ROCK ISLAND, IL He was a second-generation hardware owner in a small northern Michigan town, as famous there as the Lord God Almighty himself and nearly as powerful. He could fix almost anything and he loved to tinker. He seemed to take particular pleasure in showing me how to change the points in a Briggs & Stratton engine.

I remember the open platform elevator he built in the back of his store, the way it growled, the simple lever for up or down, the cables and pulleys, the vibration beneath our feet as we rode it from the basement of the store, where all the toys were, to the attic, where all the mysterious boxes and parts were. I remember the main floor of the store, the knife case and the yellow jack knife I coveted—and eventually got. I remember the sporting goods aisle, the ball gloves, the catcher’s mitt, the bats, the hockey pucks. I had to touch them all. I remember the gun aisle. I remember the south wall and the hammers, saws, and levels hanging there.

I can see it even now: the tile floor, later carpeted, the Sunbeam mixers, the bulk nails, the check-out counter, the sign above the front door, and the ramp leading out the back, where hung the brooms and mops. And I remember the musical waters of the Pier Marquette river. Still it rushes on. It longs for home.

What a magical small town it was. Across from the ballpark, where you could see some amazing fast-pitch softball, stood a Dairy Queen, later a “Dairy Barn,” where we’d buy beef jerky from a fat lady and pretend it was chewing tobacco. Then we’d head over in the soft summer evenings, my cousin Marc and I, to see Big Herm Williams pitch another no-hitter for Steve’s Amoco, and then walk back to the manse and its Austrian pines and its vegetable garden. There homemade ice cream and pie and sleep awaited us.

South about 200 miles another capable man struggled—before an early death relieved him of the trouble—to keep a small crop and diary farm alive in the face of policies inimical to his way of farming, which for most of his life included a team of horses. He too could fix almost anything, and he took pleasure in the work of his hands. As obscure as any pensive man could hope to be, he was nevertheless conspicuous: handsome, tall, strong, erect.

I remember the musty milk house, the smell of his barn, the sweet aroma of the oats, the touch of the metal scoop in the bin. I can still feel the give of a crusty cow pie beneath my boot, the scratch of the bales in the hay loft. The vegetable garden never lacked carrots; a little dirt improved their scent and taste. I remember putting up hay once. I was too young to do any work, but there I was. My dad and his brothers were working against the setting sun. They put me on the seat of the tractor and told me to hold it straight, whereupon I ran into a bale and put an end to that experiment.

A river runs along that farm, and there’s a fresh spring on the south end of it gurgling still. The Ford tractor I was too young to operate is still there, though my taciturn grandfather has been dead for almost forty years. A large pine grove, planted shortly after he died, is now an impressive forest. Somewhere beyond it, in the trunk of a silver birch, my age (10) and my initials fade. I still have the knife with which I carved them. I broke the tip of the blade that day. Many years before any of this happened a farmer and future writer named Gene Logsdon attended a seminary upriver. For sanity’s sake he used to escape in a canoe and walk the banks of this farm to commune with the cattle.

They are gone. The barn is gone. All the buildings save the house and the machine shed have been razed. The seminary is now an expensive restaurant, and the farm, though still in the family, has lain fallow for many years. Meanwhile, up north, the hardware is not in the family, not any more; it isn’t even in town. A new owner has moved the inventory and the name to a bigger city.

Both the hardware man and the farmer have given their mould to the glebe. Lives have disappeared—and with them a life.

But in both places a river remains, one sluggish and murky, the other impatient and clear—palimpsests, both, of lives richer though poorer, elegies, both, to men whose skills and knowledge were commensurate with their needs, men whose capabilities included that most difficult of human dispositions: contentment.

I knew none of the hardships of either place, none of the penury, none of the limited prosperity, heard none of the arguments, saw nothing but the night above the dingle starry and the house high hay and the fields of praise, heard nothing but the fox bark clear and cold.

What is this, then, this bit of remembering? If “nostalgia,” it will be dismissed with a scoff and the wave of a hand. If “memory,” it may yet escape censure—so long as I am obliging enough to tell of the bee stings as well, to mention the saw running on a fly wheel that nearly severed the arm of one uncle and the airplane running out of altitude that took the life of another.

In the age of unassailable Progress, a Sophisticate need only utter the dismissive word “nostalgia” to banish all that I have just recalled. The discussion is over. Game, set, and match. I’m merely “nostalgic for a past that never existed”—because it never existed for Forward Thinking People. I’m told, “you can’t repeat the past” or “go back in time”—because you can’t repeat the past or go back in time. The Futurists know that nostalgia is a Bad Thing. They’ve been told so, these independent thinkers. Next topic please.

But consider what repetition is the mother of, or that we can at least go back in character—and so in a manner of speaking go back in time. Do this and you ought to be able to tell that there’s an element of bullshit in the dismissive gesture. Some of us have stepped in enough of it to know.

“Nostalgia” descends to us via Latin (nostalgia) from the Greek nostos (νόστοσ), “return home,” and algos (άλγοσ), “pain.” Many things can be said about this word, including the obvious: the Greeks would have a word to express the painful longing for home. For us, however, who have been encouraged to leave home and have been taught to think ill of this fine word, “nostalgia” suggests a more amorphous longing, a longing at the very least for something we once had (not something that never existed), which longing is also a species of discomfort.

But whatever the semantic shift, we can nevertheless approximate an original meaning: painful longing for home.

The first edition of the OED offered a fairly precise definition: “a form of melancholia cause by prolonged absence from one’s home or country; severe homesickness.” The earliest use cited was 1780 and the latest 1861, neither of which suggests much in the way of pathology. The recent (and, at least on Geoffrey Hill’s account, suspect*) edition, not content with the earlier definition, dispenses with “melancholia” and defines “nostalgia” as an “acute longing for familiar surroundings, esp. regarded as a medical condition”; “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past, esp. one in an individual’s own lifetime; (also) sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past.” The earliest use cited is 1756 and the latest 1986. Interestingly enough, the earliest use smacks more of pathology than the latest.

The difference between the definitions is instructive: whereas the earlier one makes an attempt at etymological precision, the second assumes a pejorative meaning from the start. The second, that is, prefers the unimpeachable forward glance.

Put another way: the further into the modern project we go, the less tolerance there seems to be for nostalgia. Nostalgia points us in the wrong direction. Even our great (updated) dictionary tells us this.

I say this having to some extent been influenced by Christopher Lasch, who has little patience for nostalgia. He calls it “the abdication of memory”; for him it is the “ideological twin” of the idea of progress, its “hallmark” the “disparagement of the present.”

Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable. Nostalgic representations of the past evoke a time irretrievably lost and for that reason timeless and unchanging. Strictly speaking, nostalgia does not entail the exercise of memory at all, since the past it idealizes stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfections.

Lasch is quick to add that memory too may “idealize the past,” but it never does so

in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes with good cheer. . . . It is less concerned with loss than with our continuing indebtedness to a past the formative influence of which lives on in our pattern of speech, our gestures, our standards of honor, our expectations, our basic disposition toward the world around us.

I would credit these admittedly useful distinctions more readily were it not that what Lasch calls “nostalgia” seems to me to be more like the pixie dust of pastoral consciousness. In fact Lasch does go on to say that “nostalgia finds its purest literary expression in the convention of the pastoral.” But he seems unwilling to permit the stubborn obtrusiveness of etymology; he is unwilling to allow that the painful yearning for home—if indeed that’s what “nostalgia” means—does aught but falsify the past.

I would not falsify the past, but I can’t let my enemies, who are wrong, have their way with this fine word either. I would save nostalgia, save it for memory. I would save it as I would save sehnsucht. The homeward impulse is salutary—a great boon from Odysseus to St. Augustine to Wordsworth to Evelyn Waugh—even if it may at times distort memory in ways that pastoral does by convention and intention alike. I understand that we may unprofitably nurture the schmertz of loss and stylize the past beyond recognition. But I would not disparage the desire to return home.

The Fall and the second law of thermodynamics are equally useful to us here in suggesting that there hath passed away a glory from the earth. One of these ought to work on even the most committed ideologue of modernity. For my part, I would no more supress nostalgia than refuse a martini.

That’s a drink neither of my grandfathers ever quaffed—or heard of. But two rivers, the Grand and the Pier Marquette, still slide across the faithful vicissitudinous land of my forebears. Unmoved these waters move. If it is true that a man can never step into the same river twice, it is equally true that he can—and ever shall. I can step again into the chilly currents of two of them. The pain is an exquisite preceptor.

____________________

* Geoffrey Hill’s fine review of the revised OED, “Common Weal, Common Woe,” first appeared in the TLS and is now collected here.

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