Nostalgia and the Unreflective, Active Present

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that what have you had?" 

This is perhaps the most famous quote from Henry James' The Ambassadors. And that's certainly understandable.

I recently listened to Juliet Naked, another book by Nick Hornby, and I groped my way back to this quote.

The heroine of the book, Annie (age 39), has lived very little. Stuck in a dead-end relationship with Duncan (40ish, a drip), Annie feels she has wasted the last 15 years of her life. This is a shock.

She wants to live. She very much wants to have a baby. By random chance, she begins an email correspondence with a cult rock musician. Then she actually gets to meet him in person and he comes to stay with her in her small, depressing seaside town in England.

You may see where this is going. When confronted with the choice of whether to sleep with him or not, a minor character delivers a speech similar to the one in James' novel.

But sex aside, what does it mean to live? Unless it means wearing really short shorts and sitting in a book warehouse, I'm not sure that I'm truly living at this moment. And what about the moment after that? What about now?

I'm afraid it's quote time again, straight from Annie's brain, courtesy of Hornby's narrator:

"The cliche had it that kids were the future, but that wasn't it. They were the unreflective, active present. They were not themselves nostalgic because they couldn't be. And they retarded nostalgia in their parents. Even as they were getting sick and being bullied and becoming addicted to heroin and getting pregnant, they were in the moment. And she wanted to be in the moment with them. She wanted to worry herself sick about school and bullying and drugs."

That phrase, "the unreflective, active present" is striking. I feel most alive in my unreflective, active moments. Anything that takes me out of myself--like writing or filmmaking.

I leave you with another part of that famous quote in The Ambassadors:

"The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have [...] Live!"