nostalgia – Auxiliary Memory

Have I Burned Out My Nostalgia Neurons by Being Too Nostalgic?

by James Wallace Harris, 5/3/26

The word nostalgia was originally coined to describe homesick Swiss mercenaries. For a long time, it was considered a malady, rather than the bittersweet emotion triggered by recalling our past. The term eventually expanded to include longing for the past in general, even for times before you were born.

The first movie I remember seeing on television was High Barbaree (1946), where nostalgia was a central theme. There is a scene early in the film where two childhood friends are separated when one of their parents moves away. The film was based on the novel of the same name by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, but it was rooted in Hall’s nostalgia for his childhood. In the novel, but not the film, we experience Alec Brooke’s last thoughts before dying. In the film, they are his last thoughts before being rescued.

At six, I had already experienced leaving friends several times. My father was in the Air Force, and we moved frequently. The movie and novel have had a lifelong impact on me. See “Did The First Movie You Ever See Haunt You For The Rest Of Your Life?“

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was nostalgic for my previous homes, schools, friends, and pets. For many years, I had recurring dreams of struggling to find my way back to our house in Hollywood, Florida. Those dreams stopped after I took a trip to that house in my early thirties.

My upbringing programmed me for nostalgia. I’ve always wallowed in it. Do I have more memories than the average person because I moved around so much?

When I retired, I spent years rereading my favorite books, contacting old friends and relatives, processing old photos, creating Spotify playlists of all the music I loved since 1962, collecting all the science fiction magazines I loved growing up, and watching all my old favorite movies and television shows.

Here’s the thing. I’ve been retired for thirteen years, and emotionally, it’s not what I expected. I thought my personality would have solidified in old age, but it hasn’t.

I feel I’ve psychologically changed several times in the past thirteen years. The current change is a surprise. I think I’ve burned up all my nostalgia neurons. For years, I only played one Spotify playlist composed of a thousand favorite songs from before the year 2000. Now I’m only listening to songs that came out after the year 2000. And the books and magazines that excite me the most are about current events. I haven’t given up on old friends, but so many people I used to know have died or disappeared.

Scientists have learned that memories aren’t fixed. When you recall a moment from the past, you overwrite it with new thoughts about that memory. I’m wondering if all my nostalgic reveries have overwritten my original recordings. That I’m no longer getting a nostalgic dopamine high when thinking about the past because I’m triggering recent memories that erased the originals.

Conservatives seem hell-bent on bringing the past back through political means. But can they give me back the thrill of being young and going downtown on a bus and eating at a lunch counter in the 1950s? Even if I had a time machine, would I use it?

I have a tremendous nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s. However, would I return if I could? Without air conditioning, I’d be miserable. I’m 74, and I doubt I could get the medical care I need. What would I do? Rent a room in a rundown hotel on Miami Beach and listen to 1950s records while reading 1950s science fiction magazines? I could do that now.

I will admit, if I had a time machine, I’d make day trips to the past. Would returning to the scenes of my original memories exorcise the nostalgia that drove me back there?

I have to wonder if getting old eventually ruins nostalgia because we get wise to our fantasies? I’ve spent 74 years creating the life I have now, which is so very comfortable. Didn’t all the choices I made lead to where I am now? So, why would I jump to another place in time?

I’m returning to the idea that nostalgia is a malady. And I’m wondering if I’ve finally cured myself? Or have I? Will nostalgia return like bouts of malaria? I feel like aging is a series of transformations. I shouldn’t expect to arrive anywhere permanently.

Over the past few years, I’ve lost the ability to watch movies and television shows by myself. I had many theories as to why that was so. The main theory assumed that the Internet, YouTube, and doomscrolling destroyed my ability to focus. But I’m wondering if I was trying to watch TV by who I was in the past, and that just didn’t work. I’ve recently started watching TV again on my own, and my mind has stuck with it. Maybe my new stage of seeing things can let me relax and enjoy the shows. Before, my mind was restless.

Is that because my new non-nostalgic self has found new reasons to watch? I don’t know. My new self has found different books to read and different music to listen to. But how long will this last? I assume I will keep changing.

I have another thought. I spend a lot of time meditating about consciousness and studying it in books. I have many new theories about who I am. I no longer think of my personality as a unified, singular being. I now see myself like a computer with many parts: CPU, GPU, NPU, memory, etc. Have these discoveries undermined my nostalgic drive? Maybe self-awareness can destroy nostalgia?

This leads me to ask: Can we reprogram ourselves?

JWH

Why Is This Restaurant Playing The Big Bopper?

by James Wallace Harris, Sunday, March 31, 2019

Susan and I went out to breakfast this morning. She wanted to try this new place called Staks. One of those storefront restaurants where you order at the counter and sit down and wait for your food. (A trend I don’t like.) What surprised me was the music they played at 7:30am, oldies like “Rock Around the Clock,” “The Wanderer,” “Chantilly Lace,” “He’s So Fine,” and “Dawn” – all songs from when we were growing up.

We sat at a booth with high backs covered with green plastic. In the middle of the room were sterile white metal tables and chairs occupied by younger people, including three late twenty-something couples with babies in highchairs. I wanted to ask them what they thought about the music. I was grooving to oldies, but were they? Was it just Muzak to their ears? The staff was all teens and young twenty-somethings. Why were they being forced to listen to old people’s music all day? I assume some industrial designer imagined both the decor and music together believing old fashioned breakfasts went with old-fashioned music. There were no vegetarian or gluten-free options on the menu – that would remind people of now and break the illusion.

Just to check if I wasn’t the only one noticing this trend I found this at the Chicago Tribune, “Nostalgia has taken over food and pop culture because we can’t help but fall for it.” Google also gave me “4 Ways to Use Nostalgia to Grab Your Customers’ or Members’ Attention.” Of course, marketers have been selling us American Graffiti and Happy Days leftovers for decades.

I can understand a fondness for life between WWII and the Vietnam war because that’s when I grew up. Susan and I were the only music-age-appropriate customers in Staks. Susan still knows all the words to those songs. Why should our nostalgia be piped into younger generations? My parents hated rock ‘n’ roll. I have to work mighty hard to find songs from the 21st-century that I love. And the song I do find to love, tend to sound like songs from my past. My parents like music built around vocalists, horns, and woodwinds. I grew up with vocalists, guitars, bass, and drums. Modern music fans love processed vocals mixed with computer-generated tones and sampled clips.

My theory is every generation has a sound they are pop culturally programmed to resonate with during their teenage years. I assume in half-a-century the young people that were sitting in the middle of the room will be in booths listening to music from their generation wondering why another industrial designer brought it back.

By the way, here’s a 21st-century song I love. I’ve probably played it two dozens times today. It shows I shouldn’t think every generation is stuck in their own musical hole. It still doesn’t explain why I see young people wearing t-shirts with The Beatles, Jimi, or The Grateful Dead pictured on them. I never wore a shirt with Benny Goodman’s face and doubt I’ll wear a Rilo Kiley advertisement.

Finally, why is it easier for younger generations to embrace older generations of music than it is for older generations to keep up with the music coming from younger generations? There are plenty of places to eat and drink that feature contemporary music. I just don’t go in them anymore. Why? I’ve heard many in my generation say they feel invisible around younger people, and that made them feel old. I’ve got to admit I stopped paying attention to newer trends, so they are invisible to me. Maybe it’s mutual.

My guess is those under 30 kids in Staks never even noticed the music.

JWH

Visual Nostalgia

by James Wallace Harris, Sunday, July 22, 2018

This post is for Linda. I told her about the growing trend on Facebook for sharing all kinds of old photos, illustrations, ads, paintings, and drawings, and she suggested I do a blog post about it. I’ve joined several groups on Facebook where members post images, usually from the 20th century, but sometimes older. I assume it’s nostalgia-driven, but it might just a love for creative artwork.

The first group I joined was The Golden Age of Illustrations which collects book and magazine illustrations, often from children’s books, but adult stories as well. Here’s a few of them. This group has over 70,000 members.

Over at Mid Century Advertising, the appeal is partly the art but mostly the memories. Here’s a varied sampling that doesn’t really do the group’s wide interest justice. Part of the appeal is to remember forgotten objects. Part of the appeal is to remember a different way of life. This group currently has 35,806 members.

One of my favorite groups is Space Opera Pulp because I love science fiction. This group has 11,813 members, on the small size compared to the others. When I was growing up in the 1960s I didn’t know any other science fiction fans. Evidently, there were way more than I ever knew. I guess science fiction was a guilty pleasure until Star Trek legitimized the genre.

Another group that focuses on book and magazine illustrations is Illustration Art Archives. It has over 15,000 members. This group loves full-size color illustrations. Most are from old magazines, but some are from books. By the way, adult books used to have interior illustrations. This groups especially seems to admire a dramatic scene.

The last group I’ll mention is Hi Resolution Paintings, where over 40,000 people love to share high-resolution copies of fine art. I like to save high-resolution images for my 4k monitor’s desktop background. This group has some of the nostalgic images of the other groups, but I like it for the old realistic fine art paintings.

There are many more visually nostalgic groups over at Facebook. New ones pop up all the time. In a way, it makes sense since Facebook is visually oriented. But most people post photos about recent activities. Isn’t it odd that so many people want to post images of things they remember from a long ago that isn’t personal? It might be an age thing. Most of the people I know on Facebook are over 60. Maybe it’s just a delight to see something so vivid and bright that was only a dark dim memory.

Or maybe, in our troubled times, old images are more joyful than the depressing images we see in the news.

JWH

Why Do I Love Old Black and White TV Shows and Movies?

by James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Normally I watch the latest hit TV shows, usually on Netflix, HBO, or Amazon Prime. Generally, I watch these shows with friends. I’ve gotten so I don’t like watching TV alone. However, when I do, it’s because I’m too tired to do anything else and it’s too early to go to bed. When I’m alone I’m drawn to old black and white television shows, movie westerns from the 1950s and old Hollywood movies from the 1930s. Why do I prefer black and white shows? Why do I save shows in color for when I’m with friends?

MeTV got me hooked on two old TV series this month, The Fugitive and The Outer Limits. Both shows premiered in 1963. As a kid, I discovered The Outer Limits when the first episode aired. It ran on Monday nights at 7 on ABC. My father loved The Fugitive which came out on Tuesdays on ABC at 10 pm. I watched it some back then but didn’t really care for it. I generally hated the TV my folks loved. I don’t know if that was rebellion or I was just too young for the content.

I have a hard time remembering my dad being home, but he loved TV, and he liked it best when us kids weren’t around. There was nothing on Tuesdays at 10 my sister Becky and I wanted to see, so we left him alone to watch The Fugitive in peace. A half-century later, I’m staying up late watching The Fugitive alone like he did. I wonder if that gives me any kind of psychic connection to how my father felt?

Fugitive

Becky and I were horrible TV hogs. We’d have huge shouting matches with our dad on Sunday nights during the 1966/67 season when we pleaded to watch The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and he fought to see Bonanza, his favorite western. I loved westerns too, but not Bonanza or The Virginian, my mother’s favorite cowboy show. Gunsmoke was my TV shoot-em-up. I don’t think Becky ever liked westerns, but I should ask her the next time she calls.

This year I’ve also bought the first seasons of Gunsmoke, Have Gun Will Travel, Route 66, and Cheyenne. I bought the complete series of The Twilight Zone on Blu-ray and The Fugitive on DVD. I’m thinking about buying Perry Mason and Maverick.

Route 66

I used to hate Perry Mason, which was my mother’s all-time favorite TV show. She also loved to read the Perry Mason mysteries. But for some reason this year, I started watching them on MeTV. I liked that it was in black and white and sometimes featured street scenes of the early 1960s. That’s why I bought Route 66 because it was filmed on location, viewing 1963 America in contrasty black and white.

At the start of the 1963 TV season, we were living on Homestead Air Force Base. I started the seventh grade at Redlands Junior High in South Florida, when I was eleven. After a few weeks, we moved back to Hollywood, Florida, and I attended my second 7th-grade school, but I forgot its name. I thought it was Broward Junior High, but I can’t verify that on the internet. I was in class at that school when they announced over the PA that JFK had been shot. Three days later I turned twelve. After that, we moved to South Carolina, where I went to my third 7th-grade school, John F. Kennedy Junior High.

The Outer Limits

Memories of 1963 represent living in two states and three schools, and for some reason the 1963/64 television season also vividly sticks in my mind. I started regularly listening to rock music at the end of 1962 when I got an AM clock radio for Christmas. I became much more aware of the world around this time. It was during that time period I became a bookworm, rock & roll fan, addicted to the boob tube, and started going to the movie theater on my own.

High Barbaree

I remember watching TV since I was four or five, probably with the 1956/57 television season. My family didn’t get a color television set until 1965, so my first decade of TV was in glorious black and white. All my life I’ve loved old black and white movies from the 1930s and 1940s. I wonder if that’s because I spent my formative years viewing a B&W TV screen? My earliest memory of my father is waking up in the middle of the night when I was four, and walking out to the living room to find my dad watching an old movie on television. He let me stay up and watch it with him. This is my first memory of television and the first movie I ever remember seeing. I didn’t discover until years later it was High Barbaree (1947) with June Allyson and Van Johnson.

Why now? Why has my mind started craving old black and white TV shows again, ones from long ago? Is it just nostalgia? Is it a way of communing with my dead parents. And isn’t it odd that I’m not watching the shows I loved as a kid but prefer seeing the ones my parents watched when I wasn’t around? I still can’t stand Bonanza or The Virginia. Both of those shows insult my sense of what a western should be.

The other night my friends and I watched The Solid Gold Cadilac and I found it immensely pleasurable it was in wide-screen black and white. I can only remember a couple wide-screen black and white films at the moment, The Apartment and The Big Trail, both of which I have on Blu-ray. It’s a shame B&W wide-screen didn’t catch on back in 1930.

Am I drawn to the black and white, or to the period content? I don’t know. I’m not sure I would like The Fugitive as much if it had been in color for its first three seasons. For some reason, I’ve never liked the remakes of The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits which were made in color. And the only horror movies I enjoy are the classics from the 1930s which were in black and white.

I wonder if nostalgia comes in black and white and modernity in technicolor? The 1950s were definitely a black and white decade to me, even though I have some personal photographs to prove it was indeed in color. I wonder if kids who have always lived with color TV ever think of the past in black and white? Were my formative years corrupted by black and white TV sets? Will children today remember the world in LCD/OLED imagery? How would my consciousness of the past be today if I had never seen a TV, movie or computer screen, or photograph of any kind? Would I even conceive of black and white?

The world does turn black and white in low light, or when you’ve had way too much to drink. But now that we preserve the past digitally in color, will that eventually eliminate an appreciation of viewing reality in grayscale?

JWH

Movie Memories From Growing Up

By James Wallace Harris, Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Yesterday I watched two movies I had first seen in the 3rd and 5th grades. I don’t know what spurred this bout of nostalgia, but I wondered enough to write this essay. I don’t think I’m unique in wanting to see shows again from childhood. I often read customer comments when buying DVDs on Amazon that start with phrases like “I’ve been searching for this movie for decades.” Been there, done that, more times than I can count.

The first film I watched yesterday was Treasure Island from 1934, with Jackie Cooper and Wallace Beery. I was in the third grade, and we were living in New Jersey. I believe I saw the movie first, then my mother got the book and read it to me, or with me. It’s the only memory I have of her reading to me. I also remember going to a costume party that year dressed as Long John Silver. I’ve seen this film countless times over my lifetime, and it always evokes strong wistful emotions. I don’t know if it’s the story, or memories of my own feelings from long ago. It’s funny, there’s been many versions of Treasure Island since 1934, but I’ve never seen any of them. I either feel the Wallace Beery version can’t be beat, or I’m afraid of ruining my nostalgia. For some reason my memories of black and white movies are stronger than movies in color. There were some old films that were in color, but I first saw them in B&W because we didn’t own a color TV until 1965.

The second movie, the one I first watched back in the 5th grade with my sister Becky, is The Time of Their Lives, an Abbott & Costello film from 1946. Lou and Marjorie Reynolds play revolutionary war ghosts, falsely condemned as traitors, cursed to haunt the Danbury estate where they were killed till the crack of doom. Bud plays a guy in the past and the present, but kind of an asshole in both eras. The neat thing about this Abbott & Costello flick, is the duo are separated. Even as a kid, I could only handle so much of their standard shtick, so The Time of Their Lives was refreshingly different. Becky and I loved the story of very old ghosts interacting with the modern world. Of course, we also love the Charlie the Tuna commercials that came on with the movie. Today, I can enjoy parts of The Time of Their Lives but it’s pretty damn silly. Mostly, it’s nostalgia that keeps me watching. The Time of Their Lives is often referred to as the Abbott & Costello film for people who don’t like Abbott & Costello.

As a kid, I didn’t really like a lot of kid flicks, not even Disney films. But I did love films about pirates, folks stranded on desert islands, ghosts and angels. The first film I remember seeing, High Barbaree, I’ve written about a number of times, included a mystical island and a stranded naval pilot. Did that film start me on my road to loving fantasy, or was I born with a fantasy gene? Or is it just typical for kids to love movies about ghosts and angels? Doesn’t everyone love It’s A Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, The Bishop’s Wife, For Heaven’s Sake, Angels in the Outfield, Death Takes a Holiday, On Borrowed Time – wait, I seem to be remembering only old black and white angel movies. I do love Wings of Desire, City of Angels and Angel-A, and other modern angel movies, but not like I love the old ones.

What’s hilarious is I’m an atheist, but love angel movies. Go figure. Even as a kid I was skeptic. When I was very young I was extremely gullible that attracted torment. I was a year younger than all the kids my grade. For example, they picked on me for being the last kid to believe in Santa Claus. So I guess I turned towards fantasy in movies and books, my secret way to enjoy ghosts and angels, knowing they weren’t real, but still getting to believe in an approved way.

I have to wonder why the movies I saw before age 13 burned deeper into my consciousness than the movies seen since? I’ve watched thousands of films, and I know intellectually that modern films are far more sophisticated, better made, better acted, and better told, than my old favorites. But it’s the old films that have glued themselves to my neurons. It’s also these films first seen in childhood, that I buy and rewatch. Is that just me, or true of everyone as we get older?

Which reminds me, I also loved old movies about dogs and horses, especially National Velvet and Lassie Come Home, or maybe as a kid I just had a crush on the young Elizabeth Taylor. During that time I used to love reading books by Jack London and Albert Payson Terhune. And don’t forget Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan flicks, and shows about monsters like King Kong and Frankenstein. But by the time I was in the sixth grade, I had developed a passion for 1930s movies, especially for MGM and Warner Brother pictures. I didn’t know anything about the studios back then, I just loved black and white movies from the 1930s. That’s what showed on TV growing up, so I was conditioned by them. Films like Manhattan Melodrama and Grand Hotel seemed otherworldly to me then, and maybe now too.

Maybe one reason why those old films are so well buried in my brain is I used to stay up late watching them. During the summer vacations my parents would let Becky and I watch the all-night movies. I realize now my mother probably allowed this because we’d sleep until noon, and this would give her some private time before she had to be at work at 2pm. Anyway, maybe I love these films more because I watched them instead of getting my REM sleep. To me, one of the most powerful forms of nostalgia is watching old black and white movies late at night in a darken room. I love the flicker of movie light being the only illumination of reality. Hell, I had VR sixty years ago.

JWH