Nostalgia, is caused by a sense of respect to those people who have made your sweet memories. Nostalgia comes when you find yourself far from people with whom you share sweet moments of past and it intensifies when these people pass away. As a surviver, one feels responsible to cherish the memory of the dear departeds.
Being 30 years old, I am recently feeling impulses of nostalgia. I have never had such an experience before. This feeling of compassion includes not only departed ones, but also those who used to be my close friends but now they are mentally far from me. This also includes my father, who used to share pieces of wisdom with me when I was a child, and now we barely find a subject on which we both agree. And my brother, and my sister, to whom I am someone as close as a stranger.
Is this a natural effect of aging? I am wondering if this feeling will get more severe as time passes, or is it going to decline and diminish at some point? I read somewhere – maybe in Kundera’s immortality – that at a certain point, one is so old that all memories of past disappear. Death is so close that it cannot be distinguished from life. So close that one does not feel responsible any more to cherish the memory of the dear departeds: the moment of freedom from Nostalgia.
