… and aging Shiraz

Thanks, Facebook and Billy Connolly fans

Aging books and ideas

I have since moved them around a bit, but they are all still here — like me, older…

On Facebook last night I posted this:

One of my treasures — complete Shorter Oxford Dictionary Illustrated, published for Caxton Press, 1961. I picked it up from Peter White’s Books Buy and Sell in George Street, Haymarket some time in the late 1980s. It wasn’t just a shop! Peter was a great conversationalist and a keen mind.

These days I really need a magnifying glass to use it! Do people have paper dictionaries any more? I would argue online dictionaries really don’t offer the same experience — the random browsing through the highways and byways of the language.

That attracted likes from four people: Alan, whom I taught at TIGS 1971-4; George from the Sydney Boys High Class or 1986; Mitchell from the SBHS Class of 2000 — and Louise, who is  Professor of English, Macquarie University, and happens to live in the house where I lived from 1943 to 1952!

Back in 2001 I posted: As I promised: Weeping like a child for the past

D H Lawrence’s poem “Piano” is as powerful an enactment in words of nostalgia as I know. Like sentimentality or grief, it is a quality that defines us as human; to be without it is to be less than human. Like those, it is also dangerous, or can be. It is instructive sometimes to check a dictionary, in this case the latest Shorter Oxford:

nostalgia | n. L18. [mod.L (tr. G Heimweh homesickness), f. Gk NOSTOS + algos pain: see -IA1.] 1 Acute longing for familiar surroundings; severe homesickness. L18. 2 Regret or sentimental longing for the conditions of a period of the (usu. recent) past; (a) regretful or wistful memory or imagining of an earlier time. E20. b Cause for nostalgia; objects evoking nostalgia collectively. L20.
2 A. TOFFLER “This reversion to pre-scientific attitudes is accompanied by a tremendous wave of nostalgia.” Country Life: “Nostalgia for a world of Norfolk jackets, muttonchop whiskers, penny-farthing bicycles.” A. BROOKNER “She alone remembers her father with nostalgia for his benevolent if abstracted presence.”  B  P. DE VRIES “Her potato bread was sheer mouth-watering nostalgia.”
Also nostalgy n. (rare) M19.*

The earlier use confirms my feeling that nostalgia can be a form of grief. Migrants, I am told, especially involuntary ones such as refugees, spend their lives going through the stages of grief over and over again, even when on the surface they may appear settled. In a sense we are all migrants, and our home country is childhood, or some warmer world than the present, which may be a world of imagination. I am a nostalgic person, and it is my own childhood that draws me, or even my mother’s childhood, a more bucolic world or apparently more settled values. My mother’s father, whom I dearly loved, was a teacher; in a sense it was my nostalgia as a 16-year old that made me become a teacher.

I would not be without the sometimes sad pull of nostalgia, yet I also recognise it is a force that can lead away from maturity and contentment in the present moment. I think it partly explains why I am drawn to younger people than myself; if I am honest, it must be seen as a reluctance to leave youth behind–the “Peter Pan” principle, or what the Jungians call puer aeternus. That is part of my make-up, not in itself a bad thing but bad if allowed to become unbalanced. “To be young at heart” and all that is the positive side. Paradoxically, nostalgia also draws the young to those who are older, as part of their appeal is that they may represent a “lost world” to those on the edge of the complex and possibly dangerous choices life offers. And you thought it was “wisdom” the old had to offer; well, partly so–but it is also a retreat into a “better” past through the old sometimes I suspect. Certainly there was a lot of that in my affection for my grandfather, apart from the fact that he amply deserved such affection.

In politics the role of nostalgia is well worth exploring. I would hypothesise that much of the appeal of reactionary or conservative politics is nostalgia, which can be easily distorted or manipulated. From the Nazis to Pauline Hanson to George Dubya Bush to John Howard–consider these not as equivalents–it would be silly to say Howard has much in common with Hitler–yet nostalgia is a crucial factor in all four, I suggest. Not to mention the present ruling party in India, fundamentalism worldwide, and so on: a force to be reckoned with is nostalgia.

In education, nostalgia governs attitudes to schooling, often to the detriment of education, which needs to be future-oriented as well as conservative. To prepare students for a world that existed for their parents or grandparents is to betray those students. Yet there are lessons from the past, and things worth preserving: respect for the rule of law and human rights, for example. Hence I again stress the immense value of studying History–but critically rather than nostalgically or sentimentally.

So much more could be said, but that is enough for one Sunday rave! — end 2001 quote!

But here is a free app I have used for 20+ years

Yes, WordWeb. The free version asks you every year to affirm you have not added to greenhouse gases by taking international flights, but aside from that eccentricity it is a very handy little app which if course works offline too. It has now and again assisted my Wordle as well.

Aging Shiraz — but probably no more than two weeks longer…

So yesterday old age forced me to leave West Wollongong as my blood pressure medication had run out. No, this is not the medication:

Those were purchased from BWS Burelli Street on the way home, as after the pharmacist I of course lunched at a very quiet though Christmassy City Diggers.

I lunched not on barramundi but tried the Monday Burger Special, a distinctly non-Aussie cheeseburger. No beetroot, pineapple or egg…. But of its genre OK, even if the very lean beef patty was a tad dry….