Fictive?

I recently heard an actor say that he resided in nostalgia.

Yet as Virginia Wolff noted--memory is unreliable. As our perspective changes our memories alter.

Doris Lessing posed the question-- why is memory so selective ? She wasn't referring to cataclysmic events or those events we desire to repress.

Given that memory, an illusive presence that hides as well as reveals, leaves out so much it cannot be fully trusted.

We weave together a patchwork, snippets of recall, a sampler of the past. A fictive past emerges spun with the woof and waft of imagination.

So to reside in nostalgia, to be homesick for the past, may be to engage in wrapping memories in the swaddling blanket of fictive autobiography.

Yet, nostalgia no longer carries a stigma. It is no longer associated with feelings of melancholy.

John Tierney reported in a 2013 New York Times article about recent research, " people tend to have a healthier sense of self-continuity if they nostalgize more frequently..."

So live forward, but it's fine to stop and reside in nostalgia.