Nostalgia

But this exchange of bright daggers is only a transient balm for the Shop-Talker who finds himself a victim of the common modern complaint—a nostalgia for the place where one is not. Chateaubriand has, perhaps, much to answer for in giving voice and body to the longing of complicated modern spirits for what appeared to his sophisticated heart as the simple and happy life of savage peoples and wild unpopulated places. But this illusion, this longing, is not confined to sophisticated French authors. It existed, for instance, in John D. Long, a straight and unsophisticated American, when in the year 1863, at the age of twentyfive, he made a business trip through the East and Middle West. He saw what there was to see and he wrote in his diary, as a young philosopher should, this judgment:

What a preposterous fool I am when I can remember me of my own home in Maine — with blinds and curtains, white, snug, and clean, with grounds slopes of grass, shade, — mountains in the distance, and the still life of rural scenery. I am tired of seeing, especially in this journey, everywhere the toil of men. And ah me! [flavor of mid-nineteenth century!] I am wishing I could elbow my way out of the struggle and pushing of the crowd, content to forgo all and to return to humble and obscure retreats and to leave the great world to its own revolutions. It is a weary world.

That is melancholy youth for you; but throughout America of Yesterday, the book which contains extracts from Long’s lifelong diary, we find this same nostalgia, ripened as he grows older, but always poignant, whether Long was in Boston or in Washington where, supposedly, an American should be satisfied with the preoccupations of a Secretary of the Navy.