So the keyword is nostalgia. I do not need to define it, when I am between leaving one home for another. But I have referred to it before as a vortex, and it can be that way, as long as you don’t poke beyond the event horizon. Of late, this has been 24 (the last two seasons!) and assorted samurai flicks, extending back to White Heaven and Hell. But I don’t dwell on the content of my nostalgia as much as its purpose.

Can nostalgia have a purpose?

Okay, that was a joke between me and a man named Rob. But really, now. I haven’t thought about this nearly long enough to feel adequately nostalgic, but I propose three purposes (non-exhaustive) for nostalgia: letting go, impressing oneself, and learning something new.

Now that I’m moving and trying to come well under the 20,000 pound allowance (leagues, under the sea, and other such numerical jokes), the best use I can think of for nostalgia is just a pang before you let go, as I am discarding many of my undergraduate files which I no longer needed, and no longer needed even as I graduated–but how was I to know. Nostalgia, then, is a momentary tribute to an irrelevant past.

Yet, I recognize: I recognize myself and even some of my jokes that’ve lasted when I reread my high school satires of high school. Ironically, I am currently living in a doctoral satire of high school. Or grim parody. Or post-tragic farce. But the best part about auto-nostalgia is being surprised that you are capable of such wit at such an age, or such energy or drive, or stubbornness, and then hopefully this teaches you to reach for that standard yet again in what you do. The undercurrent of self within change.

And that’s the real purpose of nostalgia. It lets you learn something new about what you thought you knew. Or were passed out for, in the case of most of seasons 7 and 8 of 24. Re-viewing, re-thinking, re-appreciating for the first time, at least in that way. And this is why I do re-visit the same texts over and over again, because I do believe that they have plenty to give, on each reading something different, so my nostalgia is not a longing, or a VH1 special about those moribund 90′s, but rather pointed, somehow, to the future.