It happens every year at this time: I'm walking through Wal-Mart or someplace similar and I see the aisles marked "Back to School" and the parents piling up carts with binders, with their doleful children standing by, and my chest seizes up: I feel a depression verging on panic. That is because I was a weird kid and I did feel that depression and fear every year when I actually did have to go back to school in two weeks. (I was neurotic, and my fear had to do with anxiety over doing all my homework on time, an anxiety that I find has only grown more paralyzing now that I do homework for a living. It's why I still have, every time I am feeling overworked, the dream of being back in university, about to write an exam in a course I have not attended. I know, everyone has this dream.)
I tell myself I do not have to go back to school, do not have to face the sarcasm and temper tantrums of Mr. Spencer, who terrorized Grade 5, and still I have the alienating feeling of homesickness every time the weather starts to cool. I am immediately thrown into the dislocated uncertainty of the undergraduate deciding whether he should spend the afternoon looking for an apartment or lining up to register for courses. That mood still defines the fall for me, 25 years later.
And it's that mood - and other quasi-nostalgic moments like it - that gives me a glimmer of understanding of why writers of fiction are so taken with the past.
Writing about the past is something I've been quite stern about in recent years, just because - in this country, anyway - that activity so dominates the literary landscape. The preoccupation with history has always seemed to me to reflect a disdain for the present, as if the present were trivial or corrupt in some way. The fixation with the past as the only place of authentic feeling or significant action has always struck me as somewhat goody-goody and also romanticized. It's possibly just a coincidence, but historical fiction does seem to be so often moralizing, or at least morally simple.
But now I, hypocrite, find myself, in moments like the Wal-Mart angst moment, flooded with the past and an intense urge to explain to everyone around me how everything used to be so different. Because I've only just realized it, in the past 10 years or so - how so many of the social signals and habits I grew up with are gone, how everything - and I don't just mean how you make a phone call or type an essay - is so radically different. That realization creeps up on you. L.P. Hartley famously wrote, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Like an immigrant from that country I am eager to describe its landscape to people who have never been there, to draw maps of its fantastic geography, to recount its strange vocabulary and customs.
I seem to want to do this particularly in the presence of young people, who missed the world history that shaped me. I want to describe to them what it was like to discuss with a bunch of quite typical public high-school kids whether you preferred Chopin to Debussy; what it was like to "neck" for days with a Catholic girl who wouldn't let you touch her until you were "going out"; what it was like to have nowhere to go in the evening, even in a city, but a fluorescent-lit Tim Hortons; what it was like to spend four years at a university where you didn't know anybody who knew anybody who had a television (watching TV in that place and time would have marked you as a hopeless conformist, incapable of critical thinking); what it was like to receive long, hand-written letters from travelling friends that only concerned what they were reading, and to spend almost every evening writing them. I would feel that I was describing the land of the Tartars, on distant hazy steppes.
Of course the impulse is partly nostalgic: One doesn't remember the restrictions and constraints of earlier times, just its freedoms, and as one gains responsibilities one craves freedom. Nostalgia is an unproductive motivation for the creation of art. It's precisely my awareness of an underlying nostalgia that makes me chafe when I read the dullest of the fiction about immigrant life on the prairies, or about Grandma's cooking from the Old Country. Nostalgia ends up creating art that is more in the service of personal therapy than entertainment.
So why do I so adore Marcel Proust, a guy who explored nostalgia - and that particular urge to relive a period that now feels foreign - for 4,000 pages over seven volumes of the most beautiful and intriguing fiction you are ever likely to read? Nothing earnest or goody-goody about Proust.
I can't write like Marcel Proust. Or even like Alice Munro, who does the recent past so pitch-perfectly. And I don't want to tell uplifting tales of the triumph of the human spirit in a time of hardship. Perhaps I just want, like D.H. Lawrence, to "weep like a child for the past." So I still think the impulse is not to be trusted, and I will do my best to postpone it again, delay it until I am truly too old to write about anything else.