Nostalgia: A Few Words

There is a well-known tendency on the part of critical commentators to criticize feelings of nostalgia. They point out that the past was not a kind place to most, and attraction to that past can seem to them to elide or even validate that unkindness--with misanthropes of the postmodernist variety perhaps especially likely to point out such things.

Still, consider the common objects of nostalgia--typically bits of pop culture. Films, shows, music and the like. One can see in them not a forgetfulness of the badness of the past, but fondness for those things that helped get us through the bad times, remembering which can be a reminder that we will get through the bad times in which we are living now.

There seems to me something life-affirming in that.