Nostalgia.

Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means, "The pain from an old wound." It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn't a spaceship. It's a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels: round and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved. -- Don Draper, Mad Men

Michael Chabon once wrote something to the effect that many writers suffer from nostalgia for a time they never knew, a time before they were born. That idea is most deeply evidenced in Chabon's most successful book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a sepia-toned look at the golden age of comics, and by extension, the New York City of the late 30s and early 40s. The book is successful, so far as it is, largely due to the obvious and deep love that Chabon has for the era and the place -- something far more powerful than memory alone. I can't remember the exact essay in which he writes about this, and I haven't got the book (Maps & Legends) to hand, but I do remember when I read that, I had a feeling of -- ah-ha! There's someone else who feels this, too!

I've always been afflicted with nostalgia for things that didn't need it: I have a tendency to grow melancholy and ruminative just before moving, even if I'm moving from a place where I was nothing but lonely and unhappy, and to drench every memory of even the recent past in a summery sunlight; and by the same token, images of places I have never been, from times before I was born, can fill me with a yearning that it is beyond my powers to express. This feeling is strongest with places and things that no longer exist: the shabby façade of Ebbets Field in the heyday of Brooklyn baseball, a street from inter-war London long since bombed flat, a line drawing of a Dutch schooner bound for colonies now rightly returned to native rule. I think this is why I have always had a love of old maps -- they give form to my fantasies of time-travel, of seeing the world before its entirety had been discovered.

I come from Oregon, one of the last places on Earth to be "civilized", in the sense that people showed up there and built roads and permanent structures and cities and suchlike. Perhaps related to Oregon's long-held (and deeply-treasured) reputation as something of a frontier is the fact that it seems to be a haven for "alternative" lifestyles, people uninterested in traditional religions and philosophies, who arrive looking to find God or the self somewhere in the communion of oddballs and naturists and professors and whathaveyou that squats out there in the rain. But frontiers, unfortunately, are swallowed, and become borders, and lines demarcate where we butted up against the limits of our space -- in this case, the Pacific Ocean. But this, too, feeds some people's need to search for something that may or may not be there, but they turn the eye inward, often, these days: in the possibly legitimate search for God, there is also, well, a certain narcissism.

Okay, I'm wandering from my original topic, which was nostalgia, specifically for times before we were born. The fact is that living in the West, where everything is new, there's not much of that feeling to be had, at least not the way it is here, in New York, where not long ago I walked through a cemetery in which some of the graves were planted before there was a country known as the United States of America. And so far, of all the places I have gone, the one that has evoked that in me most strongly, more than mid-town or the Brooklyn Bridge or the nostalgic syntheticism of Citi Field, is Grand Central Terminal, the largest train station in the world, a station that has now stood for 96 years, and dates from a time when the train was the way one got around the country if one was in a hurry.

I'm sure I must have been there once before today, but if I had, it was so long ago I no longer remember it. I probably wasn't old enough to appreciate it. Not that I really know how to appreciate it now; I know nothing of architecture or really that much of its history, but to stand in its main concourse, all gleaming marble and green ceiling, and look out over it, is to feel suddenly the desire to transport myself back in time, to see men in long coats and hats, sailors home from the war, women in crepe dresses, children in kneepants, to enter that crowd and be in it, to move among them, to walk out on the street and see black hulking cars, to ride the train downtown and walk through the Italian and Jewish and Irish ghettos that have long since been gentrified into hipster hangouts and yuppie pied-a-terres.

I have always had a sense that New York, like many Eastern cities, had a heyday that lasted just through the end of WWII, a time when industry boomed and great things happened in places like Chicago, St Louis, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. It is true that cheap cars and cheap suburbs and freeways sucked people out of these cities back in the 50s, and long stretches of them were given over to urban blight. There was even a time in the 70s when it looked like Los Angeles, that bastion of all things not-New-York, the sprawling metropolis of cars and sun and constant culture clash, would surge past New York to become the country's largest city. What a shame that would have been; I have lived in both now, and I must say, New York is an infinitely better place -- bigger, smarter, less likely to swallow your soul and spit it out soggy and somewhat the worse for wear. Anyway, I have always desired to see the New York of that heyday, when baseball was still played in Manhattan and Brooklyn, when WEAF beamed Guy Lombardo and Bob Hope across the entire eastern seaboard. In Grand Central, you almost can. Not quite, but almost.

I didn't really do much at Grand Central, because I didn't have anywhere to go, and once you leave the concourse it is, like many public buildings, given over largely to food courts and hot little tunnels where people walk quickly without ever getting anywhere. I just mooned about, trying to hear Red Barber calling a Dodger game in my mind, thinking, wishing.

The truth of the matter is that, much like the rest of New York, Grand Central is going through a bit of a renaissance in the last fifteen years or so. Gone are the days when New York City teemed with murderers and crack fiends, when the Bronx burned through a hot night's blackout, when the city threatened to sell off the station to make way for office space. Another set of tracks is being added to the 67 already in existence. An enormous renovation in the 1990s was largely successful. Nearly all the trains run on time, and if you lose your iPod, there is apparently just a 1 in 50 chance that it won't eventually turn up at lost and found. And rail! Rail is the hot new way to get to grandmother's house, or at least it will be if we wish to stop those ice caps from melting -- don't you think?

So maybe it's not all nostalgia in Grand Central. But forgive me if I wish to let it wash over me just a little bit before I get on a train and go anywhere.