The Nostalgia Bone

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[1] On the web at theshmit .org.

[2] When I was younger, probably about 10 or 11 years old, my grandmother actually gifted me a cassette player for my birthday.

[3] At that age, I didn't own CDs or MP3 player or something.

[4] I definitely didn't own.

[5] any cassette tapes.

[6] My mom decided to drive me to this store that's called Media Play.

[7] It doesn't exist anymore.

[8] And I knew that I wanted Daft Punk's 2001 album called Discovery, and so we bought it.

[9] This was around September, going into October, and I just listened to it all the time, religiously, constantly.

[10] So it was this really crucial moment in my life where a few things converged, like my introduction into music that I really loved and enjoying a change of season and being a young person and having that freedom.

[11] And to this day, I still listen to that record.

[12] It's in my car.

[13] My car, I have an older car.

[14] It has a tape deck.

[15] And so I can, uh, pop it in and kind of transports me back to that time period.

[16] It gives me this sort of like lump in my throat kind of feeling, but it's not sadness.

[17] You know, it's not something that I necessarily mourn.

[18] Like, I don't want to go back to being 10 years old.

[19] You know, I like being an adult.

[20] But it's almost just like a visceral feeling that lump in my throat and the misty -eyed kind of feeling that I get and my face gets a little red.

[21] My brain kind of shuts down and my body's response to sort of take over.

[22] over.

[23] It's more than just a tradition.

[24] It literally is like an embodied experience.

[25] Every year the tape sounds a little bit more worn down.

[26] It's a little bit more warped.

[27] One of these days I'm kind of afraid that I'm going to pop it in and it's just, it's going to be so degraded that I won't be able to make any sense out of it anymore.

[28] But at that point, I might, myself might be so old that I may not, you know, recognize it anymore as this nostalgic talism.

[29] And who knows.

[30] I'm Rantad de Vattah.

[31] And I'm Ramtin -Arablui, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR.

[32] Today on the show, the history of nostalgia and its eternal paradox to both hold us back and keep us going.

[33] Producer Lane Kaplan Levinson takes it from here.

[34] I'm sitting in the corner of my parents' living room in the house I grew up in.

[35] Kat Stevens' Tea for the Tillerman album cover is pressed between my knees, and my fingers trace the track titles for the first.

[36] thousandth time.

[37] I know the order by heart.

[38] Where do the children play?

[39] Hard -headed woman.

[40] Wild World.

[41] Sad Lisa.

[42] Really deep cut.

[43] And my favorite, Miles from nowhere.

[44] Miles from nowhere.

[45] Guess I'll take my time.

[46] And when I'm leaned up against the pulsing speakers, it's just me, Kat Stevens, and the Tillerman.

[47] Whoever that is.

[48] It's just us.

[49] That's where I'm transported when I hear this album.

[50] It's like a trapdoor or a shoot that plucks me from the present moment and punts me back to that general time, my childhood.

[51] And when I choose to hear this music, it's to evoke the same emotion that daft punk brings up in Grafton Tanner, an emotion that washes over you when the weather changes, or the sky turns a certain color, or that song comes on the radio, and suddenly you're in two places at once, thinking fondly of the past and mourning it all at the same time.

[52] Nostalgia.

[53] Well, I've been researching nostalgia for several years now.

[54] Grafton Tanner is a communication studies professor at the University of Georgia, and he's written two books about nostalgia.

[55] The most recent one has a great title.

[56] It's called The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, The Politics, of nostalgia.

[57] I think that nostalgia is sort of the defining emotion of our time in that the last 20 years has seen one kind of nostalgia wave after the other.

[58] Nostalgia's hard to pin down.

[59] It's not necessarily happy or sad.

[60] It doesn't make you feel good or bad.

[61] The emotion can wash over you thanks to a cool fall breeze or a smell wafting over from a neighbor's kitchen or an old photo you've never even seen before.

[62] I would say that Nostalgia is a longing for a home in the past.

[63] It might be imagined.

[64] It might be cobbled together.

[65] It might be even distorted.

[66] It doesn't mean that it's true or false.

[67] It just means that it might be kind of imperfect.

[68] Because memory sometimes is imperfect.

[69] But for all its ambiguity, nostalgia does reliably offer one thing, an escape.

[70] Away from the uncertainty of the future, and towards the permanence of the past.

[71] And I wanted to know if that's a good thing, because nostalgia has for a long time gotten a bad rap as being this obstacle in the way of progress.

[72] We can't move forward if we're always looking back.

[73] This is certainly a discourse that's been around for a long time.

[74] So I wanted to know if it was good for us individually and also as a society.

[75] And finding that out, I think, meant figuring out what nostalgia is and how it's used by different people.

[76] Our new normal is full of constant instability.

[77] The future feels like a swerving car on a narrow road with no guardrail, flirting with the edge of the cliff.

[78] So it makes sense that this idea of permanence, rooted in our memories of the past, brings some comfort.

[79] Even if those memories are painful, even if the past wasn't so great, it still was.

[80] And that sense of knowing, of having something to hold on to, is what many of us are looking for as we barrel towards this uncertainty, this cliff.

[81] Nostalgia takes us to that warm, reliable place of before.

[82] But this emotion has lived many lives, and before it was thought of as a marketing scheme, political strategy, a beat -up cassette tape, or simply summer turning to fall, nostalgia wasn't an emotion at all.

[83] It was a deadly disease.

[84] I'm Lane Captain Levinson, and today we trace the history of nostalgia from its origins as an illness to a defining emotion of our time.

[85] Hi, my name is Leah Chang.

[86] I'm calling from London, and you're listening to Thurline from NPR.

[87] I feel nostalgic when it's fall during this time of the year because the colder weather, and it reminds me at the time when I used to see all my friends back in school.

[88] Around this time, it's also Korean Thanksgiving or Chutha, and that makes me miss my family and day dinners that we used to have.

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[97] Hard one, Mother's Milk.

[98] Nevertheless, I long.

[99] I pine all my days to travel home and see the dawn of my return.

[100] turn.

[101] And if I got will wreck me yet again on the white, dark sea, I can bear that too, with a spirit temper to endure.

[102] Much have I suffered, labored long and hard by now, in the waves and wars.

[103] Add this to the total.

[104] Bring the trial on.

[105] Homer, the Odyssey.

[106] In the 1680s, a group of Swiss soldiers stationed abroad started coming down with a mysterious disease.

[107] They fainted, they hallucinated, they claimed they saw ghosts and heard voices.

[108] Autumn seemed to be a particular trigger.

[109] As the leaves changed colors and fell to the ground, the soldiers found that they couldn't fight, they couldn't eat, they could barely rise out of bed in the morning.

[110] They were sick, and it was spreading, which peaked to the interest of a young ambitious medical student.