Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present ..... The name for this denial is golden age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in. It's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.
I was so astonished by the remark on nostalgia in Woody Allen's new film 【Midnight in Paris】 (starring Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams). To some extent, I have lived in the past, like Gil (played by Wilson) in the movie who thinks he would be happier if he lived in a different time. I somehow have had obsession with the 90s and have been reluctant to move on and grow up ever since the day of college graduation. To be more exact, I think that my spirit always lags a few years behind the present time. I was not aware of why and how my mind behaved in this way until the remark in the film waked me up.
Sometimes those good old times are not as good as they feel like. They seem to be so good only because they have passed and we don't have to deal with them anymore.
