This Is Running for Your Life (3 page)

Nostalgists were said to see ghosts, hear voices of loved ones, dream themselves home, mistake the imagined for the real, and confuse their tenses. If they had been able to find vintage candy stores or Ramones 45s on eBay, perhaps they would have, and we'd all roll our eyes and think,
Let it go, man; live in the now
. But in its origins as a mental illness, nostalgia is a fairly pristine metaphor for ambivalence toward modern displacements, the foreboding of the present moment and an untellably gnarly future. Which goes a long way to explaining why the first Americans considered nostalgia to be a weakness of the Old World. They were too far away from all of that, too new and forward-looking for crybaby callbacks to the good old days. Motility was progress, and a national sense of place and pride what they would make it—the future, not the past, was where American dreams were set.

The nostalgia diagnosis had disappeared by the twentieth century (but was revived in Israel, according to Boym), if not before the emergence of suitable heirs like neurasthenia, the diagnosis minted by the American physician George Miller Beard in 1869. Henry James's brother William nicknamed the complaint, which was described as a kind of exhaustion with the new, “Americanitis,” and pharmacies began stocking elixirs to restore youth and ward off the anxiety and fatigue Beard blamed on the new world's unwieldy speed and excessive freedoms. Neurasthenic men (including Teddy Roosevelt) were directed to recalibrate themselves against nature's rhythms, while women (including Charlotte Perkins Gilman) were put to bed with orders to quiet their minds. Lengthening life spans only seemed to intensify a focus on the primacy of youth, with F. Scott Fitzgerald bewailing a generation's first wrinkle even while the party staggered on.

I think you know the rest: We now live on a global clock, every standardized minute counted off on the screens we stare at all day. Our world has never been so closely observed and recorded and mediated, yet our lives have never seemed more self-contained. Western societies are increasingly a matter of discrete single, couple, or family plots, private spaces designed to sustain themselves apart from any conception of a whole. That tendency toward a discretionary existence accounts for the familiarity of the floating, customized Xanadu of the Internet, as well as the hunger for community it seemed to satisfy. The clock was restarted, and the challenge to scale one's finite sense of time against an ultimate infinity was compounded by a sense of hair-straightening acceleration—the sudden potential to experience all things, all at once. It became possible—it became progress—to live at a speed and spacelessness that held the present in an exploratory suspension. We could prospect this new world like towheads in Narnia, with the sense that life on the outside was paused where we left it, and that “together” we might invent an end to loneliness.

What nobody told us is that nature may abhor a vacuum, but in its natural state longing is one big sucking sound. Over the last decade, the tightening cycle of nostalgia choking Western culture has proliferated into a kind of fractal loop, and for this we blame each other. But our backward fixations are less a product of the desire to stop the clock or retreat to a more fruitful era than the failure to adjust to a blown-out sense of time. In fact, what we call nostalgia today is too much remembrance of too little. We remember with the totemic shallowness, the emotional stinginess of sentiment. And we experience the present with the same superficial effort. Like overworked busboys gesturally wiping down tables between lunch-rush patrons, we launder the events of the day with the estrangements of irony, the culture's favored detergent—or dead-earnest ideology, its competing brand—just to get on to the next one.

On the one hand, perhaps all of the world's longing has led to this moment. Maybe this is what the poets warned about—Werther and Wordsworth and Whitman, all the wigged-out piners down the ages—maybe it wasn't precisely petunias and print media and high-speed rail they were worried about but
this exact moment
. This, of course, has been said before. It's impossible to know how different our concerns are from those of Hofer's Swiss soldier sulking on the coast of Sweden, or the Dutch student dreaming of her mother's toast with hagelslag at Oxford. It's impossible to know how deeply programmed we are to long for different times, places, tastes—the tinted comforts of memory. It's impossible to know, in a time that is no time and only time and all times, all the time, how that programming might shake out. But one suspects Broadway revivals might be involved.

On the other hand are the human things unchanged by time and technology. Things, perhaps, like the cosmic, wall-eating longing that takes light-years to get to you only to confer—burning past your self and any emotion you have known or might know to your very molecules—the unbearable nothingness from which it came. That stuff's still kicking around. But again, the vessels we fashion to contain and commodify fathomless emotions now often look a lot like
Jersey Boys
, or jelly shoes, or the memes that streak across the Internet, fostering what little cultural intimacy is tenable when we are so many and moving so goddamn fast.

If anything could, recalibrating and redistributing the weight of our shared past might begin to restore a sense of pace to the culture, relieve it from the sleeperhold of easy nostalgias, and reroute the collective longing behind those impulses in some more useful direction. Svetlana Boym says nostalgia outbreaks often follow a revolution, and to the Velvet and the French I suppose we must add the Facebook. Though it seems unfair for a fogyish revival to court its constituents as they move through their thirties, which is to say just as the fog is finally clearing.

*   *   *

I was buying gum and uranium-enriched sunscreen not too long ago when the drugstore clerk was swept into a Proustian vortex by the sight of my gold Motorola RAZR on the counter. “Ohhhh,” she sighed, dumping my purchases into a tiny plastic bag. “I know that phone. I wanted one of those
so bad
.” She beamed at the memory. “That was
the phone
.” It was a rare moment of gadget relevance for me, so much so that I didn't notice her use of the past tense and said something shy about how you don't see many of the gold ones around. My clerk frowned. “Tsssk—not
anymore
,” she said. “I'm talkin' like
two years ago
. When I was in
high school
.” I punched in my PIN. “I have a BlackBerry now.” I covered the phone with my palm and slid it off the counter. “You need to upgrade.”

And I did, believe me. Let's call it the theory of receptivity 2.0.

The problem, if you will permit it to be thought a problem, is that I can already feel myself reaching the point my grandmother hit in her eighties. For her it was the airplane, the car, the telephone, the radio, the movies, um, the atom bomb, television, microwaves, space travel, CD, DVD, ADHD—fine. But the cell phone was a gadget too far; my grandma simply topped out. There's a limit to the assimilating one person can do in a lifetime, and she reached it with fifteen years to go. I was the teenager who complained about being made to whip cream by hand in her kitchen, the congenitally late but ultimately enthusiastic adopter of everything wireless, compressed, ephemeral, convenient, and generally knuckle-sparing about the digital revolution. And yet every other week now, when I hear of something like Google glasses—which I guess are goggles that annotate the visible world with information about what can be bought, eaten, or sexually enjoyed therein—my first thought is a grandmotherly
Aaaaand I'm out.

My knees are still good, my friends! I have perfect eyesight, and you know why? Because I let someone
cut into my eyeballs with a laser
. I don't hold biweekly
Fight Club
vigils in my living room, frost commemorative Tracy Flick cupcakes for friends, or wrap myself around a life-size Ralph Fiennes pillow each night. But the older I get, the more protective I feel of something like 1999, a time that felt interesting even then because it was so firmly allied with the present. The longings I associate with it are longings outside of time, larger than me and the movies both. To experience such a radical burst of cinema in my own time stopped me in my tracks, but hardly permanently. If anything, it kept me seeking that feeling, of being a part of something remarkable, and staying awake enough to know it. If anything, I fear not having it in me to care in that same way about the latest tablet, or to develop strong feelings for what amounts to a delivery system, or to imprint sense memories on a soon-to-be-obsolete aluminum slab. Which is to say I worry less about being left behind than not wanting to board the party bus in the first place.

In a 1968 conversation with Marshall McLuhan, Norman Mailer used the example of plane travel—the latter word, as McLuhan points out, taken from the French verb
to work
—to illustrate his fear of a poorly inhabited present. “I don't want to come on and be everybody's Aunt Sophronia and complain about the good old days, which I never knew either,” Mailer said, by way of qualifying his feeling that flying a thousand miles in an hour means moving through “whole areas of existence which we have not necessarily
gained
. It may be confounding, it may finally be destructive of what is best in the human spirit.”

McLuhan replied with one of his casually immortal predictions: “If you push that all the way, what it means is that we will increasingly tend to inhabit all of these areas in depth, simultaneously.” Mailer took this like a shiv to the spleen. “But we will not inhabit them
well
!” he cried. “We will inhabit them with a
desperately bad fit
!”

I'm not sure I ever knew the good old days either. It's too soon to tell. And believe me, young people, I know the case against me better than you ever could: I rarely go to shows anymore; I don't troll the sites I can't even name for hot new sounds; I never got into Mumblecore; too often I read new books because I'm being paid to; and it's probably a matter of months before I look in the mirror and see Ethan Hawke staring back. I'm right there with you. But tell me, have you seen 1999? I was young then, but it didn't mean that much to me. It seems like a while ago, I know, but it won't be long before you're standing where I am now, trying to sort your personal history from the stuff that stands alone. Time used to do that work for us, but time's a little tired these days. Time needs a minute. For those of us born into pieces—you and me both, pal—the challenge is not
salvaging
a meaningful sense of time but determining how to build one within our current parameters, and then inhabit it well. I guess I can only say you'd be amazed how much the 1999s and the Ethan Hawkes of the world can help you with that, if you let them.

*   *   *

About two years after moving to New York and not long after the release of
Before Sunset
, I found myself sharing a room with Ethan Hawke. Should you move to New York and stick around long enough, eventually you will too. A group of us were huddled in a penthouse at the Tribeca Ritz for an informal brunch. Whether genuinely felt or a function of decorum, the hostess showed a helpless ambivalence about the space, which she informed me was bought for a song—and here we bow our heads to consider whatever her version of that tune might be—when the building went condo in late 2001. She and I had paused our tour of the apartment to consider the spare bedroom's northern exposure when I felt Ethan Hawke draw up to my side.

I could tell you about the way he ate chicken curry with his hands but parsed a cupcake with a knife and fork, or the loud, actorly register of his voice across the room, or the way, during our brief exchange—the hell-or-high-water piece of him every person in that room was going to claim before he got away—he'd only pause from his uncomfortable flitting to grant eye contact when I paid him a compliment. I remember those things, as well as the view—out of the living room's panoramic, southwesterly window bay—of what seemed to be endless harbor beyond Miss Liberty's straining arm, and the horror I felt when a puzzled author with a blond bowl-cut approached the glass to ask if the lone child on the premises belonged to me. But beyond them is a memory of accrued and connective meaning. Beyond them is simply the sense of being engaged in a new and yet distinctly familiar way with Ethan Hawke's face, and the felicities of time.

As a kid, probably around when I first saw that face, I nursed a secret conviction about how the perfect movie could be made. It would tell the story of a life, start to finish, only instead of makeup and lighting and showy acting, a commitment of decades would capture the effects of time. How had no one thought of imprinting the celluloid version of a story that spanned, say, thirty years with the truth by actually filming it over thirty years? It would be a life's work, and a work shot through with life. If someone just took the time, I felt sure, by at least one measure of default it would be the greatest movie ever made.

I used to refer to myself as a nostalgic child: I mourned our kitchen garbage bin's transition from paper to plastic as though it were the end of the belle epoque; when my father bought a new car, I took it as a personal insult to the past; and as far back as I can remember, I have been drawn to people and art beyond my lifetime's reach. Ten was a tough birthday, as I recall; the ascent to double digits felt so total. How different, anyway, would twelve be from twenty-one, or seventy-two from twenty-seven, or thirty-three from thirty-three? Surely a person had to hit one hundred for time's fullness to register in the same way; the rest is numerical noise.

But it's something like learning of a movie that matches my ten-year-old specifications almost exactly, a film currently listed on IMDb as the
Untitled 12-Year Project
, which began shooting in 2002 and has a scheduled release date of 2015—it is finding out that this movie is being directed by Richard Linklater and counts Ethan Hawke among its cast that gives all of my early, instinctive jockeying with time and its tyrannies a kind of amber—not to say golden—glow. Like that drawing of the old lady whose nose becomes a young woman's chin in another glance, time's sorceries freeze under close scrutiny and flower when permitted a shift of perspective.