The process of memory is such a complex field of human existence that it is difficult to know where to begin in trying to grasp its conceptual slipperiness. And yet it is hard to find a more basic element in our lives than they way the past is present to us in the here and now.
Who am I without my memories of being me? And should I lose my memory one day, who am I then? These are not just academic questions in a society facing great growth in case of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
The ancients and the medievals held to an art of memory that was a prized thing indeed. From Ad Herennium, usually attributed to Cicero, through to Matteo Ricci’s Treatise of Mnemonic Arts, and beyond, places were used as method for remembering. Each memory was tied explicitly to a place, preferably a real one, used imaginatively into which memories were stored. This method highlights the way in which memory and place have always been deeply connected. We tend to associate strong memories of happenings with the places in which they originally happened
Perhaps the most intimate and evocative of memories are ones from our childhood. We can find ourselves caught in a reverie of nostalgia if we return to a place from our childhood. In those moments we feel both at home and not at home. We have moved on, but the feeling of a past self that was so at home in a place, even a half-forgotten one, is so strong as to make us feel once again at home there albeit ever so briefly. These associations are often powerful and involuntary.
Prayer moves something like this too. We are always searching for ‘at home-ness’ with God. The interplay of this absence and presence between ‘at-home-ness’ and ‘un-at-home-ness’ is the nature of what we call the spiritual life. It’s the way of the pilgrim.
Nostalgia for childhood places can be similar to nostalgia for earlier prayer experiences, or places of sacredness. I was struck to read that Pope Francis is in the habit of kissing the confessional in his home parish where he first felt the call to the priesthood at sixteen years old. This is his honouring of memory tied clearly and deeply to a place. Ignatius Loyola was a great believer in ‘savouring’ these experiences and bringing them back to memory.
However, this Ignatian savouring is not the intoxication of nostalgia, which can be classic false consolation. The good of nostalgia is in its deep desire for peace and being ‘at home’; its bad often lies in its fear of the present and its romanticising of the past.
Nostalgia thrives as a sort of crisis of memory: a fear of losing something beautiful and true that becomes escapism that disengages from the present in protest. This is not a savouring of the past to engage in the present, so much as its distortion. At this point, nostalgia becomes the enemy of the spiritual life posing as a false friend.
