffected. So while it might be true that we traffic in stereotypes or otherwise misattribute when we cite a wistful predisposition for traditional values or a longing for the factory floor while explaining decampment among erstwhile Democrats, pervasive impecuniousness makes those emotions easier to rile. That’s fertile ground for the weaponized nostalgia of populist demagogues.

Of course, such political opportunists tend to be self-serving and egotistical. And populism’s quick fixes often prove inadequate in the face of problems with complex causes. Whether they ever admit as much, exploited voter blocs are just a means to an end — stepping stones to power — for the demagogue. Such constituencies tend to be expendable, and they’re eventually treated as such. As the Jameses noted in the Foreign Affairs article, Hitler quickly “lost patience with rural policies once he no longer needed peasant voters.” By 1937, they went on, The Führer “openly expressed his contempt for ‘peasant philosophy stuff’ and refused to receive Darré or entertain his requests.”

III / Counterclockwise

 

Clinical disease or not, nostalgia isn’t always harmless.

Three years after Beck, writing for The Atlantic, delineated Hofer’s bane in innocuous terms (“People who like to bring up old Nickelodeon cartoons at parties”), Donald Trump harnessed nostalgia to forever change the course of Western history, many would argue for the worse.

Even the most generous interpretations of Trump’s openly anachronistic politics can barely avoid conceding that toxic divisiveness is part of the program, although they’d argue “the other side” is at least as guilty. Behind that toxic divisiveness is a cynical play on people’s emotions, chief among them nostalgia.

Americans currently harbor a grim view of the present compared to the past. That’s the flipside of nostalgia. Consider, for example, that survey respondents in a 2025 YouGov poll ranked the present day lower on overall quality of life than any modern historical period not defined by a crisis.

As the chart shows, the combined share who described life in America as “terrible” or “poor” in 2025 was nearly 34%, the same as the share who said it was “excellent” or “good” (the “terrible” share was double the “excellent” share), roughly on par with the Antebellum Period.

With allowances for the fact that quality of life assessments are inherently subjective, the idea that the average American has it worse today than they did midway through the 20th century (to say nothing of the 19th century) is objectively false on most metrics which include health and wealth. If creature comforts were all that mattered, there’s simply no comparison between today and, say, 1960. As James Pethokoukis put it, “Give me a break: American life wasn’t better 50 years ago.”

Pethokoukis was responding to a 2023 Pew study which showed “sizable majorities” of US adults expect America to decline over the next 25 years on several important metrics. Specifically, two thirds said the economy will be weaker, more then seven-in-10 said the US’s influence on the global stage with diminish, more than three quarters said political divisions will widen and more than eight-in-10 that the wealth divide will increase.

I can’t claim to disagree with the majority of poll respondents on those issues, but I’d quibble with the contention that life for everyday people in America’s worse today than it was 50 years ago, the poll’s main finding. The figure below shows you the simple breakdown of the responses in the poll versus 2016 (two months prior to Trump’s first election victory), 2017 and 2021.

The phenomenon’s especially pronounced among whites, 63% of whom said life was better half a century ago. More than half of adults aged 18-to-49 — which is to say more than half of US adults who by definition don’t actually know what it was like to live 50 years ago — said life today is worse or, more accurately, imagined that life today’s probably worse based on second-hand information.

Partisanship plays a role, but the intra-party increase in the share of respondents who said life was better 50 years ago was the same in the 2023 poll: 72% of Republicans in 2023 versus 59% in 2021, up 13ppt and 43% of Democrats in 2023 versus 30% in 2021, for the same 13ppt increase. Given that, you might suggest inflation (and everything to do with inflation) goes a long way towards explaining the increase. After all — and despite everything that happened during the seven years spanned by the four surveys included in the chart — the share of those who said life’s worse versus 50 years ago was more or less unchanged until the 2023 poll. What changed from 2021 to 2023? A lot, sure, but most notably among so-called “kitchen table” issues, inflation.

Of course, the 1970s (the ostensible comp in the poll) was also a period of high inflation, but the memory of 2022’s inflation was much fresher. And when the 2023 poll was conducted, headline CPI was still running 5%. In the 2024 edition of the PRRI American Values Survey conducted two months prior to the election, more than six-in-10 Americans said the cost of housing and everyday expenses was “a critical issue” for their vote, a higher share than those who said the same about the health of the country’s democracy, immigration, crime, health care or abortion.

As a quick aside, in a 2017 cross-country poll by Pew, the US was among the only advanced economies where more than four-in-10 survey respondents said life’s worse in their country compared to 1967. The other two were France and Italy.

Setting aside the likely distortion from the 2022 inflation, there’s little question that large swathes of the US electorate are enamored with appeals to an idealized past. CivicScience, a Carnegie Mellon-backed opinion research firm, tracks nostalgia on an ongoing basis. In August, 62% of Americans “reported feeling at least ‘somewhat’ nostalgic for the past.” One in five said they were “extremely” nostalgic. Somewhat paradoxically, the feeling was more pervasive among those under 45, although at 56%, the feeling was also strong among those 65 and older.

Notably, nostalgia polling’s no different from any other polling in that the wording — and even the ordering — of survey question can influence the results. For example, a 2021 CBS poll suggested seven-in-10 Americans think of themselves as forward-looking versus just 19% who said they were nostal­gic for the past. But consider CBS’s framing: They asked, “Do you think of yourself more as someone who tends to be nostalgic about the past, or do you think of yourself more as someone who tends to look forward to the future?”

The pollsters surely didn’t mean to bias the results, but you can see how the question might’ve done just that. It vaguely suggests there’s a “right” answer. The fact that 62% of respondents aged 65 and up said they were forward-looking attests to that. Sure, people tend to look forward to retirement, but it beggars belief that fewer than three-in-10 American seniors (29% in the poll) are nostalgic about the past. More importantly, the overall poll results were completely at odds with the share of the presidential vote garnered by an openly nostalgic political movement in the preceding two elections and, as it turned out, with the share of the vote garnered by that same movement in the next election.

A CNN poll conducted this year showed more than half of Americans believe the country’s best days are behind it. That share’s more than doubled since 2019 suggesting, perhaps, that Trump’s been both successful and not: Successful in engendering more disillusionment, but unsuccessful so far in his second term instilling faith in the future, even if that just means faith that the good old days are on their way back.

The chart gives you a sense of how Americans were inclined on that question just prior to Trump’s first election. You can see why his message resonated. At least in CNN’s polling, the share who believed America’s best days lay ahead wasn’t that much higher in 2016 than it is now.

Of course, this didn’t start with Trump. It was Ronald Reagan who beseeched voters, “Let’s Make America Great Again” and The Gipper was hardly an innovator in resorting to cheap emotional appeals. As the American Enterprise Institute wrote in a 2023 study, nostalgia has “a considerable hold on Americans’ imaginations” and politicians are keen to exploit that with “appeal[s] to memories of real or imagined better times.” The AEI’s review of historical surveys suggests “abundant support” for the nostalgia emotion across history. That support’s particularly evident in the presence of vague poll questions asking if “things were better” or our “circumstances happier” in the vaunted, but often unspecified, days of yore.

Consider, for example, that when polled by Gallup in 1939, nearly two thirds of Americans said they were happier in the “horse-and-buggy days” and yet, when Gallup pressed the issue, asking if Americans would actually prefer to live in the horse-and-buggy days, the responses flipped: Just 25% said yes. That speaks to the idea that happiness isn’t inextricably bound up with technological proliferation, something we’re learning the hard way in the 21st century, but also to the notion that appeals to nostalgia are most effective when couched in nebulous terms. Nostalgia is, after all, an emotion, and emotions tend towards the irrational. The “horse-and-buggy days” question wasn’t about the horses and the buggies, it was about the wistfulness evoked by the term.

In the same way you can bias survey responses against nostalgia by phrasing your question such that poll participants are effectively forced to declare themselves pessimistic Luddites, you can elicit majority support for the past by asking whether things were better during “the good old days,” a foggy postulation which enjoys something like universal recognition despite being temporally undefined. That’s the technique populists often employ: They harken to an imagined halcyon period, often without delineating it, a deliberate analytical omission which affords political entrepreneurs the latitude to create amalgamations of non-contemporaneous socioeconomic conditions.

Public polling consistently fails to produce consensus on when the “good old days” actually occurred, so if your political career depends on appealing to those days, you don’t want to get too specific. Although Americans seem to agree that the 1950s, 1980s and 1990s were generally good decades, much depends on the age of poll respondents.

As The Washington Post noted in a highly amusing (for being brutally honest) piece published in 2024, “the good old days when America was ‘great’ aren’t the 1950s, they’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.” The same’s true abroad, in other advanced economies. “Far from believing that our best days lie ahead, a study suggests most people are wistful for the good old days,” the Sunday Times wrote, editorializing around the results of a 2024 poll in the UK. “Exactly when you think the good old days were depends, perhaps unsurprisingly, on your age.”

Trump’s never been clear on when the “good old days” were in America. As Tinatin Japaridze pointed out earlier this year, he’s reaching back much further in his second term, “contending that the US was at its peak during the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries” as opposed to the 1980s and 1950s nostalgia which animated much of his first-term rhetoric. And yet, he still plays routinely to “the material allure of the Reagan era’s deregulation and the ‘greed is good’ ethos.”

To repeat myself, the lack of temporal delineation is deliberate. It affords political entrepreneurs like Trump the latitude to create amalgamations of non-contemporaneous socioeconomic conditions. And like the 18-to-49s who told Pew that life today’s worse in America than it was 50 years ago, you needn’t have lived in the imagined past to yearn for it, which is a good thing for Trump because there aren’t too many Americans around today who remember the Gilded Age.

“Many young people… rely on the highly malleable personal historical narratives of older Americans to color their nostalgia for the hazy golden snapshots from the past,” Japaridze went on, adding that “the powerful narratives crafted by political ‘nostalgists’ can hinder society’s capacity to envision a future that builds on present realities” by encouraging voters to “retreat to the comforting, yet often illusory, embrace of a past that never truly existed.”

IV / The Philosophy Of Time Travel

 

“I think it would be really strange to feel very close to your 25-year-old self when you’re 50,” Zadie Smith, the celebrated novelist, told The New Yorker‘s David Remnick this month.

She was referring to the young woman whose literary debut White Teeth created a new star virtually overnight. “I’m grateful to that girl because she wrote a book which enabled my life,” Smith said, thanking her younger self before emphasizing that the two women have drifted apart over the years. “I think for anybody, that would be a strange relation.”

It is indeed a surreal relation. The relation between your middle-age self and the person you were two decades previous. I can confirm Smith’s suspicion that feeling very close to one’s younger self is in fact “really strange,” and on most days highly distressing.

That distress can likely be explained in part by the notion that to dwell too often and too immersively in the past is to negate oneself in a very literal — and very existential — sense of the word “self.”

When pressed, it’s very difficult, bordering on the impossible, to perceive of ourselves as anything other than registers of impressions. As a vexed David Hume famously put it, “I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.” He doubted the seriousness of anyone who might suggest otherwise. “If anyone, upon unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him,” he wrote, in 1739.

Immanuel Kant, the greatest of the post-antiquity philosophers and one of the brightest minds our species has ever produced, found the flaw in Hume’s seemingly air-tight reasoning. Writing half a century later in what, on some lists, ranks as the single greatest disquisition ever penned by a human being, Kant introduced “transcendental apperception” as a necessary, a priori condition for experience, as such. As William Egginton put it in his masterful 2023 work The Rigor of Angels,

[F]or Hume to even report [his] feeling[s] he had to perceive something in addition to the immediate perceptions, namely, the very flow of time that allowed them to be distinct in the first place. And to recognize time passing is necessarily to recognize that you are embedded in the perception.

What exactly constitutes the “you” in that excerpt is, was and always will be, the subject of intractable debate. The point is just that experience is only possible if there’s some one, or something, there to do the experiencing — some one not only to register perceptions, but to place them in a spatial-temporal context.

Whatever that “you” is, it almost surely isn’t some eternal essence. Experience requires a subject who processes and orders perceptions in such a way as to develop a coherent (i.e., a spatial-temporal) view of reality, sure, but we still can’t say much about the nature of that subject if we can say anything at all.

Put as a question: The subject of experience — the “I” — may well be an a priori condition, but “a condition” does not an immutable essence make nor, I’d argue, does this condition constitute something that can itself be the subject of inquiry unless Kenny Rogers and the First Edition are performing a Mickey Newbury song.

Still, it occurs to me that the discomfiture which plagues my every waking moment might be a function of my increasingly elaborate efforts to reconstruct the past, a project which, paradoxically in this context, entails making assumptions about my “true nature” even as the whole exercise robs me of the only “self” I actually have: The self which experiences change. In the same way, it might well be the case that America’s national agitation stems from a strained attempt to recapture an imagined golden age that exemplifies traditional “values” at the expense of losing itself entirely.

V / Memento

 

Egginton asks, “What would it entail to have an attachment and never lose it?” “Take a scene from your past,” he says. “You may see a vague picture [and] you also probably register an emotion: Wistfulness, nostalgia.” You know you can’t “recreate it perfectly” but “what if you could,” right down to the very last sensation?

On day six I woke up to a text message. “We’ve been thinking about you, C. You doing ok?”, it read. There was a picture attached. A family photo, as it were, from a summer vacation on the Isle of Palms, just east of Charleston. As part of my reclamation project, I regularly reconstruct that trip from memory. I had no idea there were actual pictures or if I did, I certainly never imagined I’d see them.

I was so taken aback to see us — me, him, the girls, the kids, all frozen in time on August 9, 2010 — that it took me a moment to gather my thoughts. Then I marveled at the serendipity. “How’d you know I was sick?” I typed back. He said he didn’t. The apparent coincidence was almost too much to process. I couldn’t even remember the last time we spoke, and yet here he was, before dawn on what might’ve been the worst day of my life, sending a photographic postcard from the best day.

“What if you could access such moments at will?” Egginton writes. “But you can’t. The more precisely you relive the past, the less it is a past you remember and the more it becomes the present.”

I forwarded the picture to my email, opened my laptop and fed the image to one of the AIs I use with instructions to create a 10-second video using the still. A minute or so later, I was staring at a seamless, moving reconstruction. We laughed and gestured. The girls’ hair flitted in the ocean breeze. And the tide washed up over our feet.

“A truly perfect replay would erase its very sense of being a replay altogether because it would erase the connection between moments of time that constitute the one remembering,” Egginton goes on. “A perfect memory is impossible because it destroys the very self who remembers.”

I spent the day writing, reading and watching 10 seconds of reconstructed past over and over again. Around 5:30, my doctor called. “Sorry it’s so late.” “That’s alright,” I said, by then fully resigned. He got to the point: “It looks benign.” “Oh yeah?” “Yeah.” He read to me from the radiologist notes: “‘Unremarkable.'”

When we got off the phone I walked out onto the balcony and looked out at the water. Most of me was relieved. Part of me was disappointed that my date with eternity was postponed.

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