Nostalgia - Part 1

Nostalgia, it’s a funny thing. Especially the bittersweet reaction to it - happy that it, whatever ‘it’ may be, occurred and sad that ‘it’s’ now gone. I should know a bit about nostalgia, at least the boring side of it anyway, for in my A2 level of English we studied the pastoral genre. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty for in reality I’ve locked away all the things I learned in Year 13 over the summer, ready to be released when they are inevitably needed at university. However, the basic principle of pastoral found in many Philip Larkin, R.S Thomas and Dylan Thomas poems to name a few is an overall nostalgic yearning for the past, when the grass was greener, the apples were juicier, the birds sang lovelier and the children were innocent…ter.

Come to think of it, many may find The Great Gatsby, a classic piece of American Literature to hold major ties with nostalgia – the last few pages in which Fitzgerald depicts the raw, natural beauty of the American landscape in the eyes of the new settlers wafts of the ‘American Dream’, what it once meant and what it means now (now being 1925, faced with the likes of Tom and Daisy Buchanan and their money, greed and carelessness).

Bah! This post has not-so-suddenly turned into an English essay! (Well at least that bodes well for the future.) Hmmm, let me recollect my thoughts for this post was actually supposed to digress off and into my nostalgic stance on video games, then possibly branch off into the wider meanings of such (see, I do plan these things). For now, we’ll call this Part 1 - the preface, the prologue, the set-up, if you will and be done with it.  Look out for Part 2, where instead of discussing the serious themes of literature we’ll be talking about things like this…