I’m on an Amtrak train to Philadelphia, listening to the new Boards of Canada record on my iPod Nano. I’ve taken buses and trains from Boston to Philly and New York for decades, starting in my twenties, and I’m always reminded of those times when I make the trip. In those days I would have had a Motorola Razr V3 and a 4th-generation iPod “classic,” listening to Beach House or Espers or Galaxie 500.
As I sit here, I’m experiencing a pronounced sense of what feels like nostalgia. It’s not a longing for the past, but a feeling of a return to the past, a familiarity. More specifically, a feeling of having recaptured something that I’ve lost along the way. What is it that I’ve lost?
An easy answer might be that I’ve lost, like many of us, my attention span, my presence, my intentionality. Is it just that, though? I still had my phone with me and was occasionally texting. Can it really be just that I was listening to something on an iPod instead?
Can it be that I was just listening to something new, that I liked? This is an experience I used to have more frequently in my twenties, like many.
Is it just that this is a good record? Is it just that I like Boards of Canada?
Is it just that I’m in a good mood today?
I think part of what you “miss” when you feel longingly nostalgic is something that wasn’t there in the first place. There’s a flattening of the roughness of the everyday when events or scenes are looked back on, a simplification. It’s a feeling that I think you are capable of recapturing, though mostly it occurs by accident. It’s like there’s an openness, or a spaciousness. It may be a mundane moment but somehow you feel “more alive” than usual. It’s not thrilling or euphoric, it’s just… an alignment with the world. A feeling of rightness.
Certain triggers can give us that feeling, but how can we hang onto it?
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