I’m fascinated by SPQR, especially the final days of the Republic, and I have a dark red shirt with a yellow laurel and a bold “SPQR” emblazoned on it. The crimson hue clings to my skin like a faint stain of history—when I run my fingertips over the fabric, I can almost feel the rough texture of a legionary’s tunic, or the cool stickiness of blood on the cobblestones of the Forum after Caesar’s assassination. The laurel, too, is no mere decoration; it’s the same symbol that rested on Octavian’s brow as he turned the Republic into an empire, masking purges and silenced voices in the name of stability. I could spend hours contemplating and appreciating the dreamlike aesthetics of the Pantheon or Italy’s neoclassical parliament building, tracing the contours of the columns, the stone sculpture of a goddess on a chariot, and the eagle she holds aloft. When I listen to Quod Lux Romae, the Mediterranean spreads out before my eyes. The music not only gives me a sense of Rome’s legacy but something far deeper and unsettling—the longing tone resembles the mournful eulogy for a devastated homeland, spoken by the ravaged, haunting souls of Gaul’s old battlegrounds and the silent decay of the repressed and the purged as Octavian paraded in triumph. I longed for what could have been—burned books and lost thoughts replaced by exquisite concealment and sensitivity-avoiding justifications. He held that a system bringing stability and efficiency makes the plebs’ lives better. But how could I know?
Margaret Atwood has said, “We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her, we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it, but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come, and try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.”
We cannot always see the past clearly and have resolutions, so it is often impossible to come to terms with it, no matter how hard we try. We yearn to be fully present, to accept what is gone and before us without resistance. This is the kind of serenity the Stoics urge us toward, focusing on what we can control, letting go of the past and future. But even as we try to remain in the moment, we are constantly being shaped by time, experiences, and the inevitable changes they bring. The process of evolving and adapting to the flow of life is as much a part of us as the desire to stay rooted in the present. It’s this duality that creates a quiet discomfort. How can we fully inhabit the moment when part of us is always reaching forward? Therefore, for me, nostalgia is not about missing the “good old days” but longing for a closure to its unresolved tensions when you cannot escape from it. And this is why nostalgia will always be there.
This does not mean I want to recreate the past to find a resolution. Older adults often claim that student life is the best and that we will miss the simplicity of our teenage years. Yet, it is human nature not to want to be less sophisticated or engaged with the world and society than the majority. If someone like me were to express their opinion about adolescence, they wouldn’t say they miss the simplicity of the old days. Instead, they would say they prefer the present because it is the time when their life feels the fullest and most sophisticated, closer to knowledge and truth—even though it may not necessarily be happier than the past. There may be regrets and longing at this stage, sure, but that doesn’t mean the present is worse than the past. If given the chance to go back in time, we might have new regrets and new troubles based on our inherent personality or nature, and what we have. The same applies for a society—now is the point where our experiences are the fullest, our perspectives the most diverse; and we are still exploring or will be exploring. And, given our nature, we cannot expect to “fix it” even if we could go back in time: you might fix something you knew, but another thing you never expected would emerge. “Know Thyself,” says a Delphic maxim. To know ourselves is to recognize that our longing for the past’s closure is not a weakness, but a testament to our humanity, and that our present, flawed and alive, is where we honor both the echoes we hear and the voices we are still learning to speak.