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Eternity
I believe nostalgia [is] a model of unanimous eternity. The exile who with melting heart remembers h
I’m glad it was benign. The clock has stopped ticking. Malignancy dims your life view forever.
We are experiencing our eternity in this physical life everyday, unfortunately we suffer from a life long case of amnesia to that fact. Fortunately or unfortunately, we are all getting out of this life alive. There is no postponement to be had. Ponder that concept. 🙂
“We are on an endless flight my friend
With no beginning and no end
I’ve forgotten more than I remember
Sometimes I want to hide myself away
But I know there’s no escape
We must go on, go on forever”
Todd Rundgren – Fade Away
Another masterpiece, thank you.
Reading this reminds me of a dear friend that I lost to nostalgia. A brutal car crash on his way home from the bar was what ended his body, but it was nostalgia that killed him.
We became close in the 90’s, both of us freshly out of the military and living poor but free on our sailboats with our wives travelling the East coast and the Caribbean. For all of us they were the best times of our lives: young, beautiful, free. A world full of hope. We eventually went our own ways but always stayed close and visited often. He eventually inherited a solid chunk of money, enough to buy the dream boat and live comfortably off of the interest of the inherited banking stocks. Then the 2008 recession wiped out his undiversified portfolio, a crushing blow to a guy who was really smart and knew he knew better. He had to sell the boat, move on land, tried to work again but couldn’t. Started drinking excessively, wife left him, jail for multiple DUI’s. I was always trying to snap him out of it, for years I tried. I even got him back on a boat to help me with a delivery on a trip he hadn’t done before with new surroundings, new sights, new opportunities. I knew he was gone when I couldn’t even coax him out of the cabin. A beautiful day with deer walking along the shore, alligators lingering on the edges, and he sat in the cabin watching videos of his dog and wife and him on his dream boat, reminiscing of the ‘good old days’ and unable to experience the beautiful life that was all around him. Unable to listen to the friend who was trying to help him. He wanted so badly to go back in time that the world became an unbearable weight to him.
This reminds me of the one interesting speaker we had in my MBA program – he was worth tens of millions on paper and flew on private jets prior to the Great Recession, but went broke because he took on too much leverage. You could tell his life had been absolute hell after that and speaking to students was a way for him to process his loss. His core memory from that time was reading a newspaper on a private jet with the sun rising above the clouds.
We only tend to hear about the entrepreneurs who conquered the world, but history is littered with failed entrepreneurial endeavors (they all fail eventually). Knowing the outcome colors the past for successful entrepreneurs who romanticize the early days when they were up-and-comers,
Pema Chodron says SHENPA causes us to feel the fundamental underlying insecurity of human experience that is inherent in a changing ,shifting, impermanent,illusory world… as long as we are habituated to want to have ground under our feet.
Maybe nostalgia is related.
I loved the time I spent learning to be me. It started with a set of 26 volumes of a fairly nice set of encyclopedias in 1954. I was ten. I read every volume through to the end, twice, over three years or so. I went off to boarding school at 13 and got smacked in the face with Latin, English, math, history, and writing, hundreds of writing assignments. Then came college when the the first three things I faced at 17 were Kant, Vector Calculus (earned D-) and the art of proper criticism (turned out to be the basis of the rest of my life). I pushed on through college and a doctoral program comprised of four majors. All together I was in school continuously for 22 years. I loved all of it. I think about learning daily. I taught for a living and will still do it when prodded. I am a regular academic reviewer and have been since 1974. I love to discover what other people think.
As to nostalgia, I have few photographs, memories of trips, etc. Part of the reason for that scarcity is that I have a defect in my memory. I can remember facts but not people. I’ve never seen half my living relatives. I was married to my wonderful treasure of a wife for 54 years before she passed. Sadly, I can’t really remember her face, or my daughter’s, or my parents’. In fact when I look in the mirror in the morning I see a face I can’t actually describe. I can tell it’s my face but as soon as I turn away I can’t describe my own face.
I was listening to “All Things Considered” one day and there was an author being interviewed. They were talking about the past and the interviewer asked the author if she could go back and be any age she wanted, what would it be? Without hesitation the author said she would want to be as old as she was when she still felt good. What a wonderful answer I thought that was. I’m about to turn 81 and for me that age would have been about 62, just before my wife became terminally ill with dementia and I had to have my insides permanently rearranged.
I really enjoy these monthly pieces–they alone are worth the price of admission/subscription. What’s the point of all this macro economic and geopolitical stuff if we lose our sense of humanity? Well done.
Some day the articles are just going to stop. Thank you for this one. Great writing and book recommendations.
“Some day the articles are just going to stop.” No they’re not. There’s a contingency plan for that. I mean, obviously if an asteroid hits me one day there would be an interruption, but bear in mind: I’ve been doing this for a decade, and I’ve had plenty of colds, doctors appointments, dentist appointments, luncheons, dinners, travel and so on over that 10 years, and never once have the articles stopped. There have been new articles here every, single day with no exceptions since 2016. The only thing that would trigger a hard stop is if I just spontaneously combusted, but even then, there’s a back up plan to deal with the situation.
A few times per year, I fret about what will happen when you (inevitably) stop writing. We all must pass someday, and anyway, you’ve earned the right to shut it all down and molder in obscurity at any time. I’m in my late 40s; there may be one, two, even three decades of my life where I will lack a Heisenberg make sense of the currents of the world and goad me into discovery. (I’ve learned more in the past seven years from your citations and frequently-cryptic pointers than in the decade prior.)
Needless to say, it was torture working my way through Hume and Kant with that cliffhanger reveal fresh in my mind. I persevered, though, because we all know you’re a bit of a drama queen. Moreover, if this were going to be the big reveal of your imminent demise, I was determined to savor every remaining word.
I’m sure your contingency plans are well considered. Ghost writers? Fine-tuned AI models? A full AI-driven content mill? None of these would surprise me, but I like to think that your imitations will never be as good as the real thing. (Baudrillard is spinning in his grave right now, enraged that I have fallen for a simulacrum and deny the reality of the weary, nostalgic wreck behind the digital pen. Tough titty, Jean; I like what I like!)
On behalf of your readers: anchor to the past as much as you need to in order to tolerate your existence. My own project for staying sane in these times involves losing myself in work, too, and building my own contingency plan should the worst transpire and my type (gay, outspoken, left-leaning) are deemed Untermenschen again. Some days I’m as trapped in the unknowable future as you are in the past, consumed by my plan to expatriate myself and a miserable fraction of my capital. It makes the present easier to tolerate, though, and helps to minimize time spent doomscrolling. No doubt your nostalgia, though it isn’t a project per se, provides you with a similar benefit.
I would never root for your demise, but I’ll be damned if I’m not curious as to what your backup plan entails.
Glad your transition from your corporal body has been postponed. Although I would have enjoyed reading about your post corporal existence.
Trump’s intent on establishing the robber baron era in our current timeline is well on its way. From his I don’t need no stinking IGs, to defanging oversight committees to his complete disregard of legal niceties, we are well on the way to the looting of America.
Perhaps I have been immunized from nostalgia. I have to say that mentioning the word Witeout makes
me cringe. Used to go through bottles of the stuff. I did enjoy the cognitive dissonance of the poll regarding having nostalgia for the past versus actually returning and living in the past.