I’m not outdated or unhappy or whiny.

But sometimes I get nostalgic.

While nostalgia is often abused, devalued, even damned, I can’t help but sincerely wish it rehabilitation.

Like many people, I found myself over the holidays with a group of old friends (my “close guard,” as I like to call them) just to reminisce. Instantly cliche and pretty mundane, you might say, and you’ll be right. But this precious moment made our hearts swell. He confirmed to us that time flies with his sweet moments alternating with the more difficult episodes. And in these times when we need validation more than ever, it’s been reassuring.

We were nostalgic and it was tender.

I admit it, I like to bask in my nostalgia. she comforts me I like to sway in what Marcel Proust calls “the immense edifice of memory.”

And I find it very useful in those moments when you wonder where the joy has gone.

It reminds us that joy can always come again because it has already happened. After all, life is just one big circular movement.

And here I am once again reassured.

François Cheng wrote in his very moving novel The saying of Tianyi “If, despite everything, I keep intact this capacity for wonder and wonder, it is because I am constantly carried away by the echoes of a very distant nostalgia whose origins I do not know. »

It’s true that it can be mysterious, this nostalgia. And above all several times.

Its origin is interesting and easily explains its negative connotation.

In the book Nostalgia, story of a deadly emotionThomas Dodman tells us that at the end of the XVII^e In the 19th century, some soldiers, banished far from their families, fell into an incredible sadness that made them sick. This disease was then called “nostalgia”. It’s a fascinating read that also recounts how nostalgia has changed and adapted from one era to another, right up to our contemporary society, where capitalism has inherited it with “its psychology, its social relations, its cultural traits”. has, the author continues. let us, among other things, consume objects that reconnect us with our memories.

In fact, we live in a society of object fetishism.

But these objects, relics, to which we entrust the function of reactivating a memory, are ultimately only the transmission belt, the triggers of this memory that has become inscribed in our minds and hearts.

Memory is the essence of nostalgia. And that is what it is about.

So I tell myself that all means are good to do good. Nostalgia is one.

And finally, if we stop at part of the etymology of the word “nostos” (return), we realize that it is a derivation of an Indo-European root: “nestaï”, whose first meaning is “happy return, hello”.

My grandfather, an immigrant who had experienced the wounds of uprooting, often liked to record songs from his childhood, from his native Italy. It didn’t make him sad. He rejoiced because, as Jane Austen wrote, “When the pain is gone, the memory of it often becomes a pleasure.”

Nostalgia, it must be said, will also have given us the most beautiful songs that we carry together in our hearts, such as The Manic from George Dor:

“Sometimes I think of you so strongly / I recreate your soul and body / I look at you and marvel / I expand into you / Like the river in the sea / And the flower in the bee”

I also think of the great Serge Bouchard who writes to me The Black Spruce Prayer in reference to that famous ball from our childhood, which refers to “baseball in summer” and “street hockey in winter”:

“Today I sit motionless in my armchair all day, look out the window, stare at the street in front of me and spend hours locked in myself. One might think that I am praying or that I am meditating. You might even think I’m thinking. But no, I only have a blue, white and red rubber ball in my head. »

That’s why I wish for us moments when nostalgia, weaned, bringer of comfort and harbinger of hope, reminds us that beauty exists, has shaped us and will always return.

The poet Jean-Paul Daoust affirms that “melancholy is a sadness that rests”. I say that nostalgia is a joy that is remembered.

And it is very good.