You perceive time based on how much stuff has happened. If you have an uneventful week, it will feel as if your week flew by. If you have a week jam-packed with activity, especially new activities, it will feel as if your week lasted a long time. If lots of things have happened that week, your perception of time has to “stretch” to accommodate them all. If nothing new happened, just the usual repetitive events, then it will feel as if the week took no time at all. There wasn’t much worth recording, so very little mental “tape” was used. An eventful week is a long week. An uneventful week is a short week.
Things that happen on an annual basis tend to stand out in your memory. When you show up to a Christmas gathering with your family, you might feel like this: “Man, it feels as if the last time was yesterday!” But of course, in the past two years, you’ve only had two Christmases. Two events isn’t very many, so the mental space for “How long ago was last Christmas?” is only situated relative to one other event. “Two years” feels like a long time because you’re considering all the stuff that happens in two years. “Two Christmases ago” doesn’t feel like a long time, because you’re only considering two different Christmas parties you’ve had.
Which brings me to nostalgia. Nostalgia, it seems to me, is an emotion of transience. You don’t get nostalgic for things that are still here. You get nostalgic for things that are gone. More accurately: you get nostalgic for times, not things. For example, I once visited my hometown. I felt very nostalgic while I was there. It’s not that my hometown has somehow passed away; it still exists, in much the same state as when I was a kid. Rather, I’m nostalgic for the time of my life that I spent there. The phenomenon that makes me nostalgic — this childhood toy, this song from my adolescence, a picture of this person I once dated — is something that very well may exist. The toy is still intact; the song can still be listened to; the person I dated is still alive, and indeed might be someone I’d rather not meet again. But I’m not really nostalgic for the toy or the song or the person. What I’m nostalgic for is my childhood, my adolescence, or the time when I dated her.
Even more accurately, I’m nostalgic for the quality of a time of my life. If you think back to your childhood, it has a certain feel. A certain “smell”, if you like that analogy. You could almost say, a certain spirit. There’s something intangible, some mysterious effusion, that can only belong to one time in your life. I can think back to my early twenties and feel that time, and it’s a very different feel from high school, which is very different from my childhood. C.S. Peirce called this an “ontological first”, an un-situated suchness. It is a matter of great interest to me that this “suchness” seems to arise from a mess of unrelated phenomena, and yet somehow be independent of them. Again, it’s like a spirit. Something that clings to our memories the way dew clings to you in the fog, and yet, sits above them somehow.
We become nostalgic when some magical trinket — the toy, the song, the picture — invokes a spirit from the past. Nostalgia is the occurrence of a seance, a kind of necromancy.
By the dismal tarns and pools
Where dwell the Ghouls,—
By each spot the most unholy—
In each nook most melancholy,—
There the traveller meets, aghast,
Sheeted Memories of the Past—
Shrouded forms that start and sigh
As they pass the wanderer by—
White-robed forms of friends long given,
In agony, to the Earth—and Heaven.
—Edgar Alan Poe, Dream-Land
Autumn nostalgia is a well-known phenomenon. Everyone feels a bit wistful when the leaves begin to change. There’s a (fairly saccharine) album by the band Dream Theater called “A Change Of Seasons” that addresses this issue. It’s saccharine because it’s a cliché and it’s a cliché precisely because everyone knows about it already. Autumn nostalgia is the stuff of Hallmark cards and Kinkade paintings. It’s autumn, and we’re all sad about our pasts and busy remembering things. You know the drill.
But none of this addresses the question of why autumn makes us feel nostalgic.
When the seasons change, there is a point when we first notice the change. The leaves are changing; the wind has a cold bite in it, just a bit more fall than summer; you suck the air in through your nostrils, breathe out, and say, “Autumn!” Of course, you rationally know when the seasons are changing by looking at the calendar. But the event where you first feel the change of seasons doesn’t depend on the calendar. There’s a little mental switch that happens where something deep in you acknowledges that it’s fall, and this inward turn of seasons happens once a year. Just like the Christmas party, it’s a once-annual event. And like the Christmas party, it puts you in mind of all the other times happened. This, naturally, brings nostalgia. This nostalgia is potentiated in the case of autumn over other seasons, because autumn is when everything dies. The change from winter to spring is noticeable, in my neck of the woods, when there’s just a hint more summer in the air than fall. That’s a change that gets me excited. But when the air changes at the other end of the year, I feel relaxed. My eyes feel open wider. I feel less active, but strangely, more alert.
Autumn is the most nostalgic season. It’s as if the ending credits of the year have begun to roll and you can sit back and contemplate. It’s no wonder that the Celtic holiday of Samhain was in the autumn. Remember what I said, about how nostalgia invokes a spirit from the past? That’s Samhain for you. That’s Halloween. The Celts thought that the veil between our world and the spirit world was thinnest on Samhain, in the autumn. But, of course they would think that! What other time of the year is everyone being visited by ghosts? When the harvest is over and there’s not much to do, when everything is fading and your mind is in the past, spirits walk the earth.
And, of course, the fact that everything is dying reminds you of what’s waiting for you any day now. You don’t get to decide when. You’re a spirit walking the earth, too. Not for much longer.
The rhythms of nature, and their phenomenological consequences, make the autumn a good time to think about death. The modern world has upset this somewhat; most of us don’t work in agriculture and so don’t feel the relief of the year’s work being over because the harvest is done. But, the nostalgia still occurs reliably, as long as we still go outside frequently enough to notice the weather changing.
Given that our traditions are worth preserving, I think there’s a case for taking Halloween seriously. Not as a spooky magic day, per se, but definitely as a holiday where death plays a central role. The “spooky magic” side of it is how kids are meant to participate — and adults, too, for reasons of nostalgia. The kids can dress up in costumes. The adults can carve a jack-o-lantern with their kids (or by themselves) and remember their childhood. Confront what lies beneath the wistfulness of this season, which is transience and mortality. It doesn’t have to be depressing. It can be quite beautiful.
So if you’re wondering what to do for the spooky season, and you’re too old to trick-or-treat, there’s your answer. Dress up in a costume and go to a Renfaire if you want. Carve a pumpkin with the kids. But your job as an adult is to use this season for its historical purpose, the one the Celts knew very well: memento mori.