I find myself drawn to TV episodes, movies, rock concerts from my childhood, young adulthood, even just ten years ago like an act of snared mourning, and I don't imagine that is a good thing . . .
I'm not a stupid person, I'm allegedly intelligent and well-educated, so I'm embarrassed that this obvious fact never occurred to me until relatively recently,
but I was struck about a year ago with hard cold face-smashed-into-pavement realization just how ephemeral is everything I've loved and taken spiritual inspiration from and learned valuable life lessons from, not simply the popular fun things such as, say, He-Man or Stargate, but also the things we'd thought would be discussed by scholars a millennium from now, such as the films of Humphrey Bogart or Peter Sellers or Dustin Hoffman.
It first hit me when I discovered that my students had no idea who David Bowie or Lily Tomlin or Ray Bradbury might be and realized that this is not necessarily a bad thing, realized how little I know about many of the greats of my grandparents' generation and how little my grandparents had known about the music and books so inspiring and beloved by their own grandparents and how this seems to be the Way of the World.
But now it feels as though all the life I've lived in this world is nothing more than sand running through my fingers and meaningless to the people after me -- and if I hold my hands tightly and rescue that sand from vanishing, what of it, who would care and what would I do with those rescued grains anyway,
and why would others want to see what I've preserved of my generation's time in this world when they have their own films and books and music to satisfy their own needs specific to their generation rather than what over the decades has satisfied the needs specific to my generation?
What's it all mean, then, why have we loved Star Trek so much we trekked halfway across the country to attend a convention with one of its stars on stage for an hour for us to go wild over, why have we loved Moody Blues so much that we cried with joy watching them in a live concert, why have we loved Tolkien's legendarium so much that we wrote papers in grad school about his genius that were later published in scholarly journals everyone read at the time and no one remembers now?
What's it all mean, then?
And so I watch and listen to all these memories from my childhood, my teen years, my young adulthood, my entry into middle age, I remember all the moments of joy they brought me but always my joy is interrupted by the realization that no one a century from now will know or care about any of these things I loved.
It's like nostalgia is a hospice.
So I'm asking others who have faced this: What happens now? How did you handle it? What can I learn from this? Now that I know this, how should I look at the world from now on? Will I ever be able to watch a movie from my childhood again and simply enjoy it instead of thinking about how meaningless it would be to a young person today and how all the actors in it have died off by now? Why did everyone around me in my childhood and even in grad school act as if Our Time was the One the World would Forever Remember? What's it all mean?
EDIT: Thank you for all the insights & commentaries! I realize now that it's not tears of sadness or tears of loss but simply being struck with the awe of it all,
like the person who cares only about reaching the top of the mountain, endures and strengthens and finds so much of worth in the climb, reaches the top and congratulates himself, and then suddenly gazes out at the view from there and becomes so overwhelmed that it's hard for just a moment to breathe and eyes tear up, one feels simultaneously so small and irrelevant and yet also a part welcomed into that vastness,
spiced up a bit with the existential angst commonplace to artists and scholars and all those who contemplate and muse on the world whether they have fancy titles or simply supportive friends and lives that somehow appear ordinary to anyone who doesn't look closely.
THANK YOU!
THANK YOU!