a dear friend wrote this in an email to me, after i concocted something about nostalgia and pain:
'About nostalgia...it's a function of the human condition that when we decide that an experience was, on balance, a good one, then our memory of it all tends to be shaped accordingly. We forget or edit out little aspects or nuances. Or as I like to say, we get all Rashomon about things. Hence the ache for nostalgia, just as we pine to breathe in that summer sunlight the way we did when we were children. We want it still despite the knowledge that the past is all but gone except for the ghosts of memory.'
'Or maybe memories are like karaoke-- where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen's bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn't know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning-- and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it's better to not know the lyrics to your life.'
