Mike Zang - Hrossa Nostalgia

Tearing through the first dozen chapters in Out of the Silent Planet, I was delightfully enthralled by the plot and it's substance. C.S. Lewis helps us view our own culture from a refreshingly alien perspective. Chapter 12 is the first extended dialogue between Ransom and one of the hrossa, Hyoi, in which they discuss the emotionality, pleasure, and pain of events. This includes memories of the events as well. Their conversation soon become personally applicable; I realized that my own opinions of nostalgia were intimately connected with Ransom's, and the hrossa culture (although definitely familar) was a longshot away from where I would like my own values to sit.

That said, Hyoi's revelation about a pleasureful event needing to take place just once, and it's memory to be a literal extension of itself reminding me immediately of C.S. Lewis's statement from In the Shadowlands [sic?].

"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if pleasure were one thing an memory were another. It is all one thing."

This quote from page 73 not only reveals a quixotic aspect of the conscious capability of memory, but it also refutes the Cartesian dualism in which much of Western culture rests upon. From an American standpoint, physical pleasure is far different from the later mental/emotional/spiritual recollection of that event; thus we dichotomize the physical from the emphemeral, but from the hrossa point of view, the two are indistinguishable. The memory of a previous pleasure follows us throughout life for an indefinite amount of time. When I think of things like that, it makes me not feel so bad about reminiscing and knowing that all that has happened to me in the past, whether good or bad, will never leave me. In that case, do the hrossa even experience nostalgia? It seems as though they would live not just in the present, but in any or perhaps all accumulated emotional states they could conceivably reflect back on.