Once, by tidying up, I found a letter wrote by my friends and I to « us in the future ». In reality, the intention wasn’t to question our future but to immortalize our present. We were scared to forget.
By rereading it I felt a lot of happiness mixed up with sadness and regrets due to the fact that I can’t relive those moments as they belong to the past. It was is nostalgia. I realized that if that theme sparked so much interest in me it was because it is part of my personality. I am used to hoard pictures, videos, cards, drawings, letters, many things that I don’t want to get rid of in order to remember. In talking to my relatives I realized that everyone had a different link with nostalgia.
Then, I asked myself many questions which have guided my researches :
Moreover, by listening to older people telling us about their youth, by listening to music from the past, by reading historical novels or by watching films from that period, it is possible to feel regret for not having lived in that era. In fact, when asked "If you had the choice, what era would you like to live in?", 5% of the people interviewed by La revue des deux mondes answered "a future era", 25% "the present era" and 70% "a past era". This majority shows a collective regret for an idealised past. Thus, how can we make people aware of the preciousness of the here and now?