Nostalgia, sentimentality, and reality:
As someone once commented about a piece I had written on this subject, it contained some “lovely ideas, lovely memories, but I really don’t believe in the good old days. I think we invent these ideas.”
She raised some good points, and she certainly made me think again about the very real distinctions between nostalgia and sentiment, and reality. It depends on how you look at it.
Growing up in a large city like New Orleans, with its miles of flat and endless suburbs and subdivisions, malls, strip shopping centers and traffic, I thought the world that existed outside the city in the piney coastal plain of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia was a grand and glorious place to travel through. It was filled with small towns, farms and seemingly endless stretches of woodland — exotic terrain to a city boy, especially for one with an imagination and a desire for escape. I conferred on the rural South the cloak of longing for another way of life beyond the confines of the urban sprawl in which I felt trapped, and which often depressed me as a child and teenager.
Thus, this partially explains my weakness for sentimental country calendar scenes of small towns, farmsteads, general stores and backroads. I like to look at the humblingly innocent paintings of John Ford Clymer on the covers of old Saturday Evening Posts from the 1940s and 1950s, which I collect whenever I can find them in flea markets or antique shops. They are based on memories of his childhood in central Washington, on the eastern flank of the Cascade mountains. They often show children reveling in the pleasures of youth: cooling off in summer in the “old swimming hole,” runnng alongside a stream with their dog, coaxing a young filly to take some fresh grass from their hands while the mare grazes nearby. I’m certain these were realistic depictions of his childhood, not inventions of simpler times that didn’t exist for him. They may seem like sentimental fantasies, but they were real enough, it seems to me.
Were the “good old days” all nice and pure and simple? Of course not. It is true that we often yearn for some perceived past in which there was little crime, no violent video games or urban depersonalization and loss of community, no smart phone addiction, or ever-widening and loosening of all social bonds, of the ties that once bound us together in communities.
But there was much crime, disease and hardship in the late 19th century. I know that from my study of social and cultural history. I do tend to idealize, however, even though I read Otto Bettmann’s book debunking many of the “myths” of an idealized past. It is called “The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible,” and it made quite an impact on me years ago. Bettmann, of Bettmann Archive fame, certainly punched holes in the cover stories we did tend to invent to ignore certain unpleasant realities about the days gone by, among them: lack of antiobiotics and sophisticated health care; improper or grossly inadequate sanitation in cities; lack of clean water; child labor; yellow fever outbreaks in the South; segregation; sweatshops filled with immigrants and the working poor; and, a society perhaps even more deeply divided by class than today.
I remember doing a research project in journalism grad school years ago in which I scrolled through seemingly miles of microfilm of old weekly and daily newspapers in Louisiana from 100 years ago, looking for tidbits of information and telling little quotes about life in the late 19th century.
Here is one from the Baton Rouge Daily Advocate, April 10, 1889:
“As summer approaches, the question of the sanitary condition of our city becomes one of paramount importance. We are apt to pay no attention to this matter until we hear that pestilence is in the land. The cholera has been moving in the direction of the United States for more than a year, and we will be liable to its visitation at any time.
Last year there was…the proximity of yellow fever to our state and diphtheria, typhoid fever and other terrible diseases [that] may at any time appear. It is estimated beyond dispute that the danger of these may be greatly lessoned, if indeed they may be entirely avoided, by proper sanitary precautions.
There were also humorous little pieces like this one from the tiny Richland Beacon in Rayville, April 13, 1889: We are living in a fast age. Time flies. To keep apace with the present times requires much exertion. This is a hard age for the drone. (19th century usage: an idle person who lives by the work of others; parasite; loafer; a person whose work is routine, monotonous, etc.; drudge.)
I had to laugh at re-reading that one. How things have come full circle! Times change, and yet in some ways they don’t. Drones now are aerial weapons that play a major role in two wars.
But it is a fact that the 19th century was a quieter age with no booming car stereos rattling window panes; jet skis disturbing a nice day at the beach or lake; ferociously loud cars and motorcycles, and other modern-day afflictions of our ceaselessly noisy and busy age.
The late 19th century was an age when most houses had front porches where people could gather in the cool of the late afternoon and early evening to drink lemondade, watch fireflies sparkle in the night, just beyond where they sat on swings and rocking chairs, and, also, where they could reminisce, greet neighbors who passed by on the sidewalks, or sit quietly reading a book. If you want a good and realistic look at what life was like in those quieter and simpler times — pre-television and the Interet — I recommend the wonderful little book, “Out on the Porch: An Evocation in Words and Pictures” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1992).
Nowadays, most houses in the suburbs have a front entry with maybe a narrow sliver of porch that is barely wide enough to put a chair in. This was particularly prevalent in the 1950s through the 1970s, but in recent years, the porch is making a comeback, and that is a good sign.
So, I believe in simple times, and the “good old days,” not as some totally objective reality or a past that was perfect because it was “the past,” but as a harkening back to a time when we were more apt to move at a slower pace, live on quiet streets, know our neighbors, including the ones next door, and live in houses that were not fortresses that had to be locked up all the time.
There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia as long as one keeps a proper perspective on it. We can’t literally go back in time, and there’s much to blight the idyllic picture we carry around with us of the “good old days.” But we can treasure our memories, and try to imagine what quieter times were like. And with the Internet and YouTube videos, we can now revisit our own pasts any time of day or night by clicking on one of hundreds of retro and nostalgia channels. The past is now on overdrive, via the Internet. But that’s a form of progress I guess. I like it.
The way we were:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSyvFCxERgn/?igsh=aGdicDZ0Nm96bXQy
(Written June 6, 1999;
Updated on March 16, 2026)
Loading comments...