Here’s a last-day-of-high school video from June of 2001.
How do you feel about it? What thoughts come to mind? Age and geography will make everyone’s viewing experience a little different. For instance, a ten-year-old living in Mongolia won’t appreciate this the same way a graduate of Glendora High School will. In general though, if asked about their feelings on this footage, the vast majority of answers would revolve around some kind of nostalgia.
As the video descriptor puts it: No phones? No social media? No worries. So you might be nostalgic for a simpler time.
You might look at all the friendly interactions and think back to your own childhood friendships.
You might listen to the students discuss their plans for the future, the doors of possibility wide open, and wonder what happened to your own dreams.
You might notice the date–June 2001–and long for the days before 9/11 and the lasting changes that day wrought.
I was born in 2004. I have no real memory of life before technology was incorporated into every facet of our lives. And yet I watch these high school seniors and feel an ache for a time I never got to experience. They had it so good, I like to think. They’re all so happy.
Go to about 3:15 in the video. A girl asks Justin (the recorder): “Are you seriously going to look back at this video and go, ‘I loved high school’?” Justin is quick to say “Probably not.”
It seems as though the comment sections on these videos enjoy this time in history more than the people who actually lived it. I read one comment: “So many of us are homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist anymore.”
Homesick
Nostalgia. What about the past, our childhood specifically, makes us ache for the days gone by? What about it makes us willing to put on rose-colored glasses? How do we handle desires to return to a place that no longer exists? And as always, what is a Christian to do with these feelings?
It’s always good to define your terms. So what is nostalgia? The word is derived from the Greek words nostros (homecoming) and algos (pain). According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, nostalgia is “A wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrevocable condition.”
If I really had your academic interests at heart, here’s where I would cite scholarly articles about the psychology behind nostalgia and its triggers, but unfortunately this blog begins and ends with my interests, so you’re going to have to make do with this Guardian article.
In all seriousness, I’d like to cite a secular author’s experience of nostalgia before I dive into what C.S. Lewis has to say.
“I also tend to be homesick in a weirder, more abstract way – homesick for somewhere I’ve never been. It’s a feeling otherwise known as nostalgia. Melding fairytales with Horrible Histories, as a child I spent hours imagining myself transported back in time to invented and romanticised versions of the past. I was an avid reader of Enid Blyton’s novels and, despite my homesick inclinations, begged my parents to divert me from my 1990s London primary school to a boarding school in 1950s Cornwall. My pleas went unanswered, so I went to my uniform-free state school every day in pleated skirts and white blouses, desperate to return to a world I’d never inhabited.”
Agnus Arnold-Forster, The Guardian
It’s interesting to note that the author herself stated that she was politically progressive and was “slightly embarrassed” for her habit of “languishing in the romanticism of the past.” To go back to my paragraph of questions, part of the reason we ache for a different time is to escape the dullness of the present moment and live a life of constant adventure. Even old English boarding schools–a harsh environment if Dickens’ portrayal in David Copperfield is anything to go by–can seem magical.
Ask a Harry Potter fan, and I have no doubt they’ll tell you they’d rather attend Hogwarts than their own school. Why is this? Aren’t there giant snakes and spiders there? Hooded creatures that can suck out your soul? Cruel professors and malicious bullies? Indeed there are, but I think danger heroically overcome is part of the draw. At the end of the series, the forces of good confront the forces of evil, and in the end, the good wins. Because that’s life’s ultimate adventure–finding the truth, using the truth to cultivate in yourself the spirit of God, thus allying yourself with the greatest good, then leaning on that good to extinguish all the flaming arrows. Any story that reminds us of this reality will strike a chord.
But I didn’t sit down today to write about Harry Potter. The Chronicles of Narnia is the fantasy series I want to use to explore this idea of homesickness for other worlds.
The Imaginary Made Real
“Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us, it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect.” The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (the fifth book in the series, but the third in order of release) begins with Edmund and Lucy Pevensie and their cousin, Eustace Scrubb. They’re sitting in Eustace’s room during the summer holiday, looking at a painting of a ship on the wall– “a very Narnian ship” according to Lucy– when they realize the waves in the painting are actually moving up and down.
Narnia is welcoming them for a third time.
The concept is interesting, because in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (the second book in the series, first in order of release) the children get to live an entire life as kings and queens of Narnia, and then come back to experience childhood again. That’s one aspect of the story I wish Lewis had explored more, the idea of having an entire lifetime of royalty in your memory while reliving stages of your life in the ordinary world.
We do get hints of this in Prince Caspian (fourth in the series, second in order of release). When all four Pevensie children are exploring the ruins of the kingdom they built in the first book, Susan finds one of their golden chessmen. “It brought back–oh, such lovely times. And I remembered playing chess with fauns and good giants, and the mer-people singing in the sea, and my beautiful horse . . .”
Lewis writes in Mere Christianity about how “you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them.”
Susan’s character gets a bad rap for being a stilted, sensible bore, but I think that’s a lot of us once the magic of childhood has passed. We stop looking for new doors to explore. While exploring the ruins of Cair Paravel, Susan complains about Peter and Edmund cutting their way in. “I don’t want an open door at my back and a great big black hole that anything might come out of, besides the draft and the damp. And it’ll soon be dark.”
All too often as adults, reason trumps wonder. And yet, like Susan, we feel an ache for what used to be. Because when we look back and yearn for that childhood magic, what we’re really yearning for is a never-ending daydream where worries are cured and physical boundaries transcended. Sounds a bit like heaven to me.
Danger of Disillusion
As natural as nostalgia is, it’s a potentially destructive feeling if we allow it to cripple our motivations, or if we treat the objects of our nostalgia as good in and of themselves.
Nostalgia can turn us into thrill-seekers. Not the jumping-out-of-airplane kind, but the thrill of a repeat pleasure. Treading the same ground, playing the same games, watching the same movies, talking to the same people over and over in persistent attempts to extract the same kind of enjoyment you had when you were ten.
For a good eight years when I was kid, my family would visit the same beach in Oregon. Summer after summer I grew up skimboarding the same waves, walking the same streets, eating at the same ice-cream shops. When I was in high school we moved across the country. We found new beaches to go to, but they couldn’t compare. Recently I had the opportunity to go back with my dad, brother, and sister. The nostalgia definitely hit hard on that trip. We walked around the beach town, stopping to take pictures by the various rental houses we’d stayed in over the years. I picked up a skimboard at the surf shop and took it to the sandbars I remembered so well.
But everything felt different. I was consciously trying to seek a thrill, to recapture the summer joy of my youth. I felt like an actor on a stage, or a retired baseball star coming onto the field to throw the first pitch. It’s become a cliched comment on nostalgia videos, but the Winnie the Pooh quote “We didn’t know we were making memories, we just knew we were having fun,” holds true.
It’s like family traditions. The first time is usually spontaneous, an accidental thing that instills itself in your family lore. It’s repeated year after year until what was spontaneous and joyous becomes obligatory and boring. You go through the motions. You forget why you even started the tradition in the first place.
“If you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life.”
Powerful words by C. S. Lewis.
Smoke and Mirrors
Nostalgia can be used as a crutch.
“No doubt, if our minds are full of novels and plays and sentimental song, and our bodies full of alcohol, we shall turn any love we feel into that kind of love.”
One of the consequences of being an English major with a concentration in creative writing is that I read a lot of fiction. I’m fine with this because I grew up reading a lot of fiction. Needless to say, my thoughts are more often full of other people’s words than my own. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Art–literature particularly–can be an incredibly useful guide to living your own life. Like George R. R. Martin said, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
When Lewis says “we shall turn any love we feel into that kind of love,” he’s pointing out the danger in adhering to fictitious ideas for their own sake instead of looking at fiction as a kind of mirror to the real world. I’ll explain what I mean.
I’ll use the end of Dawn Treader as an example. Edmund and Lucy want to follow Repicheep the mouse into Aslan’s country, but Aslan says no. He tells them they will never return to Narnia.
You are too old, children,” said Aslan, “and you must begin to come close to your own world now.”
“It isn’t Narnia, you know,” sobbed Lucy. “It’s you. We shan’t meet you there. And how can we live, never meeting you?”
“But you shall meet me, dear one,” said Aslan.
“Are–are you there too, Sir?” said Edmund.
“I am,” said Aslan. “But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.”
Narnia is like the child’s imagination, full of stories and adventures. Like the best of our stories–classic fairy tales, Shakespeare, Tolstoy–you can see biblical principles imbued throughout. Our true character is revealed in these stories, and because we’re made in God’s image, we see a bit of His character too–His love, His creativity, His sacrifice. In Narnia, Edmund and Lucy understand Aslan as being the ultimate creator of everything good. That’s why they’re heartbroken to learn they’re never coming back to Narnia.
Stories–romanticized versions of the past, you could say–are a way for us to know God a little, so that we can know him better in the real world. It’s when we read stories that perhaps aren’t so explicitly imbued with biblical principles that we start leaning on the representations of God instead of the real thing and expect to find the same fulfillment.
When we seek love, creativity, and sacrifice as seen in the fiction we consume, without understanding how to use these qualities in the context of God’s creation, we shall “turn any kind of love we fill into that kind of love.” Stories, in other words, can be a crutch for our heavenly desires. We sometimes use stories as a telescope–how close am I to satisfying these fictitious feelings–instead of a mirror–this is how I feel sometimes, so how can I fix my heart?
The Call
Nostalgia can be used as a sword.
I don’t want to sound as if dwelling in the past is altogether a bad thing. That’s the direction I’ve been taking because Ecclesiastes 7:10 says “Say not, “Why were the former days better than these? For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.” Not wisdom but most likely a yearning for heaven, or in any case a perceived one.
Just as bad, or worse, than dwelling in the past is forgetting the past. In that sense, a ‘yearning for return to or of some past period or irrevocable condition’ can be beneficial. If we really do feel that present times are worse than past times we should not be afraid to look back and note what was working so well.
For an example, I call upon Prince Caspian. Growing up thousands of years after the events of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Caspian knows nothing of Narnia’s magic.
“I wish . . . I could have lived in the Old Days . . . when everything was quite different. When all the animals could talk, and there were nice people who lived in the streams and the trees. Naiads and Dryads they were called. And there were Dwarfs. And there were lovely little Fauns in all the woods–”
Caspian’s Uncle Miraz responds, “That’s all nonsense, for babies . . . At your age you ought to be thinking of battles and adventures, not fairy tales.”
The Telmarines are afraid of what they cannot understand, and magic–fairy tales–are definitely at the top of the list. But after being forced to run for his life after discovering King Miraz means to kill him to install his son on the throne instead of Caspian, Narnia’s rightful heir, Caspian encounters Narnian animals in hiding. It is decided that he should wage war against the Telmarines. In great need of aid, Caspian uses Queen Susan’s magical horn to summon the Pevensies back to Narnia. Unlike his uncle, Caspian is not blinded by power and greed. He is able to see the beauty of Old Narnia and is willing to fight a war to bring it back.
Lewis dedicated The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to his granddaughter, Lucy. “I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be, your affectionate Godfather.”
I’m not able to put into words exactly what Lewis means by “someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” I like to think it’s analogous to Caspian blowing the horn to summon the old heroes to his aid. There is strength in the truth you find in fairy tales, strength to defeat armies of falsehood. As a child, you play with that strength. As an adult, you begin to understand it, to grow wise.
Imitations of Immortality
Finally, how should a Christian think about nostalgia? I’ve alluded to my perspective on this by describing nostalgia as an unconscious yearning for heaven. Let’s flesh that out in some more detail.
Matthew 11:25 says, “I thank Thee, O Father . . . because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto babes.”
A lot has been made of having ‘child-like faith’. Rather than attributing to children any special wisdom, I think Jesus is saying the opposite. You don’t need to be this wise scholar to enter the kingdom of heaven. Those who depend on their reason to crack the code of salvation are missing the point. Fairy tales are nonsense, they’d say. You need to live in the real world. Well, that’s why people feel nostalgic. They don’t like living in the real world, and why should they? Sin has corrupted it. It is not the world God intended for us.
I’m about to quote a seriously long passage from C. S. Lewis’s lecture, “The Weight of Glory.” This is the passage that inspired me to write this post. Even with this post nearing six pages I’m afraid Professor Lewis’s paragraph conveys my point more coherently.
“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”
Lewis mentioned the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth. I was curious what ‘moments of his past’ Lewis was referring to. Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” may have the answer. Here are lines 66-77.
"Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy
But he
Beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day."
Wordsworth is essentially saying that children see heaven all around them–its light and its joy. But as we grow older, those heavenly visions become more and more distant until everything becomes boring and mundane.
We become disillusioned with the world. Either we recognize the shadows of paradise for what they are–shadows, not the real thing which will be revealed to us in God’s timing. Or we see them only as a refuge, a crutch, vague feelings to indulge in while the world burns around us.
Further In! Further Up!
“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”
John 12:24-26
We must die to this world to claim the one we cannot yet see.
The Last Battle is the last book in the series and the last one Lewis wrote. The ending is an allegory for the book of Revelation when God will make a new heaven and new earth. Aslan commands Peter to “Shut the Door” on the old Narnia before beckoning His creatures “Further in! Further up!”
The new Narnia “was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more.” Creation as it should have been.
The Unicorn sums it up: “I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!”
The next time you feel nostalgic, don’t feel down about it. Don’t think of it as a moment lost to time. Think of it as an appetizer, something to whet our spiritual palate for the day when we get to sit at Jesus’ feet, immersed in the new Creation.