What Is Wrong with Nostalgia Anyway?

“Such, Such Were the Joys” (with the editor’s apologies to Robert Graves for titling this image). F. S. Lincoln. Governor’s Palace, Colonial Williamsburg, 1935. (Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation)

Nostalgia haunts us. Its incidence is widespread, beyond its particular role in historic preservation, not least because loss is a human condition and in learning to confront it, nostalgia may play a vital role. It may occasionally enliven our lives and may even sustain new ventures. Anyone who reads Proust’sÀ la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, or Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, will encounter a variety of places, historical moments, or characters, where nostalgia has decisive, as well as frustrating, impacts. Powell’s hero, relating his life forward and backward, from the early twentieth century to the aftermath of World War II, confronts “an historical period, distinct and definable, even though less remote in time,” yet finds himself often unsuccessful in rationalizing “what exactly the change was.” Places and people “cut a savage incision across Time,” yet too many characters find that a “present recital [of places or people] could in no way affect the past.”¹

The memory has many mansions, and one of them may surely be occupied by our nostalgias, even though we cannot prevent them from squatting in the remainder. Nostalgia takes many forms and many colors, and David Lowenthal in his essay here absolves us from elaborating any further agenda of them: his wonderful litany—sometimes forensic, sometimes ironic, sometimes (just sometimes) celebratory—takes us through most of the varieties: imitation, plagiarism, fantasy, melancholy, grief, longing, regret (relished but not acted upon), sentimentality, reverie (“marinating in memory”²), and utopianism (a future predicated upon an imagined past). Some of these are indeed nightmares, others are dreams that may delight and hurt not. Nostalgia can grip the child in France “who wishes he were crying on the Italian side of the Alps,” or the lover lamenting a lost love:

I will not, Helen, rescue you from Troy, I would not waste ten years upon the chase, Seeking to stamp the image of the past Upon a future which could never last [ . . . ]

Once under lanterns I drank wine with you. Now I would rather posses that, than find Lanterns were gutted, the glasses cracked, And shabby waiters offered wine that lacked A certain texture I recall to mind.³

Personal nostalgia (that “certain texture”) does not damage anyone except perhaps the obsessive nostalgist, even if, determined to find a lost Helen, he may discover that his effort is not worth the détour. One cannot live in the past, with any comfort or sustenance; but it may help to visit it, though perhaps we need another term for this remembrance of things past.

It is what we may call public rather than personal nostalgias that need our attention. And here, as both Giovanni Galli and my editorial title suggest, it is by no means all wrong. There are political moments when nostalgias feel sick and signal a rottenness at the heart of a culture: the Nazis’ program against Jews, homosexuals, and gypsies had its absurd (if its context were not so horrific) counterpart in ruling against certain plants (rhododendra) and against certain landscape designs, as Gert Groening and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn have chronicled.⁴ In this issue, too, we see how Italian fascism distorted the history of Italy’s garden forms to “create” a national and cultural historiography at odds, as Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto explains, with what had emerged in that country’s more subtle garden design.

On the other hand, remembrance of things past may well be invoked to sustain exemplary modern design, even if designers themselves do not appeal directly to nostalgia. Here landscape architecture in France (Bernard Lassus) and Lebanon (Kathryn Gustafson and Neil Porter), along with architecture from Philadelphia (Robert Stern) and Stuttgart (James Stirling), reveal their undoubted reliance upon thoughtful historical research...