? Nostalgia feels good and is good for us. Then, we will face an interesting question: how are we nostalgic?
Virginia Woolf, a famous British modernist novelist, provides us with clues to achieve this goal in her classic novel To the Lighthouse.
In one scene of the novel, a painter named Lily Brisco sat in front of a canvas on the beach and recalled an incident that happened when she came here for the last time many years ago.
A man who often quarrels with her is in a relaxed mood. In their unhappy relationship, she shared a rare moment of harmony with him: "This moment of friendship and love still exists after so many years, so she used it to rebuild her memory of him. It stays in her mind and affects a person almost like a work of art. "
The broader description of memory in this article and novel shows Woolf's vision of how human memory works.
? Contrary to our subjective experience, situational memory (the memory of events rather than facts, that is, semantic memory) is creative in nature, not regenerative. When we recall what happened in the past, we feel like simply calling up a psychological video file and pressing the play button. However, a lot of research shows that we are not only passive observers of these memories, but rebuild them every time we retrieve them.
? In the process of recalling, we use the "raw materials" of the past to "redesign" our autobiography to create the memories we are experiencing now, so our relationship with the past is just like the relationship between the artist and her canvas. In other words, we have some creative control over our memories. So, how can we shape these raw materials into a pleasant and beneficial nostalgic experience?
? The first and perhaps the most important consideration is our attitude towards materials. Nostalgia has no direct purpose except to provide happiness. It is a basic aesthetic memory experience, that is to say, we should treat our materials with an artist's mentality. This requires a certain degree of artistic detachment, allowing one to appreciate the theme itself, regardless of personal use.
? It seems counterintuitive to talk about the "detachment" of nostalgia, because we are dealing with our autobiographical memories, but it is precisely because of the lack of this detachment that a potential pleasant memory experience will turn into a morbid unpleasant psychological state. When the word "nostalgia" was first coined, it probably meant this state.
? Historian Svetlana Boim divides nostalgia into two categories: "restorative" nostalgia, which seeks to "return to the original static state and the time before the fall", and "reflective" nostalgia, which accepts the fact that the past has passed and thoughtfully embraces "the irretrievability of the past and the limitation of human beings".
? When we inevitably realize that time will only pass in one direction and never return to the past, this nostalgic attitude towards the past will produce a painful and unrealized desire and a yearning for "the deceased is like a husband." Only by accepting the irretrievable facts of the past can we enjoy good memories and spiritual entertainment with this reflective attitude. There is no worry in the experience memory of our present aesthetic enjoyment, and we can never really correct this moment.
? Once we reach an aesthetic distance from the past and realize that our memories are not "real" but psychological creations, we can fully accept their creative potential. Because our memory is reconstructed every time, it is an extremely unreliable record of our true "facts" in the past.