Awakening the Nostalgia We Dare Not Kill
English. Spanish. Italian.
Fernando De Haro - The melancholic sunsets of September are a precise delivery. The sense of emptiness we feel isn't bewilderment, but our inner self asking for fulfillment.
September, with its soft light, awakens a burning nostalgia—a nostalgia you thought you had lost long ago. Sunsets become ambushes: they always arrive early and announce that summer is over, and that the promise made by the long days and midnight sun hasn't been kept. We didn't take that walk; we missed the last sunset; the kisses ended just when they were most tender; and all the joys weren't enough. Neither the long lunches with friends, nor the thousand-page novel by a Russian writer, nor the sincere words you hadn't heard in a long time.
Nothing was enough this summer either. You return home or to work, and for a few hours, you're struck by the great clarity that always visits us after the holidays. Everyday life appears as it is, without the camouflage of habit: excessive and small at the same time.
We usually kill this malaise, this loneliness that the return to normality leaves us with, in the name of realism, our adult condition, reason, and faith. We kill it with various devotions.
And we often do so like someone who shamefully wipes away their tears after a farewell, trying to make them disappear quickly so that they leave no trace. As we do so, we talk about the price of rent, the latest power struggle at work—anything to extinguish the burning nostalgia as quickly as possible.
We're unable to understand this malaise, which is like our shadow; we feel guilty and sick. And because of this, we don't understand our children or young people. A few weeks ago, James Parker, a journalist at The Atlantic who writes a reader correspondence column, received a one-line letter: "I'm 19 and I'm afraid of dying alone. Any advice?"
Parker, with good will, replied that he wasn't alone. He added: "You are in control. Your life and your decisions belong to you. You are the boss. The other side of isolation is autonomy. So claim it. Get out there. Enjoy your experiences. Do things you can be proud of... As a friend in London once said to me when he saw me feeling desperate: 'Be strong, man. Be happy.'"
As an adult, when Parker suffered from that malaise that characterizes human beings, he killed his nostalgia and overcame "the illness" by gritting his teeth. The keys to Parker's reaction were accurately described by Cesare Maria Cornaggia during the recent Rimini Meeting. The psychiatrist pointed out that "today we talk a lot about adolescents, but mostly we talk about them as 'problematic,' 'different,' or 'incomprehensible.' It seems to me that we adults are incapable of seeing them, of 'recognizing' them... Too often we look at what they 'do' as an expression of a 'pathology,' and we invoke various statistics to prove that they are 'sick'."
The problem is that we adults have killed "post-holiday clarity." Cornaggia emphasized that "emptiness or anxiety are not signs of a lack, but indicators of our original experience."
The wound that September light opens, the malaise that dominates us all and leads us to seek identity refuges in this change of era, is the expression of an "I" that seems dormant. Everything has collapsed except this "I"; this is the "grace" that this time gives us.
An ego that can always be evoked, called upon. "An 'ego' that needs a true relational encounter to evoke it. The ego cannot be reduced to any of its antecedents, not even to a hypothetical illness that doesn't exist. If anything, the ego needs to be evoked in an encounter with a charm that provokes a jolt that brings it to the surface."
These September sunsets ask us never to lose the sadness that allows us not to kill the man hiding beneath our chest.
