All round the world, we see populists promising to renew some golden age by restoring lapsed imperial or demographic boundaries.īut that observation obliges me to ask myself whether I'm doing anything so very different, in stubbornly resisting the groundswell towards Triple Crown reform? It spills over into the here and now, corroding the happiness not just of individuals but whole societies. Unfortunately, while the first of these is doomed to remain notional, the second can even be national. (Very often, perhaps, because it never existed in the first place.) This morbidity is suggested in the Greek stems of the word: nostos, homecoming, and algos, pain or distress. The whole premise of nostalgia is irretrievability: the yearning for a time or place that can't be revisited.
And I must admit to some concern that this may in fact be the version to which I am destined to succumb, nailed into the same coffin as the five-week Triple Crown. The Union Army in the first two years of the Civil War reported precisely 2,588 cases, no fewer than 13 of which proved fatal. In times past, it was not so much a wistful state of mind as an outright medical condition. Nostalgia, they say, isn't quite what it used to be.
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