Angry nostalgia is an apt description of much of contemporary experience. Many descriptions of past events and trends are accompanied by gestures of rage and anger. Praise or blame depending upon one’s viewpoint — descriptions of an idealized history and anger because some of the norms and customs that greatly benefitted the individual or group are weakened and threatened, or a condemnation of actions, institutions, and traditions and anger about stolen possessions, opportunities, and restricted welfare that affect the present.
The focus of this column is not to analyze or evaluate the degree of truth behind either the nostalgia or the anger. Rather, the focus is on an alternative, what one might call a positive and hopeful nostalgia. The occasion for reflection was lunch at the Scarlet Inn, a coffee shop in the basement of the Sparks Center on the Wabash College mall.
The Sparks Center will be torn down soon, and an elaborate Community Center will replace it on the mall. Temporary kitchens and dining spaces are moving through town and being erected before demolition of Sparks. The Scarlet Inn will be closed for good. I intentionally went to the Scarlet Inn for a last meal to take a nostalgic trip down memory lane.
Back in 1965 many faculty gathered there during midmorning break for coffee. For many years I listened carefully to their debates and repartee. They welcomed a new wet-behind-the-ears colleague. The network of friendship they engendered was inclusive. Now, almost sixty years later, I sat for a last meal at the round table, with giants of the faculty in my mind’s eye sitting in their accustomed chairs. Giants like Vic Powell, Jack Charles, Butch Shearer, Ben Rogge, Eric Dean, Hall Peebles, Lew Salter, Ted Bedrick and Paul McKinney. For many, only names on buildings, rooms or plaques; but written on hearts of many others. Their period of service was a golden age of the Wabash faculty.
Much of my education came from their conversations in the Scarlet Inn. They helped a young faculty member learn how to teach, how to be a good colleague, what a faculty could be, the scope and value of the liberal arts, and how to be a better person. They helped establish a career full of meaning and purpose, and they opened new opportunities. Those gifts last a lifetime. They brought new worlds to light and helped prepare for unperceived changes and worlds they would never see. Individually they made significant contributions to the Crawfordsville community — for example, president of the local school board, the NAACP, the school board, the police board, leaders in local churches. A quiet hour of nostalgia sitting at the round table and pleasant memories of good men were positive nostalgia. Wonderful!
We could all benefit from attractive alternatives to angry nostalgia via a more positive and productive memory. Take time to remember all those individuals who assisted you along the way to become the best person you could be. Express silent gratitude for their acts of kindness, encouragement, even those kicks in the pants that propelled you forward. Their interventions were intended to guide you toward a more productive and satisfying life. Insofar as that has been your experience, you probably are indebted to those individuals for the better life you now live. We might also give thanks for those institutions that sheltered such people and their good works — institutions that have made our community a more wholesome place than it might have been.
Building upon their good example would not be a bad legacy for our lives.
Raymond Brady Williams, Crawfordsville, LaFollette Distinguished Professor in the Humanities emeritus, contributed this guest column.
