Nostalgia, a summertime inquiry

I’ve never really understood phenomenology, though some of the best minds of our time have limned it for us and offered it as an approach to living consciously. However, I suspect that pupils of the Gurdjieff teaching, aspiring to enter into life with eyes wide open and committed to impartial seeing, are phenomenologists. Gurdjieff calls us to examine each particular, as did Heracleitus: “Distinguish each thing according to its nature and show how it is,” said that unforgettable elder of the human race, issuing an injunction now ancient yet a timeless challenge. I rejoice that it has a central place in the Gurdjieff teaching. The direction to “show how it is” is interesting: it asks us to speak with one another, to share perceptions.

The first experience is of aching memory, a melancholy recognition of the irretrievable passage of time and the absence of people for whom I once unreservedly cared.

The topic of nostalgia comes to mind as I note—I suppose phenomenologically—the episodes of nostalgia that come over me in this summer of 2026 when, as people might whisperingly put it, I am “no longer young.” As with so much else in our lives, there appear to be two unlike experiences of nostalgia. One is new to me—hence this interim report reaching out to others for verification. The first experience is of aching memory, a melancholy recognition of the irretrievable passage of time and the absence of people for whom I once unreservedly cared. They were the pillars and signposts of my world, to be with them was privilege past description—and they are gone. Impermanence, swimming in time. . . I have swum past them, it can’t be helped. Others will swim past me.

Pierre Bonnard, "Nature morte jaune et rouge," 1931; Musée de Grenoble

I see Dr. W. seated where he always sat in his living room, often in a pungent mist of cigarette smoke—it was decades ago, in the end smoking did him no good. I hear his warm basso voice, re-experience his humanity and quizzical view of human nature, his delicious humor in response to what we are, his wisdom that he doubted. This was the older friend—a friend to many—with whom I spoke often in the course of the thirty years when we could easily meet: he and his wife lived downstairs, we lived upstairs.

I see C.’s vegetable garden, her concentrated regard for string beans and tomatoes, the miracle of their appearance at our meals. I see her face and movement, always for me the essence of dignity, of womanly grace, of incorporated wisdom. She is no longer here. I did my best as she aged to keep her here, brought her chocolate, pastries when she still liked them, then goat cheese—that gave her some joy—and then nothing as she wanted nothing more. Surely one of those foods would confer immortality?

Do you see what I mean? One can ache, thoroughly, with nostalgia. It presents as a torn place or leak, a flood of feeling toward people and circumstances lost. Until there occurs—this is the heart of my report—a sudden, inexplicable change in perception. Abruptly, one begins to perceive the whole of one’s life, wherever one looks in it, as something like a continuous, vivid tapestry. All elements present: through remembering vividly, with eyes wide open on the past, with impartial embrace, nostalgia sheds its pain and becomes instead a guide to good things, to lovely people. They live vividly in one’s memory. I am their guardian now, and glad to be so.

Abruptly, one begins to perceive the whole of one’s life, wherever one looks in it, as something like a continuous, vivid tapestry.

I know that they are gone. The doctor and I shall never sit together again in conversation, C. will never again fetch a basket of beans or put a loaf of bread for me on the cutting board. But love spontaneously restores the life we lived—to a degree, in a new way that is enough. Nostalgia, when it seizes its man, can become a friend to the search for wholeness, for a life of thought and feeling that makes, as the doctor would say, “nearly enough” sense. He lived his life in the Gurdjieff teaching as a kind of calculus, an approach to fullness never entirely fulfilled. How true and touching. And about C.: she lives in me, from time to time her eyes are on me and I remember how to live.

Nostalgia, when it seizes its man, can become a friend to the search for wholeness, for a life of thought and feeling that makes, as the doctor would say, “nearly enough” sense.

One might be tempted—an error—to believe that Gurdjieff had transcended nostalgia. That wasn’t so. Once, when he recalled “Turkestan, mon pays,” and on another occasion when he evoked the festive scented candles of Persia, he was all nostalgia, all memory. Once in the 1930s, speaking with a pupil, he recalled something closer: “You remember at Prieuré, Miss Gordon? Ah, such feasts we had Easter! You must remember all your life. Who was not there miss too much.”

The seemingly dry practice of self-observation, recommended by Gurdjieff and taught with rigor, does lead both to intimate encounter with oneself and to firmness of knowing. What a gift.