The past is like an old girlfriend who no longer wants to know you.
But how many of us remember this simple yet awful fact of life? How many of us desperately need to live in the past, dreaming about how things were, and fooling themselves into thinking they can re-live the good old days?
Ah, we are all of us prisoners of the past!
One of the ways this particular prisoner likes to torture himself is to visit the websites of all of the universities he studied at, just to see who is still there among the staff, and to see how much the happy places of his youth have changed. One regular site is that of my favourite alma mater, Lancaster University in the UK, where I did my PhD. Although I have four university degrees from four different institutions, I am particularly proud of Lancaster. I spent ten very happy years of my life, on and off, working and studying at that wonderful place of learning perched on a windswept hill in North West England, near the sea. It is the place where I made and lost some of the best friends of my life, and it is where I met my wife.
So I always like to look at the Lancaster University web site, especially the pages for my old department, just to see who is still teaching there and who is new. The photos on the pages for those old survivors who still teach in the Linguistics and Modern English Language Department are much older and greyer now of course, and many are now professors, or senior lecturers. Others have moved on, retired, or come in since I left there in 2000.
It always seems that I am the only one who has stayed the same, that is, until I look at myself in the mirror! But when I click on those web pages, I see the past, I step back into it for a while, and recall the places as I remember them, and it’s as if time never passed on…
Yet I know that if I were to step back onto Alexandra Square, in the middle of the Lancaster campus, right now, there would be hardly anyone who would recognize me. And I wonder if I would recognize the campus at all. I had a dream a couple of years ago. Somehow, I had teleported onto the Lancaster campus. It was night time, and the place was totally unfamiliar, crowded with young faces I didn’t know, and unfamiliar buildings rose humiliatingly on all sides. I tried to ask directions, but nobody understood what I was saying, and I could not form proper words in English. I was lost, in a place that was both familiar, yet totally alien. I no longer belonged there, my time had passed. Then I woke up in the present, my nostalgic dream a fast-fading memory.
You see, nostalgia is like an addictive drug. It hooks you, draws you in, makes you want to linger just one more time in the warm glow of the past. But eventually, it destroys you. Because you see, that old girlfriend you once adored and walked hand in hand with on the beaches of the good old days, she has moved on. She has changed, grown up, met someone else, married and had kids. You wouldn’t recognize her now, plump and weighed down with childbirth and mortgages, a harder set on her face, the odd line here and there and the inevitable graying hair.
So, for many of us, this need for the spurious comforts of the past is a particularly sad kind of desperation, a dull ache that never fades, and yet, there we go once again, clicking onto our past, kidding ourselves that we can go back to it once again.
I’ll close with the words of one of my favourite poems:
“Everything Changes. We plant trees for those born after. Poisons poured into the oceans can never be poured out again….”
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