Nostalgia Revisited

Reaching the second half of my fifth decade (God that sounds a lot worse than saying – “turning 46”) I’ve encountered brief but intense waves of nostalgia. In that spirit I share these words of wisdom from Terry Teachout on point:

I'm sniffing the air again, but not so obsessively as I used to: I've pretty much given up on new movies, for instance, and I don't even pretend to know what's going on in pop music. One can only absorb so many new things in a lifetime.

And later,

I should add, however, that a fifty-two-year-old man probably has no business feeling nostalgic about something that happened when he was forty. Nostalgia is a seductive and dangerous drug, to be used in the strictest of moderation on pain of losing your grip on the present moment. I don't often have occasion to quote Frank Zappa, but he once said something very much to the point: "It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice--there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia."

Some of my recent nostalgic, brooding posts.