The Allure Of Nostalgia In Lockdown

As well as prompting a widespread lust for 24-year-old actor Paul Mescal, Normal People, the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s poignant love story, has heralded a wave of nostalgia. The internet is always keen to indulge in nostalgia, but now, when everyone is stuck – stuck inside, stuck with family and flatmates, stuck with the decisions they made long before this all started – it’s particularly tempting to look back.

As someone who grew up in Ireland and went to the same university as the protagonists of Normal People, I’m perhaps especially vulnerable. The show is presenting a series of locations – the college library, the street on which I once lived – where I experienced young love and young insecurity and young bravado and young hope. It is making nostalgia ridiculously easy for me, flashing these locations of memories directly onto my screen. Sitting here, in lockdown, 15 years after university, wondering if I could bothered doing a Zoom quiz and whether I should have the chicken thighs or defrost the chilli, Normal People is a throwback to of boundless freedom, a time when it felt like anything could happen.

However, it’s not just Normal People-era memories that are potent for me, right now. I seem to be remembering everything, in crisp, technicolour detail. A harsh word from a teacher when I was six years old. A walk on the beach in Greece in 2016. Flashes from school trips and nights out and parties and picnics.

A friend says she’s read that this avalanche of memories is something that prisoners or those in solitary confinement experience. And while I’m obviously not in a situation like that – I live with my husband and I wave to my neighbours and I talk to my family and friends often – most of us are spending a lot more time alone and unstimulated.

There’s a Proust line about memory that seems apt. Describing the re-emergence of forgotten memories, he wrote: ‘Actually, their echo has never ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent air.’

We are all sitting in the silent air now – and even if we fill it with podcasts and audiobooks and Instagram Lives and video calls, it’s seems true that, for most people, life is a little emptier and a little lonelier than it was before. Each day – even the good ones or unremarkable ones – is to be endured, ticked off. In that space, old memories resurface, whether we run towards them, ushering in the sweet, comforting nostalgia by playing 90s hits or watching 12 episodes of Normal People back to back; or whether they occur unbidden, popping up as our minds wander.

While I’m experiencing intense memories, I have a suspicion that I’m not actually creating very many new ones. Most aspects of life are on hold for me right now – and it feels like memory-making is, too. I suppose I’ll have to wait and see but walking around my neighbourhood, cooking three meals a day, liaising with colleagues over Teams – this isn’t what great memories are made of. Even the best Zooms are lacklustre and strained compared to real-life catch-ups, lacking subtlety as well as the texture of surroundings.

Charles Fernyhough, a professor of psychology and the author of Pieces of Light, a book about autobiographical memory, tells me that ‘an important aspect of our memories is not just the core events themselves, but the context in which they happen’.

‘When a memory trace is laid down,’ he says, ‘it incorporates all sorts of sensory and perceptual details about where we are and who we’re with. Interacting via Zoom is a much thinner experience than interacting with someone face to face, so it wouldn’t surprise me if our memories of these interactions end up being less vivid.’

He recommends adding a shared sensory experience to a Zoom call – so wine-tasting as a group, for example. ‘I don’t know for sure, but maybe that will help the memories to retain some vividness,’ he says.

Of course, there are memories from this period that will need no help to become lodged forever. I will probably always remember where I was and what it felt like when Boris Johnson addressed the nation to warn us that many families would lose loved ones before their time. That type of memory is what psychologists call a ‘flashbulb memory’, a vivid and detailed memory of a significant news event. It’s just as prone to distortion over time as other memories, but there is a sense that the significant event instantaneously illuminates everything around it. The day-to-day of this prolonged crisis is more likely to recede into a blur.

The thing is, though, I want to remember what this felt like. I want to remember this time when all the days felt the same as the day before, when we all relied on nostalgia to distract ourselves from the doom of the present – and the doom of the future. Perhaps a diary is the only way to capture the strangeness of now; I cannot rely on my memory for this one; I don’t want a hazy filter, applied a few years down the line. Usually I find the thought of keeping a diary embarrassing – what would I write about?! – but that problem is taken care of now. The last time I kept a diary was as a student – but 2020's diary entries will surely be more interesting than 2004's, the ones I kept when I thought anything could happen.

READ MORE: Life And Love In Lockdown