Nostalgia

I just finished a book by Michael Chabon: it wasn't my favorite, the story didn't touch me very much and I couldn't identify with the characters, but there is something amazing about his writing. As soon as I start reading, it flows so freely and effortlessly that I can't put it down. I read at least half of the book yesterday afternoon, lounging in Central Park and on my bed with the windows open and the scents of spring tickling my nose (or was it the smells of the hot city, I can't remember?)

The story is about the summer after college, being young and careless and nostalgic for those times. I have been nostalgic lately too, very much. Not for college, but for a dreamy fantasy I have of a place I left a long time ago. Homesick for a place I don't really remember but the feeling of which creates a memory most likely false: too perfect to be real. And yet I can't shake it off, at least not for now.

"Walking the streets to Phlox's house, as so many times before - past that mailbox, past that airy, rampant bed of cosmos, past that old man, oh yes, with the neck brace and the Pomeranian - making the old approach to her apartment through the eternal oily paddle and the stink of that ginkgo tree, I was filled with a frail and sad exhilaration, which I really ought to have recognized for what it was and, perhaps, to have stopped right there - for it was nostalgia, and what inspires nostalgia has been dead a long time."

"No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything."

~Michael Chabon: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh