A Warm, Secure Place

What, exactly, happened to those old favourites of yours? That novel or movie that you saw when you were younger that had such an incredible impact on you? Why is it when you go back to it—older, wiser(?), more jaded, perhaps—it doesn’t seem to hold quite the same level of magic anymore?

It’s the same product—same characters, same actors, same setting, same writing, same everything. And yet . . . something is missing. Something intangible. Something that struck a nerve in you all those years before.

At the end of it, you think, “Yeah, that was pretty cool.” But there’s that disappointment that it’s not the same revisited. You’re not floored, flabbergasted, flummoxed, or any other cool ‘f’ word like that. You sort of sigh a little, scratch your head, and try to remember exactly why you were so bowled over by it the first time round.

Well, there’s the obvious answer: You’ve grown up a bit. You’re not a teenager anymore. People change every day, if only in minuscule increments (or, I suppose, in grand, sweeping, revelation-like epiphanies if you, say, get struck between the eyes by the Light of God or some such), but for us mere mortals, the change is gradual, like erosion.

Picture tiny bits of whatever the magic was tinkling off and shattering in your wake as the days, weeks, months, years pass, and you’re none the wiser. Silent, tiny crashes of its essence already too far behind you, or too obscured by the rattle of your newfound maturity to be noticed.

Things get louder as you get older. Why do you think older people can’t stand loud music? It’s too much now. Didn’t used to be—they used to rock till sunrise just like you do now—but those days are gone. Now you just want everyone to shut the hell up and get off your porch.

One of my bits of not-so-shiny-anymore nostalgia is the film Fright Night. Man, I used to think that film kicked ass. I watched it a few months ago and thought it was pretty lame. No idea why I initially thought so highly of it. Bad acting, bad hair. Cheesy but not cheesy enough to be entertaining simply for its blatant fromage factor. It bummed me out.

For my girly, Sandra, one of hers was Michael Slade’s Ghoul. Still a great book, and far better crafted than a lot of the other Slade efforts since, but not the same effect as before. Has she simply read more, read better in the intervening years? Maybe. Or perhaps her tastes have changed, refined. Maybe she needs more now as a reader than what Ghoul has to offer. Who knows? Whatever the reasoning behind it, though, it’s definitely a different animal. An animal, yes, but tame. Declawed. Neutered.

Sure, some movies and books stand the test of time for an individual, but a good chunk of the ones you used to absolutely adore in every way leak their life out into the dirt over the years—stabbed in the gut and left to bleed to death slowly.

What strikes me as profoundly sad is that we cannot recapture that feeling. No matter how hard we try to think back to the reasons we dug this film or that book so heavily, we can’t salvage the memory, the emotion. It seems irrevocably lost. Those are pieces of who we used to be, who we still are, and we can’t even imagine them anymore, despite the vague, deep-down tremors of how those pieces of art made us feel 10, 15 years ago.

Maybe those chunks of our psyche, our experience, have been swallowed by the job, the wife or husband, religion, sex, drugs (I refuse to add rock ‘n’ roll, damnit!), bills, kids, other movies, other books, other people even. Those bits of us that reacted so strongly to certain films/bands/TV shows/books/etc., have been integrated into our new selves, our new souls.

Maybe they’re gone forever. Or maybe we recall some of them when we’re old and rocking on our porches, a nice, cool beer in our hands. Quick snapshots of our teenage emotions, quickly crisped in a bursting synapse. Bubbles that build quickly then pop in our heads, leaving us mentally chasing the feeling down into the muck of our minds.

Go back to a novel you read and fell in love with years ago; see if it still has the same power. I have a few that actually still do hold up, but I’m afraid to tell you what they are, in fear that in just speaking their names, some of the magic will disappear, and I’m not willing to let that happen. When something is on like that, and it stays on, you have to do everything in your power to keep it on.

Search out the ones that still work, folks, and keep them in a warm, secure place. If you’re anything like me, you’ll need them to go back to them every few years, just to know that they’re still safe.