Crossing the culture

‘In the good old days, everyone was nostalgic.’

Few cities have been as idolised and idealised as Paris. I’m sure that I’m not alone in having covered the walls of my room with black and white memorials to the iconic Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysees and Moulin Rouge. These images travel with me, ‘a moveable feast’.

Ernest Hemingway gave the city this epigram during the years that the flamboyant, feverish transition from wartime to modernity took place. The everlasting was gradually being knocked aside by the fashionable, under Baudelaire’s rallying cry, ‘Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable’.¹ With ‘modernism’ as the artistic watchword, the Western world seemed to be departing from its Christian roots, replacing traditional devotion with nostalgia for church paraphernalia.

The streets of the Left Bank housed the likes of Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Picasso, and Stravinsky. Coco Chanel became a popular name in fashion, Henri Cartier-Bresson began taking photographs, and the first complete edition of Joyce’s Ulysses was published. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how different the recent history of European art might have been had Paris not provided a space of convergence.

Paris during the ‘roaring 20s’ has now gained an almost mystical aura as the site of extravagance, sophistication and style. Hollywood continues to pay tribute with films like Paris, Je T’Aime (2006) and An Education (2009). The latest example is Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, which multiple reviewers have called a love letter to the city.

Due for UK release in October, the film allows viewers a glimpse of the city in its cultural heyday. Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams) are a young couple who travel to Paris. Gil strolls through the streets to soak in the magic of the City of Lights and gain inspiration for his novel. Mysteriously, as the clock strikes midnight each evening, he is transported back in time to meet members of the Lost Generation.

Enamoured by the magic of what he considers to be Paris’s Golden Age, Gil is drawn further into this past world and away from his own. He begins to fall in love with Adriana, a fictional mistress of Picasso, and eventually discovers that she, in turn, wishes that she had been alive during the Belle Epoque.

False lustre of the past

This is a hint at the film’s final conclusion: while the lure of nostalgia is appealing, we must ultimately disbelieve the false lustre of the past and learn to accept the present moment. The film itself is guilty of encouraging an attractive wistfulness while telling us that it is futile. Nostalgia leads us to forget that the past is also full of terror and triviality, the present with beauty and excitement.

Christians are terrible culprits when it comes to the ‘good old days’ syndrome. From within the confines of the Church, the world around can seem to be racing ahead and leaving us behind. Our gut reaction is to hark back elegiacally to the days of higher church attendance and greater Bible literacy. This comes from an honourable intent: in the mile-a-minute culture that is developing, there is little time for tradition or even memory, and so it’s important for us to safeguard the Christian heritage of our nation.

World to right

However, we also have the difficult duty of living faithfully in the present moment, having been called ‘for such a time as this’.² We are responsible for shifting a nostalgia which places Christianity as a nice reminiscence in the nation’s fading memory.

Instead, we must recognise that our own tendency towards nostalgia is a longing within us to see the world made right.

It’s a natural desire for a day when ‘there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain’.³ Nostalgia is an inverted desire for a future ‘golden age’ that we will spend in a new city.

Rachel Thorpe works as an events planner and freelance writer in Cambridge. More of her articles are available at http://www.rachelthorpe.com

1. The Painter of Modern Life
2. Esther 4.14 (NIV)
3. Revelation 21.4 (NIV)

Midnight in Paris - nostalgia in the age of amnesia

False lustre of the past

World to right

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