For some, looking through old pictures is incredibly intoxicating and pleasurable. Nostalgia can envelope one in a warmth through remembrance. We do tend to discard the bad memories or at least dull them. And the good ones light up again somewhere in there.
But many times, what these old pictures remind me of is the soft violence with which we are torn from our loved ones and deposited into various pockets of material and social isolation to serve Capital. This drift and this deadness in my chest... I think of communities born out of displacement only to slowly dissolve once again, their constituents wandering, waiting to take root and make connections that are to be broken once again.
One misses everyone at once. One begins to entertain fantasies of a golden community reformed spontaneously out of all one's favorite acquaintances, family, friends, and other loved ones. Perhaps these sorts of naive fantasies form the basis of multiple cultures' conceptions of heaven and utopia. The accumulation of the Good.
Another night of wine and silly old man thoughts coming out of the head of a young adult. Dreaming of a mythical time in which "everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."
