Sadness and sweetness of musing over the past
“And it is all so sad and yet so sweet to muse over the past.” So wrote the composer Tchaikovsky to his “beloved friend” and patron, Nadezhda von Meck.
Theirs was a peculiar relationship. They never met, but poured out their hearts and souls to each other in their correspondence. The reference to the sweetness and sadness of musing over the past occurs in a letter he sent in connection with his fourth symphony, which he wrote when he was 37 and dedicated to von Meck.
I think the age factor is significant. I was perhaps most conscious of time passing and time past when I was in my 30s, and I suspect that is not unusual. But I was aware of Tchaikovsky’s letter long before that, thanks to the liner notes on the 1958 recording of the fourth symphony by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, which was one of the first classical LPs I owned.
I first heard the symphony when I was a junior in high school, not long before the Bernstein recording was released. I knew what the critics thought of Tchaikovsky’s music. But what they complained about — bombast and emotional excess — is precisely what put it so much in harmony (as it were) with my own adolescent Sturm und Drang.
In your teens you regard your vanished childhood wistfully (at least I did). You are also chomping at the bit, not only because you are not really grown up yet, but most of all because parents and teachers are continually reminding you of that. And then there’s that cute girl you can’t work up the courage to ask out on a date.
It is a time of exquisite discontent, a discontent that causes us agony, but that we cling to because the emotional depths it opens up seem precious to us. Tchaikovsky’s music is the perfect accompaniment.
Like your teens, your 30s mark a period of transition. In my 20s, I was too busy gallivanting around to worry seriously about anything, even the war (I was studying, then teaching, and then past draft age — perfect timing). But in my 30s, I had a family, a mortgage, and a spotty employment record. I didn’t just feel as if I were going nowhere fast. I felt as if I had already arrived there.
And yet … it was still both sad and a little sweet to muse upon the past. This, I now suspect, was because there was still as much future before me as there was past behind me.
That is no longer the case. Things may have got worse in my life before they got better, but better they did get and I ended up modestly successful. And now I am retired, meaning that the years I will end up having been allotted are mostly behind me. And so, while it is still sad to muse upon the past, there is no longer anything especially sweet about it.
The fact is, except during my teens and my 30s, I have never been especially inclined to look back. I am not given to nostalgia and do not tend to sentimentalize the past. But recently I have found it impinging more and more on my consciousness in ways not altogether pleasant.
The other day, for instance, I was watering the plants in the bathroom. It was cold outside and a clear, bright winter light was shining through the window, causing the white walls to gleam. At one point I blinked and for an instant it seemed that the light had blinked as well and was, for just that instant, no longer that day’s light, but a similar light on a day years past, and for just that instant I felt a strange wrenching of the heart.
During the years when musing upon the past was a somewhat bracing mixture of the bitter and the sweet, it was I who conjured the past. Now the past seems to conjure itself. It is an experience at once intriguing and disconcerting. It brings to mind “The Part Called Age,” by that neglected poet John Hall Wheelock:
Not knowing what had become of the years between,
You found yourself, as now he found himself,
An agèd man pacing his father’s acres,
Remembering how his father had said, “Someday,
When you are older, perhaps you will understand.”
Was it not all exactly as foretold
Long since? Had it not happened all over again?
He had come to that passage in the old legend so many
Before him had listened to through the centuries–
But, oh, the difference, for now it was told to him,
And it wasn’t believable.
I seem to have arrived at that part myself. And I can’t believe it, either.
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This is a wonderful column. Nostalgia seems to me the most insidious of emotions. It affects me like a rich dessert–seductive, but I always regret indulging in it. Still, I loved your slant of light. And thanks for the Wheelock poem.
Yes, I’m sorry. You’re confued. What you’re describing is not nostalgia, but the tender mingling of self-pity and self-importance.
I don’t see a trace of self-pity or self-importance in this post. The relationship between memory and ageing is a complex one, easily misunderstood by someone too young to have experienced the profound changes it brings and perhaps too blithe to appreciate that a cookie-cutter category like ‘nostalgia’ doesn’t begin to encompass it, exactly as in fact Frank suggests.