Nostalgia

Approaching my office along a 5th floor SOAS corridor, I paused outside the door because I could hear someone playing a stringed instrument and singing in a room nearby. This wasn't a surprise; SOAS's 5th floor houses both anthropologists and ethnomusicologists. But it reminded me forcefully of when I was 15 and a small group of guitarists at my school would sneak into the school music practice rooms to play and teach each other songs and riffs on rainy lunchtimes. We sneaked because we believed (correctly or incorrectly) that we were not entitled to use those practice rooms as they were reserved for use by 'musos', students who wanted to seriously practice classical music, and we were trying to play songs by Nirvana, The Offspring, Green Day, Radiohead. In our hunt for rooms to sneak into we would pause outside each practice room door for a few seconds to try to figure out if a muso student and/or a music teacher was inside. Sometimes we opened the door to find that we had misinterpreted silence and then we would apologise and move on; other times we opened the door immediately, having heard the sound of energetically strummed powerchords from way down the corridor and knowing that it could only be one or more of our little group that has always been and always will until the end.

Turning this into a brief post and trying to think of an appropriate title for it led me back to Milan Kundera's novel Ignorance (2003), to which I was exposed when a literature PhD student presented a paper on it in 2005 or 6. Kundera reminds us that nostalgia is really a kind of pain in response to knowing two things at once: that there is something or somewhere to which you would like to return, and that return to that thing or place is impossible. I doubt that at the time I read Ignorance I had ever really felt that pain as I do now, or understood that - as Kundera notes - the return is impossible precisely because the thing or place is no longer as you remember it to have been, and in fact to some extent it was never as you now remember it.