Glory Daze

Glory days, well they’ll pass you by …

There is, embedded within this über-Springsteenian lyric (that you have heard a million times either voluntarily or while trapped in a retail environment that believes in emotional coercion through classic rock), a kind of gentle threat disguised as nostalgia’s theme music: namely, that your best moments are already behind you, and worse, that you will someday speak about them in a tone that suggests both pride and a mild but irreversible neurological event.

For those of us now at an advanced age where you’d think that people would have had enough of psyllium love songs, this is not, on its face, encouraging.

Pass the Metamucil.

And yet — and yet — there is a certain demographic (again: you, eventually, unless you take decisive and probably unsustainable action) for whom this line functions less as a warning than as an instruction manual.

A suggestion, even, that one might begin pre-emptively curating these so-called “glory days” into a digestible, Cream of Wheat narrative format suitable for later recitation at barbecues, reunions and the increasingly niche but still extant phenomenon of “running into someone from high school and pretending you both remember each other better than you do.”

Nostalgia, in this advanced stage, ceases to be memory and becomes instead a kind of mind-crafted, DIY species of homespun raconteuring, where the raw materials of lived experience are hand-selected, lightly sanded and arranged into something resembling a coherent past.

Not accurate, mind you — accuracy is for historians and people involved in legal disputes — but fictively satisfying.

Consider the way certain moments metastasize in importance over time. A conversation that lasted approximately four minutes in a parking lot — during which nothing particularly notable was said, and during which you were primarily concerned with whether your fly was at half mast or there was a bite-size floret of broccoli stuck between your two front teeth  — becomes, decades later, a pivotal emotional turning point. You will recall the light (ethereal), the air (crisp), the emotional subtext (profound), none of which were consciously registered at the time because you were, again, worried about coming off like a dork.

There is, in other words, a kind of retroactive cinematography applied to the past. Angles improve. Lighting softens. Dialogue sharpens into something almost suspiciously quotable. The sexual chemistry was crackling like the aurora borealis over Yellowknife in February, even though the other party was never the slightest bit interested and had forgotten about this entirely meaningless encounter by the following Wednesday.

Entire scenes acquire thematic weight, as if your life were not a series of loosely connected improvisations but a tightly scripted indie film that, while modest in budget, is rich in meaning and features a soundtrack you absolutely could not have afforded. The centrepiece for which goes (take it from the top, boys): Glory days Well, they’ll pass you by, glory days In the wink of a young girl’s eye, glory days Glory days

This is where the time travel metaphor begins to break down in a way that is both bilious and, if you are willing to squint, kind of funny. Funny the way root canals are a scream.

Nostalgia promises access to the past but delivers instead a heavily remastered edition, complete with bonus features and director’s commentary provided by your current self, who has the dual disadvantages of hindsight and a vested interest in not appearing to have been a complete doofus for most of their formative years.

You were, by the way. This is fine. Everyone was. The problem arises when nostalgia attempts to suggest that you were, in fact, a kind of misunderstood genius whose brilliance was not fully appreciated at the time due to external factors such as “the culture” or “other people.” Particularly Mr. Gleave in Physics 317.

Stagger too far down that lost road and you’ll wind up blogging about nostalgia well into your seventies when you should be, I dunno, regaling friends with fabulous tales of derring-do from your high school days that they’ve heard a thousand times before and know perfectly well are hyperbolic, overdramatized, self-aggrandizing delusions.

(Technically, this insatiable itch to verbalize is known in Epistemic Elvis Wistfulness circles as “a little less action and a little more conversation.”)

In any case, the arcane minutiae of the details don’t bear parsing. The uncomplicated axiom is simply this: If you’re still focused on what happened in high school 50 or 60 years ago, you probably haven’t been paying enough attention to the last 50 or 60 years.

There is also the small matter of memory’s apparent commitment to what might be called narrative efficiency, which is to say that it eliminates anything that does not serve the story you are now telling yourself about your life. Entire days vanish. Weeks collapse into single impressions. Different people are conflated into single characters, like in the movies. Months are represented by one or two “key moments,” as if your existence were a slide deck prepared by someone who believed strongly in minimalism.

This is, strictly from a data perspective, somewhat alarming. If your actual lived experience were subjected to this level of compression in real time, you would assume something had gone catastrophically wrong.

And yet, in retrospect, it feels not only acceptable but desirable. The messiness of real life — the endless, repetitive, often baffling accumulation of moments — gets distilled into something like essence, or what a marketing professional might call “your personal brand.”

The further absurdity is that this process improves (that is to say, deteriorates) with age, as the original data degrades. Details blur, timelines wobble and your brain — refusing to leave a vacuum — begins to interpolate.

It fills gaps with what must have happened, or what should have happened, or what would make for a better anecdote when you are, say, explaining to a younger person why their current struggles are both temporary and, in a way that will most certainly irritate them, “the best years of their life.”

(This statement, it should be noted, is guaranteed to produce either polite nodding or active resentment, because no one currently experiencing their life believes it to be, in any meaningful sense, the best of anything. Lord, they hope not anyway. That designation is only available retroactively, once the inconvenience of actually living through it has been removed.)

At this point, nostalgia reveals its true function, which is not to transport you back in time but to construct a version of the past that justifies the present. It is less a portal than a public relations campaign.

The you of now looks back at the you of then and, instead of seeing a confused individual making decisions based on incomplete information and questionable judgment, sees a protagonist engaged in a meaningful journey toward … well, this exact moment, here at the bus station.

Boring a total stranger.

Which is fine, as far as it goes. It is arguably necessary. Without this kind of narrative sanding and smoothing, the sheer randomness of lived experience might become intolerable. You might begin to suspect that your life lacks structure, that events do not occur for reasons — that you are not, in fact, building toward anything resembling a climax. Look what happened to poor Elvis in that bathroom. We’re all going to Graceland.

Nostalgia steps in at this point like an overqualified editor and says, gently but firmly, “No, no — there is a story here. There is meaning. Purpose. Let’s just move some things around.”

And so it does. It rearranges. It highlights. It quietly deletes the hours spent doing nothing in particular, the conversations that led nowhere, the down time spent reading Green Lantern comic books, decisions that were neither right nor wrong but simply … made. Oh, and that first marriage, of course.

What remains is a version of your past that is not only more coherent but more livable, which is to say that it can be revisited without inducing the kind of existential vertigo that might otherwise accompany a truly accurate recollection.

This is one reason nostalgia is so persistent, despite its obvious flaws. It works. Not as time travel — because you cannot, under any circumstances, re-enter the consciousness of your former self, who was operating under conditions that are now permanently inaccessible — but as something arguably more useful: a way of making peace with the fact that time has passed at all.

Gonna take a sentimental journey. Gonna set my heart at ease. Gonna make a sentimental journey. To improve old memories.

Also, and this should not be discounted, it provides excellent material for stories in which you come across as significantly cooler, wiser and more emotionally articulate than you had any reasonable right to be at the time.

Which, if we are being honest, is half the point.

The other half of the equation is your inability to remember pretty much anything from the way you’re living now. So what else are you going to talk about? Yeah, just sitting back Trying to recapture a little of the glory of ... Well, the time slips away Leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of …

Glory days

Yeah, they’ll pass you by, glory days

In the wink of a young girl’s eye, glory days

Glory days