The Future of Nostalgia

"How to begin again? How to be happy, to invent ourselves, shedding the inertia of the past? How to experience life & life alone, "that dark, driving, insatiable power that lusts after itself?" These were the questions that bothered the moderns. Happiness, and not merely a longing for it, meant forgetfulness & a new perception of time." "The modern opposition between tradition & revolution is treacherous......" So opens the second chapter of Svetlana Boym's "The Future Of Nostalgia" after she has traced the roots of the concept from being identified as a DISEASE of Swiss exiles into a recognition of the problem of all mankind at the start of the 21st century. I hope I'm not wrong in saying that I think that this book may be an important new cornerstone in art, poli-sci & philosophy. I like this book THAT MUCH.... Ms. Boym's book fell into my hands quite serendipitously as I was researching material for my own novel; I was doing a search on "hypochondria" for a character I was trying to delineate with a certain kind of homesickness, and up popped the heading "Hypochondria Of The Heart" for an interview with Ms. Boym in a newspaper from Harvard University where she is a professor of Slavic Literature. The premise for her book deeply intrigued me since she elucidated some similar points that I had been trying to frame in my own work. I hurriedly ordered her book from our local library, anticipating something groundbreaking. I wasn't disappointed. This book traces a link between poetry, philosophy & politics in the modern age which is rooted in nostalgia, the longing for home & the feeling of loss due to a disctinctly modern concept of time. However, this is no futile deconstructionist tract, nor is it a conservative tome yammering on about the pervasive influences of the enemy in a "See? We told you so!" smug-but-ineffective posturing. What Ms. Boym does is show both healthy & unhealthy effects of nostalgia on history & memory. The first part of the book lays out what the modern conception of time has done to modernity, popular culture, conspiracies & collective memory, et. al. This clarifies the reality of the problem of modern life not as meaningless, but a somatization of symptoms attributed to to fractured parts of humanity, cultural & individual. She doesn't stop there, however. Boym is savvy enough to show examples of her position in parts two & three of the book. Part two shows the impact of longing for return on Moscow, St. Petersburg, Berlin & Europe in general. This cements evidence for the concept of modern time on TRADITION, by showingwhat particular post-Communist cities do to reinstill history after years of trying to synthesize it. Part three cleverly goes to the other side for a balance by showing the longings of exiles like Nabakov,Brodsky & Kabakov.In this mode, the idea of nostalgia affecting historical tradition is expanded to included the revolutionary INDIVIDUAL going