Consider the following comments on nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.
Doug Larson
Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.
Marcel Proust
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
L. P. Hartley
We grow homesick for a place that, if we returned, would no longer exist.
Longing for yesterday can be a quiet way of refusing to live in today.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Reflect on nostalgia as a feeling that is less about the past than about the present, a way of editing memory to soothe a current discontent. You might begin with a specific scene you find yourself longing for and ask honestly how faithful that memory really is. Move between the warmth nostalgia offers, a sense of continuity and belonging, and its danger, that it can gild a past that was never so golden and excuse a refusal to face the now. A reflective turn could explore whether the longing is for a particular time or simply for a self you can no longer be. Caution: resist landing on a simple verdict that nostalgia is either comforting or corrosive, since the piece is richer if it lets the sweetness and the self deception sit together.