When I was reading Luc Sante’s “Preface” to Low Life I found myself almost intoxicated by his word choices. I really love the idea of New York as “a creature,” “a mentality,” “an implausible character,” etc.
It is hard for me to not lapse into some kind of nostalgic rant. I’ve been living in this city for so long that I feel like I’ve met many of the personifications Sante mentions, and more. What is strange to me, but strange in a good way, is how Sante links “nostalgia” to the way “past decades come into vogue in regular intervals.” I always think of nostalgia as a sentimental reminiscing or romanticizing of something that is no longer present or accessible.
I picked the photo in this post because I took it a few weeks ago, simply because I was fascinated by this amazing new tea shop on Putnam Ave, and the way one tiny sign can alter a street block. It makes me think of this chapter in one of my all time favorite books–The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau. The chapter is called “Walking in the City” and de Certeau writes, “…Manhattan continues to construct the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the text of the city readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text” (92). I can’t pretend that I 100% understand what de Certeau means here, but I like the way he paints a picture of a person walking down the street as being part of the story of the city’s whole. And, I like to think that Sante, particularly in on page xv, is on that very street–that this book really did come out of his own experience walking in the city, watching in the city.
But, I don’t want to end on such an easily positive note. Yes, I love Sante’s writing. Yes, I love my city. But the way the economy of this city works is a bit confusing. If, as Sante says, “the myth of the city insists on progress” (xv), will there one day be no room for anyone but the elite? Does progress equal money?
Interesting bit about nostalgia. I saw Midnight in Paris in the summer; usually I don’t like Woody Allen’s schtick but I found this movie to have powerful meaning. I think people have the power to create the nostalgia they long for. Nostalgia is really a desire for something in the future.
I haven’t seen Midnight in Paris yet…now I definitely must. Say more about how “nostalgia is really a desire for something in the future.” That is a really interesting idea and I am curious how you think that this desire for something from the past to move to the future plays out? Do you think the past can get “priced out” in the future?
I think people who are obsessed with different, and by definition inaccessible, periods of time usually sublimate the true root cause of their need to do this. While appreciating another time period or culture is good and healthy, assuming special properties to go along with them is an error. For example, the people who existed, say in the 1920’s, their time period was all they knew. They still had day to day life, had to get up, work, personal lives etc. The idea of a romantic, bygone era is seductive but fallacious in the sense that the people who were players in that time were not experiencing it nostalgically as we do. It was just their present as 2012 is ours.
That’s not to say that there are not time periods, places, and cultures which are special and may represent a ‘Golden Age.’ But the magic people seek to capture as a property of being in a certain time and place can be created in one’s own life. Everybody only has the present and the ability to make their future. No one in human history has lived in an era other than their own. I want to ‘make my future’ and enjoy the present as it unwinds with a nostalgic sense of appreciation like a novel. So, one can actually mix the best of nostalgia and apply it to their own life to craft their future. Nostalgia is basically just ‘appreciation’ outside of the day to day. What people choose to appreciate and savor is up to them, as is how they choose to conduct their lives in accordance with this.
The past can definitely get ‘priced out’ in the sense that its value is only what people assign to it. When people are busy striving to create their realities for their own lives, the past is often forgotten. Living in the past is the luxury of one with free time. The irony is, of course, that the past events which we often wistfully remember were the work of the people who were most living in the present and looking towards the future.