Shimmers mirror memories in silver sunglints: glares of ocean bouncing light off satellites. Ignited by their alternating time zones – light and earthling years – the flickers mimic exiled silhouettes: unsleeping peeks into the past.

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No longer lame imaginings, old flames spark magic in these mirages. Such was the basis for the beach-set film Summer of ‘42: the telling of a real-life tale in writer Herman Raucher’s youth. Remembered best for its romantically strolling chords – a theme by masterful composer Michel Legrand – the picture trails a fifteen-year-old boy who falls in love with newly married Dorothy, a war bride living in Nantucket.

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Growing fascinated by the homemaker whilst on vacation, Herman stumbles upon first love helping her clean dishes and haul boxes to her attic. He’s a source of solace when the newlywed receives a telegram announcing that her pilot husband’s plane has been shot down. Contrary to scenic illustrations in the film, teen Raucher didn’t consummate his love that night; he merely held the shaken widow in support. The next day in reality she left him a ‘Dear John’ letter. ‘I won’t try and explain what happened last night because I know that, in time, you’ll find a proper way in which to remember it,’ it read. ‘What I will do is remember you. And I pray that you be spared all senseless tragedies. I wish you good things, Hermie. Only good things.’

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Slipping out of conscious, Dorothy became a long-lost figment. Her impressionable worshipper never clapped eyes on her again – but a brief message posted shortly after the film’s outing told him she was now remarried and a grandmother, advising, ‘Ghosts of that night 30 years ago are better left undisturbed.’ Raucher scribed the screenplay as a tribute to a close friend, Oscar ‘Oscy’ Seltzer, who’d paraded with him on that beach expressing randy urges for the fairer sex then died in the Korean War aged 24.

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The émigré protagonist of Vladimir Nabokov’s début novel Mary likewise wills a past love into re-existence. In a quaint Berlin hotel Ganin meets Aleksey Alfyorov whilst stuck in a stalled lift. The latter shares glad tidings of the imminent arrival of wife Mary. Despite the name being a common moniker Ganin immediately steers his fantasies to fiction: ‘Mary,’ he repeats the name in incantation – in Nabokov’s words – ‘trying to put into those two syllables all the music that they had once held – the wind, the humming of telegraph poles, the happiness – together with another, secret sound which gave that word its very life. He lay on his back and listened to his past.’

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Suddenly this unseen spouse arouses his lost hopes; he plots the pair’s elopement. Jilting fling Lyudmilla, Ganin primes himself to re-encounter Mary through a passion-fueled departure to collect her at the train station. Slides of the kinematoscope unclick; resticking snapshots of the present day to stay his passage. Changing course, he stumbles back into reality’s lament.

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Embroidered in the brain are patterns from our previous relationships: shunned routes long in disuse. The more intense the bond the stronger neural instincts grow; emblazoning themselves in circuitry like thoughtless signatures or key-turns.

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Conditioned to turn bones of buried memories to gold, the lesioned soul seeks scenes of old: engaging in nostalgia in a self-rewarding act. Regions active during feelings of accomplishment or gain – the substantia nigra, the striatum and the VTA (ventral tegmental area) – rekindle in pursuit of what is lost. In a deluding act they train the brain to journey backward to advance; a dance that leads the errant back to safety. Moments unenjoyed in their original release become collectible tableaux; the decade-old mundane is sacred.

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Sharp teeth and fangs eluded us – so mankind cultivated clans. Responsible for empathy, the hormone oxytocin first evolved to join a mother to her child a hundred million years back. Over half that interval thereafter it connected lovers. Thousands of millennia had passed when humans fell under its spell in front of animals. ‘We’re now using oxytocin for feeling attached to our ex-wolves,’ explains neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky.

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Tribes help humanity hide in collective harbour from encroaching beasts. While our mammalian comrades fashioned slicker strategies to ascertain survival – flight and deathly bite and dripping venom – Neanderthals hung out in blunt exposure; carefully enclosed in troupes to stave off ills. ‘Our hominid ancestors survived… by living in cohesive social groups in which members cooperated with one another for food, defense, child care and so on,’ explains Duke University’s Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Mark Leary. Peregrine falcons speed at two hundred miles an hour – but that’s okay: our antecedents championed pure interdependence.

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Exile was the punishment for bad behaviour; enslaving outliers in loneliness. Disowned by Roman emperor Augustus, erotic poet Ovid battled seasickness en route to Tomis: present-day Constanţa, Romania. In seclusion from his wife and greedy social life, he found himself confronting, as he writes in the Tristia, ‘Death that my split mind fears, // and, fearing, prays for.’

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The master’s X-rated Ars Amatoria – a manual on lovemaking – had apparently displeased the ruler. Punishment incarcerated him in cell-like solitude: ‘Often, too, I’ve dissolved in tears while writing, // a rain that dampened the words, // my heart felt the old wounds as though they were fresh-inflicted, grief drizzled into my lap;’ wrote the bard. ‘I recall just who, through change of fortune, // I am – and was; when it strikes me whither Fate // has brought me.’ Sour grasps by long-gone joys incited him to hurl his guilty verses to the flames.

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Holding out for safer shores, the 20th-century immigrant aspired to defy incertitude. Crude crags and bulging boulders stalled his journey; seating the Italian in a swelling tenement between his fruit-cart vending, garment-mending, pride-defending jobs. The Soviet defector left his KGB role to become a hot dog seller – or at least he did in fictional realisation Moscow on the Hudson: a 1984 film starring Robin Williams as a jaded circus star, Vladimir. Envisaging a fresh start in New York, he reinvents his act to be a busboy and a limousine chauffeur; a worker at McDonald’s.

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On the way back from a Russian nightclub Vladimir is mugged by two assailants bracing to attack him in his building. Neighbours kvetch about the loner’s only love: a saxophone. Though he eventually comes by a fellow immigrant, Lucia, who cohabits with him by the film’s end, still he lives in longing. ‘In Russia,’ Vladimir shares, ‘I did not love my life but I loved my misery, because it was mine.’ His namesake Nabokov had figured as much in his 1957 Pnin: ‘Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?’ the protagonist wonders.

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A teetering balancing act is extracting the past without side effects: succour and suffering tilting the corpus one way then the other. Bittersweetness is the vacillation of electric currents: reactivity occurring in both independent and crisscrossing regions of the brain. A rat experiment attested to this truth when the unwitting rodents simultaneously imbibed disgusting and enticing tastes. This cognitive inadequacy leads to unexpected sentimental combinations; sending seizures into spirals of euphoria in victims of anterior insula damage. Spasms have been known to captivate the epileptic patient with entrancing childhood memories: an antidote for adult rue. Neurologist Oliver Sacks witnessed in one such a spiritual journey ‘a trembling, profound and poignant joy… like the opening of a door… which had been stubbornly closed all her life.’

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Spontaneous maiming of the conscious hampers our banal routine: disturbing us the most whilst walking, driving or consuming food. Its hauntings come in doses three to five times daily.

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In sequestered individuals the vividness arrives more frequently: scribe Marcel Proust constructed a whole seven-volume opus from its ventures. Marooned in a humidifying room enlaced with incense, the allergic and asthmatic writer spent his final fourteen years in house arrest.

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His series A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) sees narrator Marcel beset by his grandmother’s loss in an onrush of unexplained memory. Abruptly he can see her leaning over him: ‘The self that I then was, that had so long disappeared, was once again so close to me that I seemed still to hear the words that had just been spoken…’ he recalled. ‘I was nothing now but the person who sought a refuge in his grandmother's arms, sought to wipe away the traces of his suffering by giving her kisses… I reminded myself how, an hour before the moment at which my grandmother had stooped down like that, in her dressing gown, to unfasten my boots, as I wandered along the stiflingly hot street, past the pastry-cook's, I had felt that I could never, in my need to feel her arms round me, live through the hour that I had still to spend without her.’

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Lashing flashes struck the subjects of nostalgia back in 1678: the year in which Dr. Johannes Hofer coined the term. A toxic strand of homesickness, ‘nostalgia’ manifested symptoms such as constant images of home: a film reel endlessly unspooling in the mind. Patients grew obsessed with ruminations on the past at the exclusion of all else; besieged by visions sometimes till their missions led to suicide. American psychologist William James concluded that forgetting was a healthy human flaw: ‘If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing,’ he averred.

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Curative properties alighted in the form of migratory medicaments: the telegraph; the ship – and later on the flight; the ferry – all to save the ailing from the banes of ruptured ties. In 1846 surgeon Louis Alexandre Hippolyte Leroy-Dupré avowed ‘nostalgia’ was an almost obsolete disease; one reparable by steam engines and postmarks. Harking back to souvenirs of destinations flooded by progressive time became a mourning of the self – not others.

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Heroines imperilled by remains of shrivelled lives filled plays of 20th-century greats Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. The former’s Long Day’s Journey into Night puts Mary Tyrone centre-stage: the wife of matinee idol James. Impinged by opium addiction, Mary travels in and out of dazes of hallucination; coping best in an intoxicated state. The last act’s final scene sees her descend with her white satin wedding gown in reminiscence: an aspiring pianist at a Convent, she had switched between desires to become a fully-fledged performer and a nun – though husband James insists that this was not the case. A Sister had advised the girl to have a yearlong secular existence before pledging herself fully to the Lord – a thought she had regarded as abhorrent.

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Enamoured by James’ portrait of a nobleman imprisoned during the French Revolution, Mary let her guard down and abandoned dreams of sacrosanct devotion. Before the drama’s Curtain the befuddled woman rummages around in memory: ‘Then in the spring something happened to me,’ she describes. ‘Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.’

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Beguiling in their guise, nostalgic episodes resist survival. Both twins experience this throughout The Crooked Little Pieces: Volume 4 – in which a sunken Isabel confronts an overwhelming longing ‘weighing on her like a swollen grapefruit threatening its branch.’ The carriage grows impossible to bear and she takes flight – predictably – in fixes of distraction.

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Glass lanterns bright with captured fireflies burn out like bulbs. Though luminous in pierced jars bearing apple slices, the stilled captives die. Like ricocheting recollections suffocating in reality – or vinyl records’ grooves outworn by overuse – they cannot relocate. So treacherous nostalgia doesn’t last.

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But we’d be lost without it.

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Sources​

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1 V. Nabokov, Mary: Penguin Great Loves, 2007, p. 58.

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2 Ovid, Tristia II, 25–25 trans. Peter Green in The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters: University of California Press, 2005, p. 23.

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3 ibid. Tristia IV, 95–103, p. 66.

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4 V. Nabokov, Pnin: Vintage International, 1959, p. 52.

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5 Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002: p. 15.  

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6 ibid. p. 21

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