The Ruins of Nostalgia 55

We were nostalgic for ruins, but did not want to be ruined by our nostalgia. As

revolutions, as abstraction, as automation kept ushering us into the future, we

kept wandering back to the past, thinking of cities built up module by module

into complexities of verticality leavened by staircases welling up through story

after story made possible by the Otis elevator, the staircase’s metaphysical bête

noire. Increasingly, among the construction sites, we found ourselves thinking

Stay, thou art so fair. The rich once took the grand tour to Rome to sketch the

ruins of the Colosseum; aristocrats built “ruined” follies on the grounds of their

peacock-littered estates. We led our visitors to the ever fewer ruins in our city

crumbling unobtrusively in the midst of ruthlessly renovated façades. It’s what

the visitors wanted to see—it made them feel a curve in the doctrine of linear

progress that curved their own doctrines of linear progress into something so

curvaceous their minds turned for a time into spiral staircases winding indolently

past the Otis elevators falling and falling. We led our visitors to the ruins and we

overheard them murmuring Stay, thou art so fair. We were not rich, but in our

heart of hearts we were aristocrats. And for a time decay had held its own amid

the otherwise precise façades of commodity fetishism. For that’s what decay

lacked—precision, or, it was precision that lacked decay.   *   But we lived in

commodities, like cowrie shells. We lived in symbols. And then one day we were

expelled. For it turns out one can live in a symbol, but only for so long. It turns

out only real aristocrats can afford to love ruin, it turns out only those who

believe in their own future covet antiques. It turns out only ruined nostalgists

can afford the ruins of nostalgia.