Nostalgia (in letters)
"I miss writing to you like this..."
Dear Paul,
While you and I were eating lunch today at Veselka in the East Village, I was thinking about nostalgia. It's been beautiful out all day. I wish I had been enjoying the moment, but I woke up in a melancholy mood. I can catch nostalgia like a cold when I'm feeling a little run down.
I wasn't feeling nostalgic about Veselka in the normal way. Not like something I've lost myself. You took me there once before, and I probably should have ordered the latkes again this time, and not the omelette. The next time we're on 2nd Avenue I might prefer B+H Dairy. But my point is, I was thinking about nostalgia in Veselka because of you.
You have been to Veselka more than twice. You remember it before the remodel, back when it was a cheap place to eat. Back when that whole neighborhood was filled with cheap, greasy Polish and Ukrainian restaurants. Back when CBGB’s was CBGB’s and not a John Varvatos store. I have wanted to live in New York for something like 30 years, but you have actually lived here longer than that. And so you have access, via your memories, to a city that predates my even knowing it existed. When you start to talk about that city, and when I hear your nostalgia for it, I begin to feel a little lonesome.
I can't ever go to the city you remember. I can't visit, not even for a day. I would like to eat in all those great old diners that closed a decade or two decades ago. I'd like to go see underground bands in Williamsburg back before Williamsburg had a Whole Foods. I feel a painful nostalgia for it all, but my nostalgia just leads me to a brick wall.
The nostalgia I feel for my own life isn’t any better or easier. I first went to that overstuffed bookstore on St. Marks Place with my parents when I was 13. The bookstore is still there, but it isn't the same thing. I sat with dad on a bench in Tompkins Square Park and mom took a photo of us. I have a print of it somewhere in an album, but that day is almost as remote to me as your memories are. What is the point in storing up all these dates and sensations and images—I remember the necklace I was wearing that day, red glass stones in a silver choker —if we can never go back there again? All it does is steal another moment, when I could just sit and enjoy watching you eat the latkes I should have ordered. And the mushroom barley soup.
I miss writing to you like this. Write back to me.
Love,
Tonya
Tonya,
I also miss the emailing. That’s how I got to know you, when you were simply my editor and I would get a reminder every six weeks, telling me another issue was coming up. It was a terse correspondence at first, always proper and brief, but you eventually began to ask me about New York City, my own past and my always-percolating plans for the next road trip. It’s a good way to get to know somebody, via correspondence, an epistolary relationship. I get a bit nostalgic about those days.
And, as for the New York that I always talk about, I can’t go back either, and now I’m pretty certain I would not want to. Thomas Wolfe is the one who said, “You can’t go home again,” but it’s an old theme. On a more meta level, you have Heraclitus saying, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” Or as my old friend, Harry Koutoukas, another ancient Greek, used to say to me, “Nostalgia is the death of the moment.” It’s too easy for me to get lost in the past. I have always loved reading history and used to imagine what it would be like to have lived in other times, especially the 1920s and 1930s. Was that a way to avoid living in the latter part of the 20th century? Or just daydreaming? And what’s wrong with daydreaming?
New York City has plenty of ghosts for me - I just read an amazing piece on ghosts, by the way. Not only do I walk around with memories, but I confront their non-existence every day. The riverfront that was a ruin when I first moved here - old piers that were falling into the river, asphalt, low work sheds - that’s all gone. Replaced with a park that everybody loves. And that park may be a memory one day, as well. Because nothing is forever. I don’t want to be one of those maudlin dudes who mourns what was. Towns change, the country changes. A cattle town becomes a uranium town becomes a tourist mecca. The wheel keeps turning. And, in the meantime, all we really have is right now.
Thank god I can write. I can always evoke the past for myself and others, pull a few strings, pound a few keys and there it is again. I get to relive something that I may or may not even want to remember. And then move on. Man, am I getting all airy here. Sorry. I remember you told me a few weeks ago that you might want a piece on nostalgia - I’m so thrilled you’re still my editor, by the way - and I got to thinking about it. A few nights later, you went to some art thing and talked to a bunch of people. You came home and said to me, “New York must have been a special scene back in the ‘80s.” At that moment, I felt the mists start to swirl and surround me with memories of the underground clubs, the weird happenings, the strange encounters.
Truth be told, I don’t remember much of the 1980s. I was in a drug-addled state most of the time, but the memories I have don’t make me want to return. Some things are better left in the past. When we go back a bit further, though, to my childhood, the endless summer days in Yonkers, to my family’s Catskills trips, I want to linger in the bittersweet sadness of happy memories. Maybe I do get nostalgic. Those family get-togethers, usually around the holidays, or celebrating Easter Eve at the Greek Orthodox church, where the ceremonies bordered on pagan. The people who are all gone now, back before I really knew that people left us. Some things only become precious with time. When you’re in it, you’re often not aware of it.
I’m just getting going, but I want to hear more from you first. I’m with you - I miss those long, endless email conversations. Luckily, I can talk to you forever and still want to hear more. Where are you? Come back from the gym. I’m going to go poke around on the etymology of “nostalgia.”
xoxox
p
Dear Paul,
Over those years (and years) of emails, you became the person I write for, and your email reminded me why that is. You're the person I talk to, even in my head. I find that I'm often explaining myself to you when you aren't there. And it's because of the way you respond, like you did just now. That kind, receptive voice.
I agree with Harry Koutoukas that nostalgia is the death of the moment. And, at the same time, I wish I could've met Harry Koutoukas. I'm nostalgic for him, and the other characters in your stories. Your parents too and all your extended Greek relations, gathered together on Easter Eve making food.
When I feel nostalgic, I think it may be a desire for belonging. I like to imagine myself living in a time and place where I might have belonged—the downtown art scene in the 80's is one of them. Out at night with the experimental videographers and the performance artists and thrown-together punk bands. When I'm feeling nostalgic, I'm usually feeling lonely or out-of-place. And I think, if only... Maybe if this were the 1920's on the French Riviera, like Tender is the Night, then I'd be in a swirl of fascinating people and everything around me would make sense. The present moment is always so loose and disjointed and full of petty discomforts. But the past is a story, with an arc and an ending, and there is sense to it. And yes, I know that everyone in Tender is the Night was miserable, but they were miserable in such a lovely, fashionable way.
I would like to have seen your ghosts, the old piers and the late nights in underground clubs. I like the way you tell a story—you make stories from your ghosts, and I can almost live in them. Even if they aren't happy stories, they always conjure an atmosphere.
But I'm correcting myself, even now. I’m lost again in wistful thoughts. I am missing my life. It's all happening right now, around me, and I should really be paying attention.
Someday I will be nostalgic for this time. I'm certain of it. The past few years have been stranger and more miraculous than any other time for me. I know that in some future year, from a quieter period of my life, I'll look back and marvel at everything that happened. I'll wish for it again. Our morning walks with Santo at the river. Eating pizza together on the steps of the Whitney. Some of these days have felt like miracles even as they were happening, and maybe that's half the miracle of it. Even this precise moment—I've brought out my notebook to the new sandy beach they've constructed along the Hudson, and I'm sitting here among the beach chairs and the men lying out in Speedos and the young women adjusting the straps of their bikinis to avoid a tan line. I can almost feel nostalgic for it now, the way everyone looks in the late morning sun. A little boy is chasing a goose across the sand. A plane is flying overhead to Newark. Somewhere behind me, a woman is telling a long, uninterrupted story to the man in the beach chair beside her.
I'm sitting under the shifting patch of shade from a beach umbrella as I write to you. I have been watching a girl in a yellow bikini descend the slippery stone steps to the water. She's splashing her arms and legs with water from the river. The older man in the flowered shirt has fallen asleep, his book open on his chest. And behind me, the woman's long story continues. Her voice is like a bass line under the chatter of the geese and far-away traffic of the West Side highway.
It's a remarkable thing, to realize you're happy at the moment it's happening. That's the true miracle—the occasional death of nostalgia. However briefly it lasts, before the mind clears its throat and carries on with theories and wishes and memories. For this moment, at least, there is nothing I want. Nowhere else I would prefer to be.
Except maybe at home, in time to meet you when you get back from your bike ride. If I know you, there will be fresh focaccia in your bag...
Love, T
Tonya,
Well, that was one of the sweetest emails I have ever gotten. I share the same conflicts when it comes to “now or then?” I agree that it would be delicious to time travel, but then it wouldn’t be my life, right? Still, again, what’s wrong with daydreaming? And who cares? It is true that the over-examined life is not worth living. I can enjoy my love affair with the past and then turn to the slice of pizza (insert food of choice) that’s in front of me and savor every bite. I was always told that I eat too quickly. Does that mean something, as well? Fuck it.
I’d like to have seen your ghosts - some of them, at least - from your days in the Black Hills and in Kansas or New Haven. I always yearned to be out west, so South Dakota seems exotic to me. Is it possible I’d rather be anywhere other than where I am? Actually, no. Now I’m nostalgic for earlier today, when the coffee was starting to hit my neurons.
“Nostalgia” comes from two Greek roots - “return home” and “longing.” Pretty straightforward, right? According to the internet, though, the word was coined by a Swiss student for his medical dissertation in 1688 and it signified a medical condition, one that could be treated with opium, leeches and a trip to the Alps. Thanks and credit to Svetlana Boym for her article on the subject. In fact, I love this paragraph of hers, describing one of three possible meanings for the concept:
". . . nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place but is actually a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time as space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition. Hence the ‘past of nostalgia,’ to paraphrase Faulkner, is not ‘even the past.’ It could merely be another time, or slower time. Time out of time, not encumbered by appointment books."
Or the internet and smart phones, I might add. I could go on, but why bother? Eventually, I'll have to stop writing this and return to the moment. AS ALWAYS, or as is often the case, my BIG FUCKING LESSON is to enjoy RIGHT NOW. This is the time. This is where my feet are now, happy with the piece of toast that I just ate after cleaning up the previous piece of toast that leapt off my small plate and landed face-down on my desk in a puddle of butter and jam. Happy with your description of the beach and your revelations while you were sitting there. Happy to be where I am right now. Do I worry? Sure, it’s my last horrible vice, but it’s getting better. There’s something so liberating about being here, right now.
I’m going to get the oil changed soon in the Toyota and meditate on the moment in Carlstadt, New Jersey before heading home again to you.
xoxox
P
Dear Paul,
It always comes back to toast, doesn't it?
I like this idea of nostalgia as a refusal of time. Or that it's the desire to transform time into mythology. I think that's what I was working toward when I said something about the desire to turn life into a story. When you don't want to believe that time is random and meaningless—and I don't want to believe that—then nostalgia is a way of crafting a narrative, even if it's inevitably a narrative of loss.
And since you brought in the internet, I will too. Here's Michael Chabon, talking about nostalgia in the New Yorker:
"Nostalgia, most truly and most meaningfully, is the emotional experience—always momentary, always fragile—of having what you lost or never had... It’s the feeling that overcomes you when some minor vanished beauty of the world is momentarily restored, whether summoned by art or by the accidental enchantment of a painted advertisement for Sen-Sen, say, or Bromo-Seltzer, hidden for decades, then suddenly revealed on a brick wall when a neighboring building is torn down. In that moment, you are connected; you have placed a phone call directly into the past and heard an answering voice."
Isn't that wonderful? Nostalgia isn't a feeling of loss, it's a feeling of connection. That's what gives it such a pang. It's touching the things we should never have been able to touch, given the destructive workings of time. The moments when the past isn't the past. When the dead aren't dead anymore—they are woven back into the fabric of our lives, behaving for a split-second as they always did.
We could keep going with this topic forever. We still haven't talked about nostalgie de la boue, which is something I have suffered from on-and-off. We haven't talked about simplicity—which is usually what we end up talking about when we're talking about nostalgia. The idea that somewhere, somehow, at some time, life was simpler. That it could be simpler.
But I think life can only ever be simple in retrospect. Each day, there are so many threads to follow. And if we lost those threads, even half of them, I don't think we'd be happier for losing them. Knowing you. Knowing me. Knowing how we are.
One day, when we're feeling nostalgic, this time will seem simple to us. And the simplicity we remember will be a lie and not a lie at the same time. Because that's how life works, and how stories work. Don't you think? The pleasure will be in remembering, and looking at each other and recognizing that we're still the same people we once were. We'll be each other's connection to this vanished moment in time.
For now, let's go walk the dog by the river. That's something I'd like to remember with you someday.
Love,
Tonya
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Paul Vlachos is a writer, photographer and filmmaker. He was born in New York City, where he currently lives. He is the author of “The Space Age Now,” released in 2020, “Breaking Gravity,” in 2021, and “Exit Culture” in 2023.
Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.
this is perfectly wonderful. it took me back - and yes, I felt nostalgic for the months of email correspondence between Damon and me during our collaboration. there is something about emails (or writing letters) that allows an intimacy of thought not possible when one is face to face with someone. I so enjoyed this you guys. well done!
Seems I've been wallowing in nostalgia for the past few years. Each visit home is more a visit to graves, literal and figurative. Oddly, I couldn't find my parents', but maybe that's because I didn't want to. I'd rather resurrect them in stories. Writing is my cure for the slough of nostalgia that brings me down. Reliving through words, sharing those stories with others and reading their stories in the comments, is the strongest therapy ever. Thank you, Tonya, for your gift to me of Substack.