(Copyright © 1999 T Bruce Tober)
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away,
Now it looks as though they're here to stay.
Oh I believe in yesterday.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney
Thursday night and I'm vegging out in front of the tube. Suddenly I'm confronted by something called Fred Dibnah's Industrial Age on BBC-2 TV.
I watch for a few minutes to see what it's all about and my immediate reaction is "What the hell am I watching this silly old git for." Some old geezer, the 60-year-old eponymous Fred, is touring England in search of Industrial Age remnants, telling the story of each, restoring many of them to their former "glory".
At first I thought time to channel hop. But I found I couldn't bring myself to change channels. I was caught up in it very quickly.
And I couldn't help wondering why.
Why was I watching this bit of nostalgia for a long lost era? Why are so many people my age so caught up in nostalgia?
Be it nostalgia for ancient steam engines or for the Fox Trot or for Glenn Miller music, or for antique automobiles or the derelict remnants of old disused factories and their rusted out machinery?
Why?
More important, why the effort to renovate, revive, rejuvenate, restore, revivify them?
I finally realised it has something to do with seeing ourselves in those rotting, rusting old iron and steel war horses; hearing ourselves in those old tunes played on scratchy old shellac Gramophone discs; feeling ourselves in those obsolete, decaying wooden wind mills and water wheels.
I think we come to recognise that we're very much reflected in those relics. More than that, I believe we come to an age at which we begin to realise that unless someone treasures and restores and preserves at least the memory of them, no one is likely to be any kinder to us.
And perhaps this is truer of men than of women. I don't know, but suspect it may well be.
Most humans, whether they admit it or not, somewhere deep down, hope for some sort of immortality.
Most humans, whether they admit it or not, somewhere deep down, hope for some sort of immortality. Women, through the birthing, and alleged closer relationship with their children, perhaps feel they've accomplished their yearning for immortality. If not, they also have the option of creating things eternal by the labour of their minds and/or hands.
Men, on the other hand, may believe themselves only able to accomplish this through the output of their hands and/or minds. And, of course, when these creations begin deteriorating, we see we may not have achieved that immortality after all.
Hence the need for nostalgia. it gives us the ability to refresh our vision of what we've accomplished. It allows us to revisit our youth for a moment here and there. And better yet, if that nostalgic visit indicates the restoration of the creation - maybe we have achieved timelessness.
But we live in the age of the disposable. Virtually everything is transient, disposable, instantly here and gone. Increasingly we create that which was neither intended to be permanent nor to be restored once deterioration sets in. And so perhaps the need for more than just the nostalgic, but the historic.
Perhaps revisiting the sites and accomplishments of previous generations, the generations of our ancestors, is what's needed today in order to realise that feeling of having achieved immortality. Achieved it, not necessarily through our own original accomplishments but through our restoration of the accomplishments of our ancestors who lived in an era of permanence, stability.
In our throw-away society, perhaps our only hope of immortality is at second-hand.