https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dp4J-oNBUag
I know that in one sense, nostalgia acts as a refusal to let go of a memory or an event in the past, and that nostalgia also acts as a reminder of to return home. Does homesickness, the opposite of wanderlust, help us to better understand what heaven really is? My intuition is that this is what the story of the prodigal son symbolically trying to communicate. I do think that there is a sense of nostalgia in the highest sense of that word, which could be a, like you said, a desire to return home. So we could say that we all have in us a nostalgia for paradise, that all of us have a nostalgia for Eden. That is something that is built into the human person in the fall. Now, the difficulty that I have is that a lot of nostalgia today is trite. It is a sentimentalism. And so it is this kind of weird sentimentalism, this attachment to the superficial forms of the past. And I think that that’s the dangerous. I think that’s a dangerous thing, actually. I always kind of joke and say that what I do, let’s say my icon carving, is tradition without nostalgia. That is, that I’m not making the icons that I make the kind of sentimental desire to preserve the past, to preserve some forms that were there before. I want to take what has been handed to me and make it alive. I want it to be alive and participative and part of the world. Whereas there’s something about nostalgia, especially kind of a modern nostalgia that we find in people, in grownups who… I mean, I have it too, like I was going to say. Grownups who still like the things they liked as kids, grownups who still collect toys or whatever, all that stuff. I think that that’s an empty, shallow thing. I’ve also been thinking of nostalgia in big terms and how it relates to the biblical story of Lot’s wife. Yeah, that’s a really good image, actually. The idea that Lot’s wife experienced a moment of nostalgia for something that she probably shouldn’t be experiencing nostalgia for. And so as she had to leave, that she had to move away from that burning place, she looked back and remembered the wrong thing, you could say. It’s not just that, it’s that she is frozen. In that sense, in that image, the fact that she looks back at the past with this nostalgic eye, it means that she becomes a pillar. She becomes a pillar of salt. She becomes frozen and she can’t move forward. I mean, it’s like someone who breaks up with his girlfriend and then he just keeps living in that weird nostalgia and then he can’t move forward. He can’t get into another relationship. You can’t move on with your life. The same thing would be with someone who, let’s say someone dies and then they don’t mourn, but rather they just kind of hold on and they don’t want to go through the process of mourning. And then they’re stuck. They can’t move forward. And so I think that, I think that, I mean, I think like you said, I think there are some aspects of nostalgia, which are, I mean, maybe the right way to say it would be that you should be, you should be nostalgic for paradise. You should be nostalgic to return home, the real home, let’s say the true home. But that desiring capacity that we have is the same desiring capacity that can also make us nostalgic for all these trite things that we had in our past, all these things that just give us a good feeling, you know, when we engage with them or give us a kind of sadness, you know, this melancholy sadness. He said the third question is about storytelling and his strange connection to nostalgia. And so he talks about this idea of remaking films, covering songs. So I acknowledge all storytelling is a retelling, a passing on of meaning, a connection to a memory or idea. Is storytelling, if storytelling is done clumsily, is that with the effect of what nostalgia is? So nostalgia in this way becomes a cheap ploy, a magic trick akin to the game of Chinese whispers. I think that, I think that you have a, I think you have a point. One of the ways to maybe understand that is to understand that, you know, because in his comments, he talks about the fact that now people are just remaking movies, like just remaking, you know, all the stuff that we like, as an adult, when I was a child, you know, Star Wars and Marvel Comics and all this stuff. Now, all they’re doing is kind of rehashing these same things over and over. It’s like the true stories, the real stories, they can be retold over and over because they’re identity forming. You know, the fact of retelling the story of Christ every year and going through the liturgical cycle, the fact of telling the fairy tales of all these stories that we tell over and over, they’re these, it’s an identity forming act. And it’s liturgical in the sense that it’s something that we kind of go back over and over and it creates a pattern for our existence. And so I think what we’re seeing, and I mentioned this in some videos before, so I think that what we’re seeing is a desire for liturgy, a desire for a permanent or a stable pattern. And it’s being done in a very superficial way, which is Star Wars, like people who live in Star Wars or people who, you know, who are totally obsessed with mangas or, you know, Marvel Comics or, you know, who talk about old video games and have this nostalgic feeling about old video games and all that stuff. Like, I think that it’s a superficial filling of the deep desire we have for a permanent or a, it’s a very deep pattern in which we can be embedded and participated.