It goes in two directions at once. It goes backwards as it goes forwards. It loops. It detours. Do not fall into the illusion that history is a well-disciplined and unflagging column marching unswervingly into the future…
And where history does not undermine and set traps for itself in such an openly perverse way, it creates this insidious longing to revert. It begets this bastard but pampered child, Nostalgia. How we yearn — how you may one day yearn — to return to the time before history claimed us, before things went wrong. How we yearn even for the gold of a July evening on which, though things had already gone wrong, things had not gone wrong as they were going to. How we pine for Paradise. For mother’s milk. To draw back the curtain of events that has fallen between us and the Golden Age.

— G. Swift, Waterland