This morning I watched the entire The Neverending Story on HDNet. And I felt little moments of nostalgia.
The first day and a half I was in Ithaca a few weeks ago, I had actual physical pangs of nostalgia.
What is it? What is that feeling? Why does it happen only from certain things? I go home to Dallas at least once a year, my parents still live in the same house I grew up in. I still sleep in my same room and everything, same room since 1978. But I don’t get that feeling in my house. I do sometimes get it when I’m in my local mall around Xmas, thinking back to all the times hanging out there.
A lot of it is just this physical feeling, this urge or want. I’ve been working on a screenplay for a while trying to capture what it is, and currently it’s at a point like this: that kids see things in 2D. Things are where they are and how they are, without any history. Your friend’s house has a picture of his grandfather on the mantle. That it’s a picture taken 50 years prior, and that said grandfather has lived before and after that moment 50 years ago, is irrelevant to a child: that picture is just there, a thing in your world.
Older, we get those ‘pangs’ looking at certain things from our childhood, but from a 3D (or maybe more accurately a 4D) perspective: we see them in time. Things existed before they entered your life, and they continue on without you now. Watching The Neverending Story now, I see blue screen effects and make-up and camera tricks. Maybe that pang, maybe nostalgia is the gap in-between my two reactions to this film in my life: before it was a film that I adored, that just was. And now it’s a film that was financed and made, even shot partially on streets in Vancouver that I’ve since stood on.
A few years ago I was driving around Dallas with my friend Stephanie, whom I’ve known since we were 5. We drove past Norbuck Park, where I’d played countless little league games, even ran cross country meets there in high school. It’s Norbuck, that’s what it is. And I wondered aloud, “I wonder how it got the name Norbuck.” Stephanie, almost surprised, said, “Because it’s at the corner of Buckner and Northwest Highway.” That’s what I mean. It wasn’t anything other than Norbuck Park to me, even up to a few years ago. Now it’s something that was built and named, uncreatively named at that.
That doesn’t exactly explain the pangs I have when I’m in Ithaca (and those have always disapated after about 2 days there), since I was 19-22 when I lived there. But maybe it’s somewhat the same: that gap in-between two somewhat identical experiences. In a childlike way, Ithaca just was when I lived there. Now it continues on without me. But a lot of that I consider sense memory: being in a place that reminds you of another time, like sometimes when I smell Paris for a half a second here in New York. I get a pang, but it’s just a little different than what I consider “nostalgia”.
What do you think? Have you had those pangs of nostalgia before? When? Why?
