Word: nostalgia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town in the midst of the Depression, he expressed a beleaguered nation's nostalgia for simpler times. The passage of five decades has only sweetened the attraction. As the serenely uneventful first act unfolds, spectators may find themselves daydreaming of moving to a village where everyone says hello and no one locks his door. But in the third and final act, as the shade of young Emily Webb returns from cemetery hill to re-experience her twelfth birthday, Wilder convincingly argues that what makes all life look enticing is the distance granted by memory...
...frozen in its own fancy high-mindedness, a rhetorical grandeur. It means the kind of range, flexibility and intelligence of response that enables an artist to pass on his culture -- his sense of past art and what it means -- to the present, refracting it through his own experiences without nostalgia or loss. Mastery does not kid itself in distinguishing between a real relation to tradition and one based on expediency. It does not mean facility. (Cezanne had it, in the teeth of exhausting struggles with the motifs that show at every point in his work. Matisse had it, while making...
...romance, had setbacks and problems: the Bay of Pigs, increased involvement in Vietnam, tensions over civil rights and fear of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union. Pretending times were once simpler and leaders once bolder is a self-pitying attitude that shifts attention from modern problems to fuzzy, romantic nostalgia...
...easy, particularly the first ones. You have to be a certain age to recognize that meeting someone again whom you once knew is a reunion. Suddenly it takes on a certain importance, encountering you as something significant, a means of orienting yourself. This was my first bout with nostalgia, meeting a friend from days gone...
...take pride in their nation's friendships. Britain is not just a former colonial motherland but also the home of a certain strain of civility that Americans admire. Canada is more than just a giant neighbor; it is also a good neighbor, and its hardiness appeals to America's nostalgia for its own frontier days. Japan's emergence as an economic superpower is more than just a testament to the U.S.'s benevolence as a victor in war and a partner in peace; it is the result of hard work, ingenuity and entrepreneurship, qualities that Americans esteem...