Evanston: nostalgia
Evanston: nostalgia
I have more music than I can listen to, but still I buy more from time to time when I come across something or someone new or new-to-me. In the past year this has included Israel Kamakawiwo’ole and Lorenna McKennitt, among others, as well as AKHNATEN, the opera by Philip Glass, and Shostakovich’s PRELUDES AND FUGUES.
In an effort to hear music that I might otherwise neglect, I sometimes set up smart playlists in ITunes of all my non-classical music and then shuffle it. I hear tracks differently when they do not come in their accustomed order.
I did this last evening while Carol was out at her tennis lesson, and one of the tracks that came up was the title to the movie OUT OF AFRICA.
I don’t believe in the good old days and I don’t have much nostalgia for the past, except perhaps for this music, which always takes me back to the day I first saw the movie.
I can’t tell you the exact date, but it was in 1986 in Sydney, Australia. RESURGAM was on a mooring in Elizabeth Bay, and we had taken a flat a block away because she was about to be hauled and professionally painted. I was writing a novel. I worked first thing every morning. A few hundred words seven days a week. It was going well. I believed in what I was doing. And I had hope.
On a beautiful, sunny late winter’s day, with the temperature around 60ºF, we walked to the city center, a mile up and down hills, up and then down to Wooloomooloo, up and then down through the Domain and Botanic Gardens whose trees bloom cockatoos, past the Opera House, and on up Pitt Street, where we saw the movie and had a pizza at a place next to the theatre.
Nothing extraordinary, but the soundtrack still takes me vividly back to that day.
The theatre is no longer there. Nor is the pizza place. And the novel was never published.
That is the nature of nostalgia.
Friday, April 6, 2007