All people have a past. Most people have a healthy relation to the past, reminiscing as long as it gives pleasure, else forgetting. Some people, though, have an unhealthy relation to the past, clinging to it like a baby to its mother. It is not a clinging to the past as such but to particular, cherished episodes and events from their own bygone life. They do this not because the earlier events are grander or more significant than the present ones but simply because they belong to the past which is the stuff that their dreams are made on. They keep their cherished memories alive by revisiting them as often as they possibly can and any object brought before them – an old bus ticket, a vivid face or a piece of music – becomes a catalyst for mournful-yet-delightful recollection and remembrance. Indeed, for this unhappy lot there is no such thing as pleasant reminiscing, merely a bittersweet awareness of that which no longer exists – bitter because of the insuperable friction between non-existence and existence, between mind and matter (because of their predilection for the former); sweet thanks to the dreamlike, mellifluous richness of the retentive experience itself.
A baby clings to its mother as if thereby attempting to remain in a state of non-consciousness. For the baby, too, there is friction: between potential conscious life (the future) and actual pure being (the present). Friction – but no choice. A baby obviously cannot choose the one or the other. Neither can, however, the people who are infatuated with the past. They cannot consciously choose either the path of existence (the present) or the path of non-existence (the past). The choice seems mysteriously to have been made for them already – by genetic disposition, parental or societal conditioning, psychological damage or otherwise. Therefore, they are “doomed” to seek out the non-existent past, that is to say, to spend their lives as almost-alive shadows in constant and futile search of their templates. But there is an important distinction between the baby and the adult: the former moves steadily (naturally) towards a realisation of its future potentialities, despite the pain necessarily involved in the process, whereas the latter, having more or less completed the process of the realisation of its innate potentialities and having thus, in a manner of speaking, no future, moves instead (unnaturally or naturally) towards the perpetual rediscovery and reliving of past experiences reneging entirely on the idea that change is or can ever be for the good.
Change can never be for the good – according to adults of this ilk – because it is precisely the permanence and ubiquity of change that fundamentally contaminate life by obliterating the possibility of pure actual being. Change is clearly a precondition for life but at the same time it is the very thing that annihilates the prospect of a life in harmony with life’s ultimate goals: the True, the Good and the Beautiful. Change precludes harmony, full stop. This is one of the great paradoxes of life and one that the clinging adult is thoroughly incapable of resolving. Let’s just call it an existential discrepancy. The act of clinging to the past is a desperate measure faced with what is perceived as a desperate human condition. The adult transfigures the past and fixes it so that it may, however incomplete or erratic, in some way resemble the ultimate purity and stability that he or she so craves in his or her life.
An interesting question is whether it is, as suggested above, the pathology of the individual that creates the existential discrepancy or rather the other way round, the discrepancy that creates the individual pathology. In the first case, it would be reasonable to let the individual undergo some sort of treatment or medication in an attempt to reestablish a more viable and productive relationship with the past. In the second case, however, there is no apparent prescription. In this case there is something wrong with the world itself, or with human nature at any rate, and surely the only adequate way to react to such malfunctioning is to evolve a corresponding malfunctioning on the personal and individual level. If human nature is corrupt or inconsistent by design then nostalgia and other “disorders” are not pathological aberrations but on the contrary sound and healthy reactions that prove that the individual is in perfect tune with reality.
