“And in myself, too, many things have perished which, I imagined, would last for ever, and new structures have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are difficult of comprehension.” (Proust 2008: 33)
Perhaps as Proust states in the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), one must expect the impending transformation of landscapes to be the double-edged result of progress. The notion of development and its bitter-sweet inevitability has finally trumped my protestations against my limited sensibilities and (maybe) better judgement. How does nostalgia perform within any given socio-cultural context - First, one must understand that nostalgia, along with the past-present-future triad, is interchangeable and fluid as it is contemporaneous. Secondly, the imagery of a 'skyscraper nation', acts as a the infinite denouement to the 'dirtier' days of yore. Such child-like expectations of a place being a constant might have birthed the entire 'nostalgic revolution' that we are currently experiencing. It is, ironically, precisely our naive longings for the past that carried us to this predicament. With the efficiency of technology and the undeniable convenience of the internet; are we, as a collective global entity, merely just narcissists basking in a cesspit of our own complacency?
Perhaps as Proust states in the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), one must expect the impending transformation of landscapes to be the double-edged result of progress. The notion of development and its bitter-sweet inevitability has finally trumped my protestations against my limited sensibilities and (maybe) better judgement. How does nostalgia perform within any given socio-cultural context - First, one must understand that nostalgia, along with the past-present-future triad, is interchangeable and fluid as it is contemporaneous. Secondly, the imagery of a 'skyscraper nation', acts as a the infinite denouement to the 'dirtier' days of yore. Such child-like expectations of a place being a constant might have birthed the entire 'nostalgic revolution' that we are currently experiencing. It is, ironically, precisely our naive longings for the past that carried us to this predicament. With the efficiency of technology and the undeniable convenience of the internet; are we, as a collective global entity, merely just narcissists basking in a cesspit of our own complacency?