this is interesting, because I have been so immersed lately in Husserl and Heidegger (which invariably leads to Nietsche and Foucault) and I have been deepy concerned about nostalgia. I am not sure how nostalgia fits into phenomenology, but for me, there is no drug more addictive than this--this sifting through photos and letters, travelling through the past on the timeless light beam of intention. That is after all what held the phenomenological reality together, the intention of our minds, which did not render the rest of the world non-existent, but subjugated to the ground, not the prominent figure.
Susan and I once identified a nostalgia for forty--we were, neither one of us then, yet forty, and we perceived that age to be the time when the world fell in alignment at your feet, when we answered to no man, when we obtained absolute, unviolable freedom.
I can hear you giggling, you of not yet forty years...
I am reminded of the beautiful British film, Truly Madly Deeply, where she would rather sacrifice every moment of her living existence for the fleeting, unsatisfying and incomplete experiences of her dead husband's ghost. We are always chasing after what is lost, like Ariadne's thread, trying to retrace our steps back to the place that is no longer; and I speak only for myself--not as one who has suffered the shattering loss of a loved one. I cannot imagine.
I love your nostalgia. And I love, that through these pouring outs of the love in us for what is gone, that we somehow redeem the world. Maybe I am mistaken, but I think that when I create my own philosophy, it will be the doctrine of nostalgia, and the active re-membering, through unceasing vigils, by the fearless at heart, for what is lost.
