The New Year’s anthem is “Auld Lang Syne,” which Mr. Google tells me translates roughly as “Old Time’s Sake.” The song is one of remembrance, of nostalgia. Nostalgia often gets a bad rap as it is associated with a kind of naiveté, a delusional, romanticized view of a past that never was. Some psychologists dissent from this view, arguing nostalgia, at least to some degree, is a healthy mental technique we use to deal with life’s uncertainty and anxiety. When we feel discombobulated by life we think of happier times as a way of reorienting ourselves, maintaining an emotional equilibrium.
Yet we cannot deny that old times pass. In his Consolation of Philosophy, the sixth century writer Boethius considers the fleeting nature of worldly goods. Boethius, once a man of notoriety in Rome, now finds himself in prison, sentenced to death on a trumped-up charge of treason. He attempts to make sense of his situation. He once had it all, and now has nothing. Men seek happiness through money, power, honor, fame, and pleasure. One by one, speaking through a character he simply calls Philosophy, Boethius knocks each of these false avenues to happiness.
Regarding fame, Boethius notes that those who are renowned in one place are unheard of somewhere else. Say you are internet influencer and sometimes boxer Jake Paul. Again, a quick check-in with Google tells me he has 28.8 million Instagram followers. But if Jake Paul wanders the streets of Krakow or Mumbai or Astana (that’s the capital of Kazakhstan, which I also had to Google), how many people will know who he is? Will not virtually everyone, when notified, “That’s Jake Paul” respond with “Who?”
And fame is fleeting. A few years ago, my wife and I were amused that a friend of ours, born in the mid-1980s, didn’t know who Cary Grant was. I suspect almost none of my students, virtually all now born in the 21st century, know who he is. Grant, the Ryan Gosling of the 1930s through the 1950s, is now a piece of trivia whose movies will shortly be nearly forgotten. Similarly, a colleague tells me of a class this past semester in which none of the students could name a Beatles song. Not one. The biggest band in rock n’ roll history, now fading from memory.
This is true of so many famous people and events. I think of persons and cultural markers from my youth that would befuddle today’s youth. Johnny Carson. Archie Bunker. US News & World Report. “Good to the last drop.” Captain Kangaroo. Alan Page. Cashing a check at the grocery store. Tip O’Neil. Iranian hostages. Or the seminal memory of my youth: The Miracle on Ice. All gone.
Woody Allen’s wonderful film Radio Days is essentially Allen’s love letter to the popular culture of his youth, largely played out on the radio, as the film title suggests. The movie is part a series of episodes of a young boy and his family living in Rockaway, New York in the 1940s and part the narrator Allen, as the grown up voice of the boy, telling stories of his favorite radio personalities. With the setting, the clothes, and the music, the film seeks to transport viewers to the 1940s. It is no accident that a sad, sentimental rendition of September Song, a song of lament for past love, occurs throughout the movie.
The film ends on New Year’s Eve, with a gaggle of radio stars gathered on the roof of a building in luxurious Manhattan. They note that another year is gone. One of them asks whether anyone in the future will remember them. The answer, of course, is no. Today, those radio stars of the 1930s and 40s are almost all forgotten, a niche interest of people like my sister-in-law who have an idiosyncratic interest in old-time radio. The film ends with this coda from narrator Allen: “I’ve never forgotten any of those people or any of the voices we used to hear on the radio. Although the truth is with the passing of each New Year’s those voices do seem to grow dimmer and dimmer.”
For those of us with a love of the past, both as it pertains to history and even popular culture, this can be cause for sorrow. Some of us have a stronger than average nostalgia streak, and it is sad to see things that were once deemed precious, even silly things like a radio show or a popular song, forgotten. It is even harder for the more important things. As a teacher of college students, it pains me how little of their own history my students know, and, what is worse, how little they, their parents, and even our educational institutions and policy makers care about this loss.
Boethius offers us consolation. Perhaps it is trite to say “all things must pass,” but it is true. Almost. Boethius points to the one thing that endures, that does not change, that we can be sure of: God. He puts this point in verse:
Grant, Father, that our minds Thy august seat may scan,
Grant us the sight of true good’s source, and grant us light That we may fix on Thee our mind’s unblinded eye.
Disperse the clouds of earthly matter’s cloying weight;
Shine out in all Thy glory; for Thou art rest and peace To those who worship Thee; to see Thee is our end,
Who art our source and maker, lord and path and goal.
Happy New Year.