[To kick off the
summer of 2016, a series AmericanStudying some famous summer texts and
contexts. Add your responses to these posts or other SummerStudying nominations
for a crowd-sourced post that’ll go down like a glass of iced lemonade!]
On the
limitations of nostalgia, and why it’s a vital perspective nonetheless.
Don Henley’s “The Boys of
Summer” (1984), the opening track from his hugely successful and
influential Building the Perfect Beast album, includes as its bridge one of
the most famous expressions of nostalgia for a lost, idealized past ever set to
music: “Out on the road today I saw a DEADHEAD sticker on a Cadillac/A little
voice inside my head said ‘Don’t look back, you can never look back’/I thought
I knew what love was, what did I know?/Those days are gone forever, I should
just let them go but—.” Henley’s whole song is a nostalgic elegy, full of
summertime metaphors for those idealized memories of the girl and the world
that got away. But in “a DEADHEAD sticker on a Cadillac” Henley has found one
of the most succinct and pitch-perfect images I’ve encountered for the
inevitability of change and loss and how we continue to be reminded of what
once was even as we’re driving down the road of what is toward what will be. (“Objects in the rearview
mirror may appear closer than they are,” to use another famous rock and
roll metaphor for nostalgia.)
I’ve written
about nostalgia
in this space before, and have focused in
much of those posts on some of the limitations of this necessarily
idealizing and often overtly conservative perspective on both past and present.
I would say many of the same things about Henley’s version in “Summer,”
particularly when it comes to the summertime love the speaker shared with the
song’s addressee, that mythical woman who got away. After all, she’s defined
more or less solely by her appearance, through the chorus’s emphasis on how the
speaker can still “see” her and her “brown skin,” irresistible smile,
sunglasses, “hair slicked back,” and so on. Like both the boys and the season
of summer, of course, those kinds of physical and superficial elements
inevitably fade over time, were never built to last, and it’s thus entirely
fair to wonder whether there was any genuine there there for this couple—or
whether, as the speaker to his credit overtly wonders, “it was a dream.” In any
case, as the song’s first verse makes clear, both the season and the woman are
entirely absent in the present—“the summer’s out of reach” and “you’re not
home”—and it indeed seems to be time for the speaker to “just let them go.”
Or not. It’s not
just that nostalgia is (I believe and have also argued in those prior posts) a
universal and inescapable part of the human condition, and most especially of
aging. And it’s not just that the things for which we’re nostalgic can, at
least if we try to remember them with nuance, help us imagine and work toward
better presents and futures based on the best qualities of those pasts. Those
are both significant elements to consider to be sure, but nostalgia is also
valuable precisely because it has been the source of so many wonderful and
transcendent works of art, a list that would have to begin with Marcel
Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
(also known as In Search of Lost Time)
but that would also include Henley’s song (as well as “Sunset Grill,” the best
song on that great Perfect Beast album),
the great E.B.
White essay “Once More to the Lake” (about which I wrote in the first of
those prior posts on nostalgia), unique and amazing children’s books such as Edward
Ormondroyd’s David and the Phoenix,
and many other texts. Without nostalgia, the canon of human artistic creation
would be seriously impoverished—and we’d have to lament the loss, just one more
reminder that there will always be occasion for nostalgia.
Next
SummerStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other summer texts or contexts you’d highlight?
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