“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Very briefly: More so than Jane is, I think, I’m intrigued by and susceptible to nostalgia. I create a feeling for it. I used to equate the emotion with sentimentality—but leaving aside the basic merits of the latter, I’ve come to understand that nostalgia, growing out of its inevitable counterpart, memory, represents a facet of Seth’s idea of simultaneous time. For if past, present and future exist together (and continue to develop), then I see nostalgia as expressing a legitimate searching by the conscious mind as it seeks to grasp that the past exists now, and is not “dead.” The quest for nostalgia is one way to bring the living past up-to-date. The yearning I feel each time I drive past the apartment house Jane and I lived in for 15 years, just west of the business section of Elmira, represents my conscious reunification of the past with the present, and even a projection of both into the future in ordinary terms.

8. Our four visitors had become our dear friends long ago. I was sure that, by arriving just when they did, they contributed much to Jane’s latest improvements. They offered enthusiasm and faith and reinforcement to both of us, and renewed in us a fine nostalgia for old, seemingly more innocent times—even though all of us knew that that was illusory: Basically, those class days, those class years, couldn’t have been any more innocent than any other times; it was just that hindsight helped!

When I look up at those three high, old-fashioned bay windows that illuminate the living room of Apartment 4, on the second floor of that house, I visualize Jane sitting behind them at her oak table, thinking and writing, intrigued and comforted by the busy patterns of people and automobiles traversing the intersection she looks down upon: Walnut and West Water Streets. And behind those windows, at night in that living room, she paces back and forth for hours at a time after she begins to speak for Seth in December 1963. She holds ESP classes there. Accordingly, then, a Jane Roberts Butts and a Robert F. Butts live in that apartment I’m creating. I think my nostalgia for those days reinforces our activities in larger realms of consciousness, as well as in our “present” joint reality, in which my wife is now chair-bound.

[...] It is back toward their dimly remembered exuberance that many adults look with a sense of loss and nostalgia. [...]

[...] Ruburt’s hesitation was caused this evening by misplaced nostalgia at ending our book. [...]

[...] Right now I’m really blue, my eyes operating poorly; tears warmly close; yet enjoying the dark sky and street as rain threatens… the view of the mountains afforded by the windows; the rock music on the radio; the odd remaining odor of door varnish—deeply loving all of it yet swept through with something like nostalgia. [...]

[...] You may think longingly and with an almost hopeful nostalgia of the religion of your childhood, and remember a system of belief that ensured you of immortality. [...]

[...] But an interesting point came out as we talked: Jane doesn’t experience that strong nostalgia when she finishes one of her “own” books.

In his art we have the nostalgia of the ego for past time, and for lost control of a self that has already vanished, and changed into something new. [...]

[...] I’m the one who’s apt to become attached to old things, old places, to look back with a bit of nostalgia. [...]

Through it all each one of us felt a penetrating nostalgia for those vanished classes, for they’d been truly unique; I don’t think it would be possible to recapture their particular, innocent, lasting sense of excitement and exploration. [...]

Two things in the dream held him back: a gigantic nostalgia for the writings in the sand that had remained for so long, the jottings of children—and for a moment he did not want to be part of anything that would wipe them out. [...]

[...] Our cottage here is within a hundred yards of the spot where we camped with Jane’s father in the late 1950’s. I would say now, without checking with Seth, that any thought of nostalgia we might have derived from returning here would have been better ignored. [...]

5. It was inevitable that Jane’s images would remind me of the note I’d written well over two months ago, on re-creating the past, or updating it, through nostalgia. [...]