....Anne Murray
(January to December)
(We'll have moments to remember)
The New Year's Eve we did the town
The day we tore the goal post down
We will have these moments to remember
The quiet walks, the noisy fun
The ballroom prize we almost won
We will have these moments to remember
Though summer turns to winter
And the present disappears
The laughter we were glad to share
Will echo through the years
When other nights and other days
May find us gone our separate ways
We will have these moments to remember
(The drive in movie where we'd go)
(And somehow never watched the show)
We will have these moments to remember
Though summer turns to winter
And the present disappears
The laughter we were glad to share
Will echo through the years
When other nights and other days
May find us gone our separate ways
We will have these moments to remember
Nostalgia appeals to the feeling that the past offered delights no longer obtainable. Nostalgic representations of the past evoke a time irretrievably lost and for that reason timeless and unchanging. Strictly speaking, nostalgia does not entail the exercise of memory at all, since the past it idealizes stands outside time, frozen in unchanging perfection.
Memory too may idealize the past, but not in order to condemn the present. It draws hope and comfort from the past in order to enrich the present and to face what comes with good cheer. It sees past, present, and future as continuous. It is less concerned with loss than with our continuing indebtedness to a past the formative influence of which lives on in our patterns of speech, our gestures, our standards of honor, our expectations, our basic disposition toward the world around us.”
Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1991) 82-3.