Feel the nostalgia in the present 🎩
2026
4/10/20263 min read
Everything that feels new at this moment in time will look quaint at some point in the future.
Think about that for a second.
I think about this often when I see something that feels distinctively modern in the present moment. It reminds me that even the most cutting-edge things won't feel that way eternally.
One of those moments was when I sat down in the Mazarine Library in Paris the other day to write, and I saw these books on my left in the bookshelves:
What caught my attention most is the multi-volume set of a ‘New French Dictionary’.
But as you can see, the books themselves look far from new.
Of course, the books were new at the time of publishing, but most likely the French language in them would feel quite quaint in this day and age.
(I would’ve liked to open the dictionaries on the shelf to verify this, but the access was reserved only to the staff.😅)
This is the fascinating paradox historians deal with every single day.
…
No WAY!
This is so funny!
Literally as I was about to write the next sentence of this post, a librarian opened a secret door right where I thought the bookshelf was! 😂😂 I’m dying.
So… the New French Dictionaries weren’t as real as I thought they were.
Maybe they have a real-world equivalent, but basically my argument was based on some painted writing on a very well-made trompe-l’oeil door. 😂
Anyway, what I meant to add before my point was sabotaged: nostalgia for past times can emerge relatively quickly.
For example, it hasn’t been that long since people used rotary phones, but it would be very quaint to use them now.
Even the 2010s feel quaint by now due to the accelerating rate of innovation in technology. Just looking at photos of the first generations of iPhones will do the trick.
But what’s even more mind-blowing is that by the same token, the current iPhone 17s will look quaint eventually.
(I’m aware I’m repeating the word quaint a lot here, but it just conveys the perfect nuance I’m looking for.🤓)
I could come up with a million more examples of this, but my point is that this idea makes me feel somewhat perplexed, but most of all, it makes me appreciate the present moment more.
Being someone who loves history and wishes she’d lived in the 1950s in Paris or Milan, this reminds me that had I been alive back then, everything around me would’ve looked ‘modern’ to me.
In other words, I wouldn’t have looked at the world in the 1950s with these 21st century eyes. I wouldn’t have felt the nostalgia as I do now when I watch for example films made in the 1950s.
No matter how much I try to immerse myself in that era through archival material, I will never be able to know what life would’ve actually felt like in those days, because history isn’t retrievable.
We may retrieve some fragments of it, but only the people who actually lived then can know what the full human experience was like in those days.
And since I can’t change my birthdate, I might as well try to see which aspects of the world around me in the present moment will feel nostalgic in the future.
That makes now feel more special.
It makes me want to take mental pictures of the world around me, because it might as well be that someone 70 years from now looks at archival material from the 2020s and wishes they’d lived in this moment.
What do you think? What are some of the aspects of this day and age that could feel nostalgic in the future? Would you have liked to live in another era?
Let me know by responding to this email. I’d love to know how you see this dichotomy of modernity and quaintness. ☺️
I’ll explore this same topic a bit more next week, but until then:
Have an elegant weekend!
Bisous,
Elle
P.S. Now I just realized that it wasn’t the books that only staff members could access, it was the area behind the secret door that was staff-only. 😂
