Reunions

I went to my college reunion a month ago. Not a milestone reunion, but a general one for those who graduated in the '80s. I was hoping to see a lot of my friends from the years above and below me, but turnout was low, except for the Class of '88, which was having its 25th reunion. Only 6 from my year (from a class of under 300, but still....), but it was wonderful fun nonetheless. I hung out in the dorm, walked around campus, chatted with old friends and old classmates, found out who had a wonderful career, who had a wonderful marriage, who had started over in a totally different profession, who was getting divorced. I don't know why I get such a kick out of all this. It's not like I dwell fondly on most of these people during the course of my normal day. Or week. Or at all, come to think of it.

I know there are people who never go to reunions, some of my friends among them, and I don't understand it, not really. I've gone to all of my college reunions and most of my high school ones. The people who don't go explain that they see their real friends all the time, and aren't interested in the others. Or they're ashamed that they aren't successful. Or that they don't have a career. Or that they don't have a spouse. Or children. Or a new book coming out. I find that they are laboring under the delusion that reunions are for showing off.

Sure, there must be some people who come to reunions to show off, especially if they felt underappreciated in their undergraduate/high school years. But that is not my experience in general. My former classmates are happy to see me, sympathetic to my life struggles, my lack of accomplishments, and supportive about my small triumphs and my plans for turning my life around. I think many people go to reunions to recapture their youth: the cameraderie, the intensity, the seriousness of purpose, the sense of seeing the future opening wide before us. It's bittersweet, of course, because that vista has been steadily narrowing over the years. Still, there are the shreds of shared hopes and dreams waving raggedly in an amber light...

Not my classmates, but I did attend an all-female college.

I guess what I'm talking about is nostalgia, a dangerous emotion. Nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos, "to return home" and algos, "pain" or "ache," so nostalgia could be defined as the pain of homecoming. Originally, it was a medical term, coined by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer in 1688 to describe the symptoms of Swiss mercenaries longing for their homeland. These men were literally dying to return home. When we think of nostalgia today, however, we think of getting a bit weepy, a bit maudlin about fondly remembered events in the past, but I don't believe most of us think of pain or sickness. Yet pain is the source of those tears–the pain that that time can never be visited again. Hell, Proust wrote an entire epic eight novels on this theme! So, why do I call nostalgia dangerous? Because it refers back to a hazy past that might not actually exist. Unlike those Swiss soldiers who were missing their very real homeland, when we experience nostalgia, we are pining for an imagined past that seems better than our cold and harsh present. It may well have been better, but nostalgia implies a sort of over-emotional idealization of that time, as seen in its definition as "a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition" (Merriam-Webster). So the modern definition of nostalgia involves a displacement in time, rather than in space. And what are college days if not an irrecoverable condition of the past?

Oliver Sacks, professor of neurology and psychology, puts it a different way. He writes about the "paradox that lies at the heart of nostalgia–for nostalgia is about a fantasy that never takes place, one that maintains itself by not being fulfilled.... All of us, finally, are exiles from the past" ("The Landscape of His Dreams" in An Anthropologist on Mars,  (Vintage Books, 1995). It is the fantasy of those college days that holds me in thrall, not the reality.

I know that my time in college had its rough patches, and that there were times when I was quite miserable. Especially when it was 2 a.m., I was jittery from unaccustomed amounts of coffee, out of Wite-Out, and I had two papers to write by 9 a.m., plus a calculus test to study for. There were times I became filled with dread at the formless mass that was my future, and there were times that I thought I would never, ever have a boyfriend (attending a women's college might have had more than a little to do with that), and that I would die old and alone in some book-crammed, dusty apartment with no one to notice I had gone until the stench wafted into the hallway. Still, even as I record these more somber memories, nostalgia creeps in, and draws a gauzy curtain over all that angst.

But why shouldn't we give in to nostalgia once in a while? It's better than smoking opium, right? I loved being at reunion and giving in to the onrush of feelings evoked by those familiar stone buildings, those well-trod paths, that computer center–wait a minute! Computer center? Where did that come from? That wasn't there in my day! And we segue immediately into curmudgeonry.

Well, my real reunion (30th!) comes up in two years, and I fully intend to go and wallow in all that nostalgia. By then, I hope I'll have a little more direction to my life. It will be fun to compare notes with my classmates, not in a competitive way, but to see what odd and quirky directions our lives have taken. You can go home again; you just can't stay.

Okay, back to being more reliable: I promise to post once a week from now on. End of the school year and its concomitant madness put me off my stride. Also, I like to procrastinate.... Hey, that could be a topic for a future blog!