"We’ll all go down babbling about some Rosebud or other"
Who wears hats now?: "[There’s] another problem about loss. Do I mean lost in the sense of something I once had and don’t any longer, or lost meaning missed out on altogether, as in: damn, they had the 17th century without me? Increasingly, I am pissed off in this second sense...
But nostalgia is a treacherous thing. It can make you teeter dangerously as you walk that thinnest of lines: on one side a clear-eyed assessment of how it was for all manner of people, on the other the pit of sentimentality. Merry Christmas everyone, and bless us one and all. The older I get, the less certain which side of the line I am on. Even less certain which side of the line I should be on. There’s something about nostalgia and its close cousin sentimentality that gives me the horrors, but also something that makes me suspect it needs a lot more serious attention than I’ve been prepared to give it."
