There was no Golden Age - but there will be! Keep the faith. Of course, there is a cure: a commitment to Progress. The suggestion seems to be that this thing, ‘nostalgia’, is a kind of sickness, like flu or measles, that just hits you sometimes, with no rhyme or reason to it. ‘That’s just nostalgia’, they say, dismissively, when you suggest that a high street made up of independent shops might have been better than one giant superstore, or that folk songs around the fire in the pub might be better than Celebrity Love Island. This is something which its critics never seem to understand. The love of a dead past is, on the surface, pointless, and yet it seems to be a universal, pan-cultural longing for something better than an equally dead but often less enticing present. Is it possible to wander the whited hawthorn lanes of Edward Thomas ’s south country, the barrows intact up on the downs, smoke curling from the chimneys of the old inns, the motorways and superstores nowhere to be seen, whilst also hunting mammoths? Probably not, though it might make an intriguing backdrop to a fantasy novel I will never write. Mine was – probably still is - an awkward melange of pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer culture and rural England before the First World War. When I was younger, this made me very prone indeed to nostalgia. Mostly I have taken the world too personally.
The world in your heart merges with the world that used to be. Ȋnd so, given your sensibility – you who are already becoming a self-exiled poet – you find that nostalgia is a form of rebellion. You can feel the great craters that it makes in the world, you can feel what is being tarmacked and neatened and rationalised into oblivion, and the depth of what is leaving, but you cannot explain or justify it in the terms which are now the terms we live by. The future is STEM and chatbots and cashless parking meters and economic growth and asteroid mining forever and ever. The one that is manifesting to replace it is a left-brain paradise, all straight lines and concrete car parks where the corn exchange used to be. This world, you can see, is on the way out, if it is not already long gone. A world without maps, a world without engines. The empty beaches and wild hilltops, the chance of getting lost in the rain forever or discovering something that was never on any map. The thrumming temples and dark marshlands and crooked villages and folk tales and conviviality and spontaneous song and old houses which might have witches in them. The little pubs and the curious uninhabited places. The strange cultures spanning centuries of time. The great forests and the stories made in and by them. Most of the things you like are fading away. If you have the kind of sensibility which prefers Lothlorien to Isengard, this means that you are a character in a tragedy rather than a heroic epic. Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don’t know very much about reality, you are living in the Machine. Then, one day, you pick up a pen and realise that you can create your own. The worlds created by Tolkein and Asimov and Verne and Howard are better than this, and there is no doubt at all that given a splinter of a chance you would prefer to live in them. This is not Lothlorien, and neither is it Earthsea.
Shine perishing republic how to#
Your world is school and suburbs and bus stops and breakfast cereals and maths homework and being forced to wash your dad’s car at the weekend and wondering how to talk to girls and listening to the charts to work out what kind of music it’s permissible to like. More exciting and, in a strange way, more real. You become a writer because the world you encountered in the stories you read as a child is more exciting than the world you are actually living in. I’ve never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, but I have often been addicted to dreams. Sometimes it can be good to get things off your chest.
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