The past is always new, the future is always nostalgic

On September 23rd, I went to see Daido Moriyama’s “Tokyo Revisited” exhibition together with my friend Ilaria. She, as a great enthusiast of Japan, served as my cultural guide and allowed me to understand that 1% of the exhibition that would have otherwise been ungraspable. It was hosted in the spaces of MAXXI, a museum complex with impressive futuristic architecture, set in the full urban context of Rome’s Flaminio district.

At one point in the exhibition, a vast room opened up before us. As happens with most MAXXI installations, the walls were sometimes white, sometimes left in raw exposed concrete. On one of the walls, blue neon lights composed the inscription “The past is always new, the future is always nostalgic”.

An aphorism written backwards? This is what it initially seemed to me. Everyone knows that it’s the past that is nostalgic and the future is what’s always new. Or rather, apparently so. Right?

The Japanese see things differently, my friend immediately replied. I asked her for explanations and little by little she helped me arrive at a reading of that cryptic phrase.

I began my line of reflection by affirming that the past was something clear, already explained in all its facets. The past is comprehensible. The past is objective. The past is something immutable.

But the more I talked about this, the more the opposite of what I was saying convinced me.

What if the past were instead extremely mutable?

Yes, it’s true that past things have happened, they are objective and immutable truths. Yet, what we emphasize about our past is not. The emphasis we place on our past depends on our present reality, and as it changes, the past also transforms. The past is its interpretation. Interpretation is something mutable, subjective, fluid. What my childhood was has undergone changes since I thought about it at 14; then it changed again at 18-19 and now, that I’m twenty, it’s different again. The things I did in my childhood are always the same, but what I remember of them, and the meaning I attribute to those actions, has varied.

As we ourselves change, therefore, our past also changes. The past is always new.

Moving now to the future, the line of reflection I developed was this. The future is never seen. The thoughts we have about the future, that is, the dreams we hope will come true, may or may not come to pass. However, we wouldn’t be able to recognize their occurrence anyway. This is because the perception of the future, like that of the past, varies over time. What we want today is different from what, once we’ve achieved or not achieved today’s goal, we would want tomorrow. The future we think about, the one we want, escapes in front of us without us ever being able to reach it.

And as with the past, this doesn’t depend on the fact that it doesn’t come true, but we are the ones who can’t recognize it, can’t be satisfied by it. When that past future comes true, in fact, our future will have already changed, our desires will have already mutated.

In this sense the future is always nostalgic. The future is something we continuously miss. We miss that something in our life. We continuously dream of future events and situations without however fully enjoying the present.