These reminiscences and the search for lost times I witness in others suggest to me that the means of passing the long days of a child’s American summer varied little from place to place. What differences there were owe to the places themselves, which all play and all pastimes, whatever their similarities, must suit themselves to. And this is as it should be: let the place decide. Our pond in the field out back meant skates and hockey all throughout the winter. The elementary school on our side of town sat on a good-sized hill, and so when the snow fell we went sledding all day long and into the night if we could get away with it. (You were king of the hill in those days if you owned a Brunswick Snurfer.) We sailed homemade boats in the cold tempestuous ponds of March and April. The place decided as much as we did what we would do, though what we did in our place was being duplicated wherever climate, landscape, and imagination permitted.
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Christopher Lasch once suggested that nostalgia is a falsification of memory. My quibbles with Lasch are few, maybe next to nil, but here I must dissent. If for the moment we leave aside the complicated business of memory—and I am not alone in taking the Augustinian view that memory is, inter alia, the human faculty that reveals divine intention in the world—we are nevertheless obliged to treat nostalgia with some strictness of expression. Nostalgia, properly speaking, is homesickness. In its etymologically precise sense it is a longing not for a time but for a place. Odysseus is nostalgic for Ithaca. The wild civility of Ogygia and the island goddess won’t do for him.
Those who would avoid a proper understanding of nostalgia have the usual routes available to them: a careless and slovenly use of the mother tongue, the lethargy of custom, a weak capitulation to convention, an indifference to the rich history in words that waits patiently, like a genie in a bottle, to be set free. (There are wishes that that rich history fain would grant.) What I have so far been recounting, what I have been remembering, certainly qualifies as nostalgia, but it is not nostalgia in the sense that its future-mad naysayers mean by it: a “longing for a past that never existed,” which is a phrase nearly as idiotic as “the right side of history.” Nostalgia provides occasion for the attentive man, thinking back on his past and on his pastimes, to be a worthy pupil of his recollections.
Consider for the moment Wordsworth’s proposition that the child is father of the man and that any of us might wish our “days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety.” Does it not seem that children—I mean children set loose into the given world, not into the world dominated by the devices and diversions emanating from hell and Silly Con Valley—does it not seem that they will perforce adapt their play to their places? This assumes, I grant, that they have actual places to be set loose into. … But it is not only for children to honor the law of local adaptation. It is for children to father such men and women as are likewise capable of such honor.
And grownups are, or at least were, capable of it. […]
In all things and in all matters the place decided ere the place-snubbing screens and smartphones came along to import a snobbish coastal monoculture, to banish meaningful pastime and elide the textured places we remember and practiced those pastimes in. These plug-in imps are a veritable scourge, lips dripping honey but tasting of wormwood. Let the upright turn away from them like pious Joseph from Potiphar’s slutty insatiable wife.
I’m not partial to the harsh language at the end there, but I don’t blink if someone wants imply that “Silly Con Valley” (how have I never heard that before?) has a nature that is both politically slutty and economically insatiable.
Let the upright men — someway, somehow, please — let us turn away.
Peters:
I recall seeing my older son, now perpetually within earshot of all the culture’s many sirens, and like all of his peers and most of their sorry parents perilously skirting those sirens’ treacherous shores, nary a mast to bind themselves to I remember seeing him pull on a ball cap, pluck a stalk of green foxtail from the ground, put it in his mouth, and head down a trail out back of our house, making for the woods, BB gun in his hand and his dog a few paces ahead of him. Maybe he will remember this. Maybe the memory will save him for the given world. Maybe the child will be father of the man, his days bound each to each by a natural piety.