Other People's Nostalgia

In his novel Ignorance, Milan Kundera defines nostalgia as the “suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return”. Yet, the novelist notes that even upon his return, Odysseus did not at first recognize Athens from the mist. Nostalgia, then, is unappeasable because we are physically incapable of returning to the exact spot left behind and longed for. Something intangible always pertains the air of the old surroundings, and we are unable to capture the notions that made the original moments worth the pain of nostalgia.

It is through nostalgia that Jacob and Arthur as friends make sense to me. This emotion is the only force to explain the undeniable connection between the two. By the time I’m writing this, the two have become so different through the impact of time that only the few years of a shared past tie them together. Like two branches of the same tree, Jacob and Arthur look upon the same roots. Yet, they view their nostalgia as polar opposites of interpretation. Consequently they treat their friendship with opposing values, but with equal egotism.

For Jacob, Arthur remains important as a reminder of his nostalgic existence. Like an Odysseus equipped for time-travel, Jacob wishes to use Arthur as his vessel of reminder and somehow recover the past to life through his friend’s body. Arthur is Jacob’s answer for wishes to appease his yearning to return. Arthur, on the other hand, accepts that his nostalgia is unappeasable.

In looking at the history of the friends, I notice Arthur reaching for Jacob less and less. They sit together in cafés, drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and speak in inane musings, but Arthur feels an inescapable emotional detachment from the scene. His words of friendships are etiquette. In all these scenes, Arthur’s actions depend on one thought: If Jacob and Arthur are tied together by mutual nostalgia, and nostalgia is an unappeasable force, what value can an unappeasable abstraction of a friendship hold?

I detect the gap between the two friends began when Jacob left Amsterdam and Arthur started spending time alone. In his lonely moments, Arthur found that he was blessed with an exceptional capacity for coping with solitude. So unmoved by loneliness, Arthur began to value what he called his “independence from attachments”. Yet, there are contradictions in Arthur’s grand theories of his self. It is during these supposedly heroic moments of solitude I find Arthur interesting.

In the gloomy grey skies of an Amsterdam June, Arthur sits on a roof of a building smoking pot and reading Kundera’s Ignorance. It was on this rooftop where he wrote the entry about nostalgia to his journal. Arthur is desperate for connections and goodbyes. He knows he is leaving Amsterdam, and the novel’s words speak to him with incredible relevance. He knows he will never return to the city where he spent his youth. Arthur looks up from the book, smokes his joint, and looks around the skyline of the city. It’s miserably cold and windy on this rooftop. Were there not the desire to say goodbye to the sights, and somehow be on a level to connect with the city, Arthur would not be sitting here. He knows the city has more comfortable places to sit around. However, this rooftop is the only place Arthur can think of where he can simultaneously connect with all the different sights of the city.

My throat feels rough as I let go some of the smoke. White Butterfly is not a particularly great weed. However, they sell it for five euros for a gram. It fits my budget. Yeah, and the smoke is rough because I made the tip too wide. Should’ve done an ‘M’-shape. There’s the towering hotel Okura. Kathy lived somewhere in that direction. I couldn’t place her building exactly; I only went there once. She showed me her Beatles-collection, and played me a bit of Debussy on her keyboard. The Debussy was great, but god the keyboard didn’t do the French composer any good. I tried my hardest to remember anything about a project on Debussy I had done in elementary school, but couldn’t. I wonder if things that afternoon would’ve gone differently if I had remembered. If my phone had not rang. If I had not said Stalin had a point about death of millions being just a statistic. Yeah, that was a mistake. Such a pretentious stupid fucking thing to say.

Arthur coughs, realises that the drug has definitely taken effect. He feels a comfortable heaviness around him, like gravity putting an increased amount of pressure to his body. He wishes he had something more comfortable to lean back on, but the metal railings on this rooftop will have to suffice. There is a bench just on the corner, but Arthur decides he feels too stoned to actually walk to the bench.

There’s the tower of Westerkerk. Anne Frank used to sit in her hiding and listen to the bells of the church sound. Somewhere in her diary, she writes about her sadness when the Germans melted the bells for guns. It’s a sad scene. Those bells were the one reminder of the world outside; a world of something else than the corners of the annexe in hiding. The ringing bells were to her what these sights of the city skyline are to me, I suppose. They were an equal connection. She tried to connect with the city even though it was distant and practically gone. You know, the school she went to must be somewhere near where Kathy lived. I remember walking past a school named Anne Frank that afternoon I went to Kathy’s. It must have held some connection to Anne Frank, why else the name? Oh yeah, Kathy said it was weird that she was made into an icon, surely there were others. Yeah, that’s when I said that stupid fucking comment about Stalin. I should roll another joint. That would require leaving this roof, and I’m too stoned to fucking deal with it. Smoke a cigarette instead.

Arthur reaches for the soft packet of blue American Spirits brand cigarettes. It was the brand preferred by Jacob, and through spending time with his close friend, the brand Arthur loves smoking the best. Jacob has left the city too. It is over a year since his departure. Arthur’s persistence to smoke this brand, I would argue, is an unconscious echo of nostalgia. He lights the cigarette, inhales and exhales a few times. He feels unpleasantly light-headed; a consequence of the effects of THC mixed with an increased nicotine rush Arthur suffers from every time he smokes a fair amount. Alone, he feels no chance to hide his frailty, and seizes looking over the city and buries his head in his hands. Closing his eyes, he breathes heavily a few times, and feels a bit of his sense of balance return. The floating sensation in his head begins feeling pleasant again.

Funny how I can’t see Vondelpark. The green area of the city that holds some of my fondest memories is somewhere behind these buildings. Jacob lived somewhere around there, but I can’t place even the general vicinity of his building. What a stupid fucking idea of trying to say goodbye to a city. Nostalgia is fucking worthless. I’d rather look at the sky. I wish it were night. There was that one night when a few of us ventured to Vondelpark after dark. A few of us did sneaky lines of coke on the grass outside the revealing streetlights. An admirable achievement considering the darkness and the delicate quality of the powder I suppose. Anyway, fuck them, I just had a few joints. Who was there? Jacob was gone. Dylan was still around, yeah I was smoking with him. Kathy was there, but she was listening to the piano-man play. Oh yeah, the piano-man. Mysterious figure really, surfacing on the paths of Vondelpark in the middle of a July night, playing piano after midnight. I think the guy was hitting on Kathy. I was annoyed. Not that we were together. Officially anyway. It was far after Jacob was through with the city. Before Jacob and I were through though, but then again, we’re not really officially through yet. Officially, because we still pretend that we’ll meet up sometime... So yeah, it must’ve been last summer. Last summer was the last time I saw Kathy about town…

I feel irritated. Arthur’s thoughts are increasingly hard to follow. They drift from one place to another. He just sucks at his cigarette, circling around Kathy. I laugh at Arthur’s great discovery about nostalgia. He clarified the worthless quality of longing for that which is irretrievable. He took his memories of Jacob, and attached his definition of nostalgia to the memories of the most important person of his youth. Before rolling his joint, Arthur felt remote pride for his rational dealing with emotions that he finds so difficult. He felt like a great thinker, re-arranging the conceptions of human emotions. He thought to cast away all nostalgia.

Yet, all his thoughts on rooftops are nothing but continuous nostalgia for the infatuated months spent with Kathy. He continuously returns to that one single time he sat on Kathy’s living room couch, he returns that one single night he watched Kathy talk to the piano man between his songs in the pool of a streetlight. His connections with the city are not goodbyes, but nostalgic exercises. He longs for the times he was something else than a young man smoking dope on a rooftop alone. He is not saying goodbye to be born as a new, better person. He is saying goodbye with the hidden hope that one of his memories will reply “please stay”. He has confused the love he felt to Jacob as a sole burden. He has confused the worth of nostalgia. He is worse off than the nostalgic Odysseus. He is, momentarily at least, at home in Athens, yet he nostalgically yearns for his great adventure back to home.

Undoubtedly, Jacob is in the wrong with his nostalgic dependence on Arthur. However, I fear Arthur is yet to realise the true weight that nostalgia holds in his life…

By JPV

Copyright March 2006