Fondly Stuck in Remembering the Past

Fondly Stuck in Remembering the Past….

In high school, I worked in my mom’s bakery on the weekends.  Everyday, at 5 am, 7am, and 10am, three different groups of retired men from various backgrounds, came to drink coffee and bullshit about every topic imaginable.  Commonly intertwined in these topics was an essence of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is predominantly considered as sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past.  Fondly remembering past experiences and events can be quite entertaining.  However, constantly looking back has its disadvantages.  I specifically mean, hindering our ability to live in the present while having the capacity to accept and enjoy our lives. 

A perfect example of taking a nostalgic perspective instead of living in the present would be the character Ono, from Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World.  Ono spends the majority of the book spent reliving his past while the reader pieces together the intent behind his memory sharing.

Ono reminisces his history in regards to his experiences pre- WWII, while his present is a few years after the war.  Ono looks very fondly to the past in combination with forgetting a lot.  Ono at times throughout the novel seems almost confused when putting together his past for the reader.  He can’t to differentiate between conversations that his teacher had with him and conversations he had with his students.   The exact phrasing of the conversations is not remembered. Ono states, “Of course, he may well not have used that precise phrase, ‘exploring curious avenues’.  For it occurs to me that expression was one I myself tended to use frequently in later years and may well be that I am remembering my own words to Kuroda on that later occasion in that same pavilion” (p.177).  After a number of years, the inability to remember exact conversations is understandable, but Ono should be able to remember whom he had the conversation with. 

Ono demonstrates how he is habitually stuck in the past by still frequenting the same establishments of his former life of which he was very fond.  In his pre-war life, Ono spent a lot of time as a student and a teacher in bar/restaurants drinking and conversing into the wee hours of the morning with tons of people.  Post-war, he frequents those now dilapidated bars of his past.  But his present company is restricted to the owner and one or two regular customers. 

For Ono, being nostalgic has been a destructive perspective.  Ono lives in the past while simultaneously forgetting crucial memories.  The typical definition of nostalgia does not apply to Ono’s life as it would with other people.  However, the standard definition of nostalgia does in part apply to the retired, old men from the bakery.