Russell Smith explores the wilds of nostalgia, and notes why he resists the urge to go there.

Writing about the past is something I’ve been quite stern about in recent years, just because – in this country, anyway – that activity so dominates the literary landscape. The preoccupation with history has always seemed to me to reflect a disdain for the present, as if the present were trivial or corrupt in some way. The fixation with the past as the only place of authentic feeling or significant action has always struck me as somewhat goody-goody and also romanticized. It’s possibly just a coincidence, but historical fiction does seem to be so often moralizing, or at least morally simple.

But now I, hypocrite, find myself, in moments like the Wal-Mart angst moment, flooded with the past and an intense urge to explain to everyone around me how everything used to be so different. Because I’ve only just realized it, in the past 10 years or so – how so many of the social signals and habits I grew up with are gone, how everything – and I don’t just mean how you make a phone call or type an essay – is so radically different. That realization creeps up on you. L.P. Hartley famously wrote, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Like an immigrant from that country I am eager to describe its landscape to people who have never been there, to draw maps of its fantastic geography, to recount its strange vocabulary and customs.