Time Again

We often are caught up in a nostalgia for what we believe to be better times, those of our past.  It is curious that with every generation there seems to be a tendency to get caught up in a negative response to the culture of our youth.  We often hear expressions like "well in my day..." or "young people today don't know the meaning of work".  I always tell my children that "in my day we had to walk to school, up hill and down, both ways, in the snow or pouring rain".  It was actualy true because there was a hill between where we lived and where my school was located, but my children didn't ever realize that fact and laughed at their dad for saying such ridiculous things.
 
I often get caught up in thinking that in my day students were much more discerning, better equipped to understand analogies and metaphors, more studious, and overall the education system in my day was better than today.  However, when I am in a more sane moment, I realize by looking at  people my age, that such a notion is simply untrue.  Perhaps it's the disappointments in life or possibly the craving for the strength and vigor of youth, that leads us to feel that times were once better.  Perhaps also it is our fear of what we are approaching and the uncertainties that the approach carries, that make us feel that times were once better.

This personal psychology works well in our political life too, when we have conservatives telling the public that we need to cut back and eliminate some of the complexities of government (smaller government) and our problems will be solved.  In our religions we tend to preach "old time religion" as if that kind of faith was simpler and therefore better.  But I have some doubts, true skepticism, about such things.  Perhaps it is merely a new form of sophistry aimed at promoting an agenda that employs such notions, but it is in the background all the time, that our past was somehow better and all we have to do to verify this notion is to remember or become nostalgic for our personal pasts.  I believe we tend to remember the good and forget the bad, forget the struggle and look at the past through rose tinted lenses.  This leads us to misinterpret and forget our actual history.  What we would really like to do, is go back into the past, recapture our youth and bring our computers (facebook and twitter), big screen TVs and air-conditioning, both in our homes and vehicles, with us.  Of course that would be impossible or pure fantasy, because the past would not be simpler, easier and therefore better, if we brought the complexities with us on our journey into our own personal past.  We tend to look nostalgic to the past from our current economic status and forget the struggle of the lower economic status of our past.  We want to go back but at the same time earn the salaries we are making today in that past.

Nothing captures this awkward feeling of trying to recapture our past better than a poem stuck inside the leaves of Cervantes' Don Quixote:

"Dame Fortune once upon a day
To me was bountiful and kind;
But all things change; she changed her mind,
And what she gave she took away.

O Fortune, long I've sued to thee;
The gifts thou gavest me restore,
For, trust me, I would ask no more,
Could 'was' become an 'is' for me.

No other prize I seek to gain,
No triumph, glory, or success,
Only the long-lost happiness,
The memory whereof is pain.

One taste, methinks, of bygone bliss
The heart-consuming fire might stay;
And, so it come without delay,
Then would I ask no more than this.

I ask what cannot be, alas!
That time should ever be, and then
Come back to us, and be again,
No power on earth can bring to pass;

For fleet of foot is he, I wis,
And idly, therefore, do we pray
That what for aye hath left us may
Become for us the time that is.

Perplexed, uncertain, to remain
'Twixt hope and fear, is death, not life;
'Twere better, sure, to end the strife,
And dying, seek release from pain.

And yet, thought were the best for me.
Anon the thought aside I fling,
And to the present fondly cling,
And dread the time that is to be."