It was a tiring day. Last night, I sat in an armchair and played a YouTube video. It was instrumental music. There was rain and wind in the background.

After a few moments, the music drew me in. The atmosphere took hold. My mind drifted back to my childhood. I don’t know how long I stayed there. I was lost in thought. It felt like an escape. From myself. From the present.

When I opened my eyes, my rested and clear mind began to function consciously again: what mechanisms, I wonder, are at work to create this magic? Cradled in the embrace of nostalgia, do we recall real things, or do we invent realities we hardly ever experienced?

It is likely that this whole phenomenon is a double game: both reality and fiction; a sweet deception and a necessary ritual. All these mixtures serve to create the illusion that the past was fuller, more beautiful, yet at the same time they help us preserve our identity, the continuity of the self, so that we do not feel severed from our roots.

If we see it as self-deception, nostalgia is a way of softening the pain of time as it flows, as it slips away. If we see it as a ritual, it becomes a way of building our identity, of keeping alive a thread that binds the past to the present.

It is likely that this brings nostalgia closer to art: both fiction and truth; both experience and remedy… Said with a touch of cynicism: just another crutch to keep us from crawling as we climb the steep slopes of existence.