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Nostalgia, as is widely recognised, is not what it used to be. And just as well when, according to an article in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, until quite recently “nostalgia and homesickness [were] regarded as mental disorders. The psychic pain associated with longing to return home had been considered a mental disorder for centuries, especially in Europe, where it was a sign of moral weakness between nations.”
In its current sense, nostalgia is taken to mean a mild, wistful yearning for a more pleasant, manageable past, when the sort of problems that currently preoccupy us did not exist. That in itself shows how nostalgia messes with the truth. The problems were always there, they just didn’t get as much attention. The rosy-hued past that nostalgia conjures up, often never was.
However, the sentiment serves a purpose. The values we think about in our nostalgic reveries are often positive ones. Kindness, consideration for others, simplicity, a desire to please, good taste, prioritising quality over mediocrity – the sort of qualities you encountered when you went shopping at Auckland’s Smith & Caughey’s.
Which is why the announcement that the much-loved, family-owned-and-run, 144-year-old department store would close early next year was greeted with dismay. Whether such mild outpourings greeted the demise of John Court, George Court and Sons, Milne & Choyce and other elegant emporia of days gone by, only a social historian could say for sure.
Smith & Caughey’s is not, of course, the last department store in town – Farmers, Kmart and even The Warehouse fit the definition. But it is the last of its kind, in which service in the best sense and human contact in an almost obsolete sense are seen to be as important as the speed and convenience allegedly afforded by self-checkouts and shopping apps.
Smith & Caughey’s was something you valued, even if you never demonstrated your affection by passing through its doors and handing over your money. The consequences of that behaviour pattern are now only all-too clear.
There’s nothing unique about such dissonance between sentiment and action. Parisians are like this about the cathedral of Notre Dame – many never giving it a thought, and certainly not using it as a place of worship – until it caught fire in 2019, at which point they collapsed in a Gallic heap of sentiment.
So, it has been with our own dear temple of commerce. (And so it also was, let it be noted, with the likes of now-extinct TV shows Fair Go and Sunday, whose loss so many mourned even though they never watched them.) But just knowing Smith & Caughey’s was there, with its ornate front and its slightly idiosyncratic product mix, meant we could be certain of some stability in this most changeable of worlds.
Nostalgia is often derided, especially by neoliberals who wish to cast aside the soppy values of yesteryear to forge ahead into a more profitable future. Who has time to indulge in such unfashionable virtues as kindness, consideration for others, simplicity, a desire to please, good taste?
Google nostalgia and you’ll find most references disdaining it as a futile activity that tries to escape reality by yearning for a past that is often imaginary and never attainable.
Yet it remains a powerful sentiment. Even the hard-headed, pugnacious atheist Richard Dawkins once wrote that he had “an English nostalgia for village life, including church. I never go, find it excruciatingly boring, but still, I have some nostalgia for evensong on a summer evening.”
An alternative, even more useful way of thinking about nostalgia may be that it has a use-by date. Fond memories are generational and are wiped out over time. In 2050, an entire generation will have been born in a world without Smith & Caughey’s in it. They will not lament the passing of its subdued grandeur and old-fashioned service. They will not get all mushy about the tearoom and the Christmas window display.
In their world, they will probably not even encounter a salesperson. Their purchases will be electronically recorded and charged for when they walk through the higher-tech retail doorways of the future.
At the other extreme, to take one example, in our city centres there are fewer and fewer people alive to remember fondly the neighbourhoods that are no more, obliterated and replaced by motorways.
Perhaps we can more easily come to terms with the likes of Smith and Caughey’s demise by cultivating a kind of anti-nostalgia - remembering all those things in whose passing we should rejoice.
To pick a random Auckland example: the unhelpful public transport timetables of a few decades ago, when buses did little more than ferry passengers from city or suburban centres and back, along routes that could not be made to co-ordinate with each other. Those were the days.
