It is raining here and I lie on the love-seat here in the sitting room drinking tea and watching a tight game between the New York Jets and the New England Patriots. I like both teams and am more interested in seeing the outcome than actually rooting for either of the teams. The tea is just Bromley, nice but nothing special when it comes to tea. The rain is a steady drizzle that makes me happy to be inside. For some reason the apartment is empty. My roommates must all be out enjoying the company of fellow alums who came back this weekend for homecoming. Most of my friends left yesterday evening or early this morning.

What is it about this setting that is so profoundly attractive? Rain is supposed to be depressing. Football is active and even a bit violent. Tea – well. I like tea. What is it about late fall that brings me back to some profoundly comfortable memory of life. “Comfortable?” That isn’t the right word. There is an element of comfort in the feeling though. It is a feeling of comfort of sorts. Like life has become this loveseat and I can just sink into it and relax – a point of “having arrived” at my destination.

Of course none of this is where I actually am. This is the memory, the ideal that the situation brings back. It is as though times like this open a window that I can look out through but through which I cannot go. I enjoy the feeling of course, but it is a enjoyment that comes in the not-having of this ideal rather than in the having of this ideal. Oddly enough it is the situations that I enjoy most like this one that cause me to want it the most.

Nostalgia is a good word for this feeling (and one that I will use from here on out) although Nostalgia tends to refer to a longing for a past perfection. Here I am referring more to the longing and the prefection rather than the past. Sometimes I think that the divide between well-meaning members of “left” and “right” is that those on the right see the perfection in the past and those on the left see it as in the future. Personally I see it as both. Humanity certainly is not where it should be now.

Nostalgia is an inexplicable but fundamental part of human existence. It is the goad that reminds us that this world is not sufficient for us. It is the fuel of religion, art, architecture and holidays like Thanksgiving. The whole Romantic movement was defined by it. It is that which makes some people just so unbelievably attractive to us in such a wholesome simple way.

This entry is not very well organized. It rambles and draws from cliches and mixed metaphors, but perhaps that reveals as much about the subject matter as it does as to my skill as a writer. The subject matter by its very nature is something that is difficult to grasp or define and for that very reason we spend much of our lives seeking after the answer to that question and perhaps it is one of the most important questions we need to answer.