Memory’s Counterfeit Currency

How nostalgia beautifies what was once ordinary

The grass is greener somewhere, so I found one to touch.

At first, the days were simply days, unremarkable in their procession as the turning of a mill wheel in a country town, each one arriving with its freight of small inconveniences and minor mercies, its unwashed crockery and its particular quality of afternoon light slanting through a window you never thought to memorise, your attention then being occupied wholly by the forward-pressing business of living rather than the rearward-gazing business of preservation, so that the hours accumulated without ceremony and the weeks closed over themselves like water closing over a dropped stone, the surface smoothing, the depth receiving, and you, unaware that you were in the midst of anything worth the costly work of remembrance, moved through it all with the brisk and unsentimental efficiency of one who supposes there will always be more.

Then distance, or grief, or the simple irreversibility of the calendar interposed itself between you and those days, and the mind, which abhors a plain account, began its long and industrious counterfeiting, setting up its secret mint in some unvisited cellar of the self, where it received the dull coin of actual experience and returned it, by arts not entirely honest, as bright and milled and heavy as though it had never been spent, as though it had always been treasure and you had simply been too distracted, too young, too present in the original moment to recognise the denomination.

The counterfeit is extraordinarily good work, possessing all the surface properties of the genuine article and several properties the genuine article never possessed at all, for the mint of memory is not content merely to restore but insists, in its lavish and ungovernable generosity, on improvement, gilding the ordinary afternoon into something amber-warm and elegiac, softening the particular discomforts of the period into what the nostalgic sensibility will later classify as texture, as character, as the very grain and nap of a time irretrievably finer than the present, so that what was in fact merely the weather of a given season becomes, in retrospect, a climate you would inhabit again without hesitation, trading the actual present, with its inconvenient reality, for the beautified past, whose inconveniences have been, with considerable craft, excised.

You remember the parlour as warmer than it was, the bread as more fragrant, the company as more alive to itself, more vivid in its conversational plumage, the laughter as more spontaneous and less effortful than laughter has since become, and in this you are not lying precisely, only practising that particular form of selective fidelity by which the mind, like a portrait painter of the old school, retains the subject’s likeness while subtracting the asymmetries, the shadows under the eyes, the slight cast to the left side of the mouth that in life read as weariness but in the finished canvas does not appear, the result being something truer than a photograph and less true than either, a version of the past that satisfies the heart’s requirements rather than the record’s.

The mechanics of this beautification are not random in their operations but tendentious, pursuing always the same apostolic mission of rendering the past sufficient, even sumptuous, against the comparative deficiencies of the present, and so they suppress with particular thoroughness the evidence of ordinariness, the boredom that attended those long Sunday afternoons, the particular quality of frustration that gathered in the chest when the same conversation arrived again at the same impasse, the way the light in that room could, on certain mornings, feel less like illumination than like an indictment, the way you were not always happy there, not even usually, only intermittently and by accident, the happiness arriving unannounced between longer stretches of the merely habitual, so that joy was less a condition of those days than a visitor who called without fixed appointment and left without giving notice.

And yet the counterfeit insists upon its portrait of perpetual golden-hour contentment, retouching the record with a patience and devotion that the original days never merited, never received, and could not have sustained even had you thought to offer it, for contentment is a thing that only survives the present tense in translation, the translation being always a little unfaithful, a little too fond, a little too eager to excuse the subject of its study from the ordinary charges that living brings against all subjects alike, the charge of monotony, the charge of quiet desperation, the charge of having been, for long stretches, simply unremarkable in the way that most of life is unremarkable and does not know itself as anything worth the amber of eventual memory.

What nostalgia trades in, then, is not the past but an edition of it, revised for a readership that the original publication never anticipated, an audience situated in a diminished present and requiring from the past the particular consolation of retroactive sufficiency, the assurance that there was a time when the sum of things was adequate, even generous, even, on the best pages of the revised edition, magnificent, so that the longing it produces is not quite a longing for what was but for what the mind has since constructed from what was, the way a traveller returning to a city of childhood finds the streets narrower than they were, the famous building less imposing, and understands, without quite finding the words for it, that they have been homesick all their adult life for a place that exists now only in the illustrated edition the memory published, without permission, without scruple, and with all the sentimental audacity of a house that has been renovated so thoroughly that the original walls survive only as a kind of rumour behind the new plasterwork.

You carry the illustrated edition everywhere, consulting it in moments of present difficulty with the reverence owed a text of established authority, and it serves you, as all good counterfeits do, right up to the moment of comparison, right up to the moment when the evidence of the actual past surfaces from some drawer or letter or returned conversation, and you are confronted, briefly and uncomfortably, with the ungilded account, the record of the days as they were before the mint had its way with them, ordinary in their bones, imperfect in their execution, beautiful only occasionally and by accident, loved not because they were extraordinary but because they were yours, which was enough reason then, and is perhaps, once the counterfeit has been set aside, the only reason that was ever needed.

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