Courtyard opened out into courtyard opened out into courtyard, and in the final courtyard, an art gallery was closing. It had opened shortly after the fall of the Wall, incandescent with idealism. Tonight was the opening of its closing exhibition. * What is art for? To critique society, to manufacture beauty, to make the artist lose all sense of time like a malfunctioning hourglass through which the sand just keeps pouring and pouring? * When I get a little money I buy books, if I have any left over I buy food and clothing. —Erasmus. This was printed on a bookmark tucked into each book she’d bought at the bookstore she used to frequent in her youth, which was closing. At this bookstore, courtyard after courtyard had opened in her mind. The bookstore was wood-paneled, with a spiral staircase leading up to fiction, and a spiral staircase leading down to nonfiction. At this bookstore, she had felt incandescent with idealism. * “One door closes, another opens”: a commonplace. The art gallery was closing; the bookstore was closing; but when their doors closed, the commonplace said, other doors would open. Other commonplaces. “The market takes care of itself.” * It was only at night, sometimes, that she realized that the door in the saying wasn’t really a door, it was only sgraffito, and the series of courtyards wasn’t really a series of courtyards, it was only a recurring dream of never arriving, walking permanently through archway after archway leading to the spiral staircase winding down to the ruins of nostalgia.
Nostalgia feels personal as a pearl feels personal in its shell, never knowing that beyond it are thousands of other mollusks depositing nacreous layers over parasites in thousands of other shells. * Many people remember the downtown of a neighborhood from their youth, with its dowdy department store and its five-and-dime, but one person is nostalgic for the clove cigarettes you could buy one at a time from a glass jar, another is nostalgic for the little blue Bakelite birds that cost a quarter, a third is nostalgic for the doughnut shop that became a Thai restaurant (and a fourth is nostalgic for the Thai restaurant, which became a vegan doughnut shop). * True, looking backward can either cause you to miss what’s ahead or envelop you in a warmth so contingent you understand how a coat can be made of translucent ashes. Every pearl is on a continuum with a parasite. * A fifth person was nostalgic for the dowdy downtown just because he knew the new people drinking and shopping in the new downtown were not, could not be nostalgic for it, because they had no idea it had ever existed. Ah, but they could. They could be nostalgic for a downtown they had no idea had ever existed. Because nostalgia is specific yet indiscriminate, benign yet opportunistic, personal yet collective, and if the twentieth century taught us anything it’s that everyone feels welcome to wander through the ruins of anyone else’s nostalgia.
We did not know anyone who had grown up in our neighborhood who could now afford to live in our neighborhood. None of us could afford to rent a house in our neighborhood, much less buy a house or even an apartment in a converted garage in our neighborhood. Over the years, the houses in our neighborhood had kept changing hands. They gained second stories, third stories, picture windows and skylights, hot tubs and balconies, gained terraces and gardens, lost yards, lost rhododendrons, gained sedge and lavender, lost juniper bushes, gained butterfly bushes and chard. We watched as houses in our neighborhood were knocked down and replaced by bigger houses, houses so big there was no room for a garden or a yard, big houses squeezed uneasily into their too–small lots, story stacked on story topped with a flat roof in a neighborhood of small houses with pitched roofs. Pitched roofs to shrug off the rain that had been hushing down since before our neighborhood was built, and that would be hushing down long after our neighborhood had all been knocked down. * And yet—in truth—we were not sure we knew for certain what “our neighborhood” meant. Did “our neighborhood” mean our neighbors, or the houses our neighbors had lived in, or the street grid, or some combination of the above? As our neighborhood gained infill, lost empty lots, lost gas guzzlers, gained hatchbacks, gained SUVs, gained cafés, lost taverns, lost children playing in the intersections, we had atomized to ever more distant suburbs, suburbs with names mangled from Native American names, or stolen from European names, or invented to sound like elevated and inviting names. Nevertheless, there persisted a delicate web of connection between us and the people who had also grown up in our neighborhood. This web was not a real web, and yet it was a real web. Undoubtedly there was also such a web connecting the people who’d grown up in the suburban neighborhoods we now lived in, which they could no longer afford. (And who were now atomized to ever more distant suburbs.) * A few of our parents still lived in the small houses with pitched roofs we had grown up in in our neighborhood. When we visited these houses, and helped our mother beat back the burgeoning butterfly bushes, we felt buried alive in the ruins of nostalgia. They were not real ruins, and yet they were real ruins.
We went to visit the natural history museum and discovered it was digitizing. The dioramas we used to lose our gaze in were gone—the trompe l’oeil space painted in realistic detail inviting us to forgo the details of the “real” space our eyes were fooled by every day. We couldn’t find the stuffed polar bear in his glass case, the badly taxidermied lynx we remembered dangling laxly from a branch, the specimen boxes of butterflies—great spangled fritillaries, brown meadows—whose wings had been chemically treated to unfurl dutifully for the viewer, the artfully arranged aviary with buttons under each bird you could press to hear a tinny reproduction of its call, birds who had given their lives so that we might live, i.e., acquire knowledge, i.e., the ability to identify the birds, their songs, knowledge we did not bury like the stuffed black squirrel had once buried nuts, but collected and hoarded and made no use of but felt for in our mental coat pockets from time to time, like the chestnut we kept feeling for in our real pocket all fall, long after its saps had evaporated and its living brown had hardened to a dead brown, a tiny nutcase of destiny containing the blueprint of the future tree whose dynasty of leaves it might have founded had we just left it on the ground, as if it granted us access to some knowledge for which we would forever be in arrears, we who had so little access to knowledge of our own future selves, or even of our current selves, for example, why we kept a chestnut in our pocket all fall, or why we turned the murderous pages of Birds of America enraptured, or why we cried each time we watched the video of the once–famous polar bear rotating in a daze from brain encephalitis before slipping from his artificial ice floe into his artificial ocean, or even why we hunted for the bear’s stuffed hull in the museum and finally found it shunted off to a side room, along with the lynx, the dusty butterflies, the silent birds–oh what to do, what to do, with all this matter, piling up in the side rooms inside us in the ruins of nostalgia.