I want to return to the Patricia Hampl quote from about ten days ago, because there was a second point I'd meant to make. She has just acknowledged nostalgia as “the sin of memory”:
"Nostalgia is really a kind of loyalty–also a sin when it is misapplied as it often is. But it's the engine, not the enemy, of history. It feeds on detail, the protein of accuracy. Or maybe nostalgia is a form of longing. It aches for history. In its cloudy wistfulness, nostalgia fuels the spark of significance. My place. My people."
I posted the quote because precisely describes my writing process and I’ve never seen this point made before. My starting points are often about as subtle as an ape pointing at a flower. I loved 1960s Rollingstone and 1970s Winona. The first impulse to write was simple: to remember and affirm. In the course of writing, my view of both places got a lot more complicated and nostalgia was the “engine” of this complication.
Of course, there is the other kind of nostalgia, the stunted kind, the Vaseline-on-the-lens kind of the more shallow variants on conservatism or just the goofy Happy Days kind.
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