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Looking Back: Feeling nostalgic?

What is nostalgia? Is it good for us? Does it prevent us from fully embracing the future?
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A Commodore 64 gaming system on display at the Maple Ridge Museum takes us back to the origins of computer games. With the fast pace of technological change, an item doesn’t have to be more than a few decades old to generate nostalgia.

Museum people think about nostalgia, a lot.

Sometimes it is our own – a yearning for things we remember liking in the past that are no longer available.

Sometimes it is the nostalgia of others that drives us when designing exhibits or writing material for a website.

But what is nostalgia? Is it good for us? Does it prevent us from fully embracing the future?

During the 17th to 19th centuries, nostalgia was considered a mental disorder. Its sufferers were seen to be excessively clinging to the past and becoming manic with longing.

It was seen as akin to melancholy, though to modern eyes it is clear they were combining ‘home sickness’ with nostalgia, where we now see them as separate.

This ‘disease’ was often associated with soldiers and, in one case, Swiss soldiers were said to become so nostalgic hearing a particular milking song that playing it could be punished by death.

Once we separate home sickness from the mix, plain nostalgia is seldom so potent as to disrupt our lives, but instead can surprise or delight us. It can also make us sad by bringing up memories that are unpleasant.

Years ago a man brought to the Maple Ridge Museum the largest cabbage grater we have ever seen. It would fit over a modern garbage can.

He had brought it with him from the Prairies. He offered it to us, saying, “We used this to make sauerkraut and I never want to see or smell or even think about sauerkraut ever again as long as I live. If you don’t take it, I’m throwing it on the fire.”

Clearly, it was an unpleasant memory, but he had kept the grater and carried it with him when he moved to Maple Ridge and then he made a point of donating it rather than simply throwing it on the fire without comment.

Objects can have great power to transport us to an earlier time and perhaps re-examine it with older eyes. Maybe our donor was able to exorcise his sauerkraut demons and talk to his family about how much he hated the process and being made to participate.

Recently, on a tour, a visitor to the Maple Ridge Museum remarked on a “funny looking vacuum cleaner” that was actually a floor polisher. Having many fond memories of floor polishers – mostly involving myself and my brothers riding it around the floor when mother wasn’t looking – I felt quite shocked that this adult didn’t even know what it was.

Museums are under constant stress to do more with less. Storage is a huge problem, but since history never stops accumulating, we can’t stop collecting.

Enthusiasm for technology leads some to suggest that we no longer need to collect objects – it’s all out there on the web. The thing is, how can you be surprised and delighted by a nostalgic reaction to something if you’ve already remembered and gone looking for it? Memories, good and bad, are recollected and brought to the surface by seeing something you haven’t thought of for many years. You can Google it later for more details, but that initial moment of surprise is the authentic experience.

Museums and their photographs and collections are walks down those memory lanes whose coordinates we’ve long forgotten.

• This is B.C. Museums Week.