#120: Nostalgia and the Cafe Figaro

October 5, 2014

Thoughts of the Café Figaro came into my mind this morning for really no reason at all. It was a coffee shop in Greewich Village frequented by beatniks and wannabe beats from middle class homes back in the 50s and 60s. At first, I couldn’t even remember the name. Now I’ve got the name, but I can’t remember what it looked like. Just fragments. Well, my time with the Figaro was over 50 years ago, altogether a different world. But nostalgia thrives on time.

I have a friend who’s mildly in love with a Lady something-or-other whose portrait hangs over his fireplace. Actually, a lot like the film-noir Laura with Dana Andrews. Another friend introduced me to the wartime memoir of Marie Vassiltchikov, a post revolution Russian princess adrift in wartime Berlin. He was clearly in love with her. Both of these women were dead, so it’s clear that people can be in love with people who are no longer alive. Can one be in love with a fictional character? Difficult to say, but my guess is that there is no logical connection between an emotion and a fact. If my friend found out that Lady something or other had never existed, that she was just an artist’s construction, he would most likely still stay in love with her.

Which brings me to nostalgia, because nostalgia is a kind of being in love. In love with a time, a place, a set of events, even a person, but it’s defined by temporal distance. This means that nostalgia is quintessentially romantic. It’s true that while romance is most always dependent on the soft-filtering given by the passage of  time, there are other ways of achieving that misty effect. For example, the influence of raging hormones can certainly improve one’s perception of things. Still, other things being equal, romance is based on the long ago and far away. This is why fairy tales always begin with those words.

Well, time has soft-filtered the Café Figaro for me, so much so that I can barely remember it. Yes, one can feel nostalgia for a time barely remembered, perhaps even more strongly because of that. When I visited Vienna for my first serious stay there, I was overcome with a nostalgia for a world my parents had lived, but I never had. It was an intense feeling episode. And of course the Vienna of the early 20th c I was responding to had been a truly shitty time, and still I felt this overwhelming bitter-sweet emotion. Maybe Vienna is a poor example, maybe there was really something uniquely beguiling about it. Both Freud and Stefan Zweig among others had very powerful love-hate for the city. No, I think it was probably nostalgia. The Viennese were artists of nostalgia, treacly kitschy nostalgia.

I have no problem identifying my feelings about NYC and the Figaro in the 50s and 60s as nostalgia. But describing the actual octet of emotions is very difficult to do, since like a real chamber piece it changes with the moment, though the instruments remain the same throughout. The dominant theme is that of sehnsucht or a special kind of “longing.” But there’s also a sadness and a mourning for something important that’s been irrevocably lost. This something that’s been lost seems to me to lie at the heart of nostalgia, but what is it?

I think it’s a longing for the romantic wonders of lives not lived and never to be lived. Roads not taken and never to be taken.

But there ought to be a word that complements “nostalgia,” for that emotion we have when we are young and contemplating a yet unknown future, a single but not yet definite one of the paths. When we are old and look back the past is hazy and indistinct, filtered into soft focus, barely discernable in its detail. Often we intentionally or not revise it. But the future is at least as hazy and indistinct when we are young and looking forward. And there’s also a longing there, a longing for the future.

The problem with nostalgia is that there is an inescapable disappointment in the moment that we feel it. We know right in the moment that we feel it that the time cannot be retrieved and we mourn it.

The difference is that with youthful future-longing, while we also yearn for something inaccessible, we will eventually get what we want, if we’re lucky. But there’s once again a disappointment; by the time we arrive at our destination in the future, the longing we felt for it in our youth has long disappeared, to be replaced with a longing for the past from which we began.

When I sat in the Café Figaro in the early 60s, broke and depressed, nursing the single coffee I could afford, fantasizing about a future about which I could only hope that it would be much better, it didn’t occur to me for a moment that there would come a time when I would be nostalgic for those moments.