Nostesia
I read some sort of union poster at school this week and liked a word it made up and then used.
The word is "Nostesia." A combination of nostalgia and amnesia. The commies who put it on the poster (just kidding, NEA) were making a point about how anyone NOT employed in education looks back on their educational past with this jaded combination of nostalgia and amnesia: everything was better back then, and everything is going to hell in a handbasket now. Sound familiar? The view comes, the poster claims, from people who are far removed from the realities faced by educators and who have an unrealistic quest to return things to "the way things used to be" when things may have never been that way in the first place!
I've been chewing on the concept for awhile. Nostesia manifests itself in all sorts of venues besides education: entertainment, athletics, politics, religion, history, to name a few. My own experience with nostesia came watching Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark the other day. While I still generally enjoyed the movie, the acting was cheesier, the special effects less special, and the plot and storyline more contrived than I remembered. Star Wars (the original) is that way as well. Darth Vader is a huge wuss in the first one. No wonder the most recent Star Wars movies are disappointing: they are just as good as the first ones!
Go back to any happy experience you had earlier in your life, and you may detect some degree of nostesia as well. Another example: at a stake service project this morning, I listened to some stake leaders (around the age of 60) talk about past stake softball regionals and the heroic feats they remembered. Some were their own feats, others belonged to legendary stake members of days past. Classic nostesia manifestation.
Loyal readers, do you have any examples of nostesia? What causes this phenomenon? Discuss.
posted by Rob @ 9:25 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Movies are often notesial for me, too. I once thought the Young Guns 2 was the greatest movie ever. I watched it at least twenty times on HBO when we lived in Washington.
Another nostesial thing for me is when I went to Snow College. I don't tend to think about how it was cold there most of the time, or how I ate bad food almost exclusively. The thing is, though, I can't help but smile looking back at it, and that makes me think that perhaps nostesia is a great thing in some cases. Regular life is almost all drudgery, and the fun things that happen are notable because of their rarity, and they are therefore easily recalled. I agree that nostesia is terrible when people try to use it to "bring back" a non-existent era of total happiness.
Anyway, great thought-provoking post.
Good point. Nostesia is like a lot of other things in that it is neither inherently good nor evil, but just is. Storytelling is ingrained into the human experience and the best ones involve a lot of exaggeration and fish tales.
The movie Big Fish takes on this topic in a pretty clever way. Too bad you have to see Danny DeVito's butt.
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