I’m a writer with strong nostalgic longings. One of my favorite essayists is Charles Lamb, someone else who labored for decades as a harmless office worker and who also longed for and wrote mostly about the past. Gerald Monsman talks about this aspect of Charles Lamb in Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer: Charles Lamb's Art of Autobiography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984). For example, see pp. 40-42:
Because quotidian or physical reality presents itself as a privation, Lamb's work is "mainly retrospective," as Walter Pater noted...For Elia, the South-Sea House in its desolation becomes a symbol of all vanished glory―all forms of absence or distance in space, time, and consciousness that undermine the original grounding of reality...In the "Oxford" essay, Elia shifts his scene analogously, moving from the outer world of the present to an interior world of the past in quest of a reality that will underwrite existence...The present is always "flat, jejune" (lacking nourishing quality), and the past seems to beckon men to an escape from the insipid starved present.
Monsman then quotes from Lamb's "Oxford in the Vacation," the second in the Essays of Elia:
Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art every thing! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity—then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou called'st it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being every thing! the past is every thing, being nothing!
I titled my first collection of haibun The Longest Time because the past is the time that I've lived in and think about the most. The present is so fleeting it's almost nonexistent, and the future of course is unknown. This situation is bound to intensify as I age.
by Richard Straw
Cary, North Carolina
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