![]() ![]() In early Jacobean England, the cult of Good Queen Bess was flourishing. Just over a century after the dawning of the European Renaissance, we can see another, very different, example of nostalgia. Well, Plato might have prized it, but you don't have to read much of him to understand that the world that produced Plato was far from ideal. Learning Greek was itself rather fashionable among the Florentine intelligentsia, so some artists were able to read Plato in the original, but what seems to have inspired the early flowering of Renaissance art is something like nostalgia for an ideal world that had existed 2,000 years before, a world that apparently prized human dignity. But what did Raphael and Michelangelo and Piero della Francesca really know of Athens in the 6th century BC? You might say the Renaissance was an exercise in long-range nostalgia, all those artists in 15th-century Florence looking to Ancient Greece for models of form and balance and civilisation and humanity. ![]() In fact, I'd argue that with this sort of nostalgia, some aspects of it must always be imagined. It's a general longing for the past, real or imagined. This is far less specific and much more interesting. I don't think there's anything terribly mysterious about that sort of nostalgia.īut there's also societal nostalgia. This is when you get a whiff of a certain type of industrial floor polish and are instantly transported back to your primary school, or when you hear a song on the radio and it reminds you of a particular summer holiday or an early girlfriend or boyfriend. So how does a fashion for nostalgia take root? Why do we need the 'good old days'? The first thing to say is that there's more than one sort of nostalgia. Nostalgia is always renewing itself, and yet the tendency to look back fondly has been around a long time. Well, it's like one of those moments in front of the mirror. So to find early rock music, real rock music, rock 'n' roll, classed as nostalgia is. I'm not quite old enough to remember this Elvis, by the time I was paying attention he was already singing his ballads, but I do remember the early Rolling Stones records, and the apparently burning question: Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone? I didn't have a daughter, I was six, so the question was academic, but I understood the point well enough: this music, and the musicians who made it, were dark and dangerous and very possibly in league with the Devil. This was Elvis Presley, and, together with the commies, he represented a twin threat to normal civilised life. ![]() That was the voice that in 1955 struck something close to terror into the hearts of respectable, middle-aged middle America. It's not quite come to that yet, but the other day I had a similar moment of reckoning, and it was when I noticed a compilation of early rock 'n' roll tunes, on a nostalgia label. According to the poet Don Paterson, there's also the occasion 'so much more terrible we rarely speak of it', when a man spots himself naked in a full-length mirror and recognises his mother. It's a commonplace that all men have the experience, sooner or later, of peering into a shaving mirror and seeing their fathers looking back at them: as good a reason as any to avoid shaving, I'd say. Imagine being stopped for speeding by one of them: how embarrassing it would be. One day, without warning, you'll be passing a couple of police officers in the street and it will occur to you they're really just children. Andrew Ford: Everyone has moments in life when they feel suddenly old. ![]()
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