Director's Statement

Humanities Center Theme for 2009-10: Memory, Nostalgia, Ruins

I am in the Strand Café, with Chloe, after the pictures and that memorable kiss. We sat at a plastic table drinking our favorite drink, a tall glass of fizzy orange crush with a dollop of vanilla ice cream floating in it. Remarkable the clarity with which, when I concentrate, I can see us there. Really, one might almost live one’s life over, if only one could make a sufficient effort of recollection.
—John Banville

Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

"What is the past if not unfinished work, swampy, fecund, seductively revisable?" writes Stephen Dunn in his poem, "Our Parents." Lately, though, I’ve been wondering if the problem isn’t so much that the past is never complete, as that it is, so to speak, super-complete: even when it has been perfected it refuses to rest content in its state of perfection. It just won’t stay still. The architect or artist, when she begins to conceive a work, thinks of it as finished: achieved, ideal, and unblemished. And so we think of the "finished" work as the end-state, the final stage toward which the thing aspires. But to think this is to forget that there is always a further stage, that of the post-finished work, the work that crumbles, fades, decays. Is it too much to suggest that it is in this stage that things reveal their true selves?

To want that our works should persist, should survive the work of time’s silent and indefatigable demolition crews—what could be more human than this? And yet, how human would we remain if that wish were granted? "When old age shall this generation waste, Though shalt remain…" sings Keats to his Grecian urn. Yeats, for his part, longed to be reincarnated as a machine:

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling…

But the very concept of desire seems to contain within itself not only the possibility of loss, but the necessity of distance, of separation. You do not desire what is already yours, or long for the place where you stand. ("Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances…" writes Robert Hass in "Meditation at Lagunitas.") No wonder, then, that so many of our desires are directed to the unrecoverable past. No wonder that nostalgia—the desire to retrieve what is, by the very nature of human existence, irretrievable—is perhaps the most powerful and, let’s be honest, the most delicious, of all the various species of desire.

So many of the ruins that seem to say so much to us were once just ordinary buildings where people conducted the routine and mundane tasks of quotidian life. It is in the process of growing ancient and falling apart that they have acquired their special gravity, their ability to speak to our most private selves. A first edition that was once nothing more than a bright clean volume on somebody’s shelf becomes vastly more poignant and eloquent once its author, and the era and world in which it came into being, have passed away. Perhaps the remains of some of the places we ourselves pass through every day without seeing, or of the items we make casual use of without ever really noticing, will one day serve as triggers for the wistful nostalgia of some future person or other. The traces we leave will not be the ones we mean to leave. They never are. But if this thought bothers us we can take comfort in the immortal words of Jethro Tull (the band, that is, not the 18th century agriculturalist):

Happy and I'm smiling,
walk a mile to drink your water.
You know I'd love to love you,
and above you there's no other.
We'll go walking out
while others shout of war's disaster.
Oh, we won't give in,
let’s go living in the past.

—Troy Jollimore, Philosophy