attitude fails to cultivate. It idealizes the past, but not in order to understand the way in which it unavoidably influences the present and the future. Nor does it unambiguously assert the superiority of bygone days. It contains an admixture of self-congratulation. By exaggerating the naive simplicity of earlier times, it implicitly celebrates the worldly wisdom of later generations. It not only misrepresents the past but diminishes the past. It attempts "less to preserve the past," as Anthony Brandt has observed, "than to restore it, to bring it back in its original state, as if nothing had happened in the interim." Henry Ford's Greenfield Village, the restoration of colonial Williamsburg, and Disneyland's "Main Street, U.S.A." exemplify, in Brandt's view, the passion for "historical authenticity" that seeks to recapture everything except the one thing that matters, the influence of the past on the present. Yet "the past cannot be known except in relation to ourselves." For that reason a real knowledge of the past, in Brandt's words, "requires something more than knowing how people used to make candles or what kind of bed they slept in. It requires a sense of the persistence of the past: the manifold ways in which it penetrates our lives." This persistence, of course, is what the nostalgic attitude denies.

Nostalgia evokes the past only to bury it alive. It shares with the belief in progress, to which it is only superficially opposed, an eagerness to proclaim the death of the past and to deny history's hold over the present. Those who mourn the death of the past and those who acclaim it both take for granted that our age has outgrown its childhood. Both find it difficult to believe that history still haunts our enlightened, disillusioned maturity. Both are governed, in their attitude toward the past, by the prevailing disbelief in ghosts.

Seemingly irreconcilable, the nostalgic attitude and the belief in progress have something else in common: a tendency to represent the past as static and unchanging, in contrast to the dynamism of modern life. We have seen how nostalgia freezes the past in images of timeless, childlike innocence. But the idea of progress, although it perceives ignorance and superstition where nostalgia perceives charming simplicity, encourages an equally lifeless and undifferentiated sense of the past. Notwithstanding its insistence on unending change, the idea of progress makes rapid social change appear to be uniquely a feature of modern life. (The resulting dislocations are then cited as an explanation of modern nostalgia.)

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