Stop Mourning Paris Cafés; Begin Your Circle Here

I found myself crying over a documentary about 1960s Greenwich Village last night—specifically, the scene where Bob Dylan plugs in his electric guitar for the first time at Newport. I wasn’t even born for another two decades, yet I felt the loss of something I’d never possessed: the electricity of being present when the world changes, when art matters so urgently that audiences boo and cheer with equal passion.

Why do we mourn for moments we missed, communities we were never part of, conversations we could never have joined?

There’s something peculiar about artistic nostalgia—it’s not really about the past at all. When I fantasize about drinking with the Lost Generation in Parisian cafés or arguing aesthetics with the Bengali Renaissance intellectuals in colonial Calcutta, I’m not longing for those specific times and places. I’m longing for the myth of artistic purpose, for communities united by the belief that what they create could change how humans see themselves.

We romanticize the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat Generation, the Bauhaus movement—not because we understand what it was actually like to live through them, but because they represent something we feel is missing from our own moment: the intoxicating sense that art matters urgently, that creators are engaged in collective acts of transformation rather than isolated acts of self-expression.

But here’s what disturbs me about this nostalgia: it allows us to believe that meaningful artistic community existed then but not now, that we’ve somehow missed the golden age of creation and are left only with its diminished echoes. It’s a form of temporal exile that convinces us we were born too late for the real conversation.

Last month, I spent an afternoon reading about the Calcutta Group—those young artists and writers in the 1940s who believed they could revolutionize Bengali culture through radical aesthetics. I found myself envious of their certainty, their shared mission, their confidence that their experiments with form and content could reshape society. They seemed to inhabit a world where art and politics and philosophy hadn’t yet been separated into discrete, specialized domains.

Yet I wonder: were they as certain as they appear in retrospect? Or is certainty something we project onto the past because we need to believe someone, somewhere, knew what they were doing? Maybe every artistic movement looks coherent and purposeful only in the rearview mirror, while the people actually living through it felt as fragmented and uncertain as we do now.

The truth about art movements is that they’re only movements in retrospect. While they’re happening, they feel like chaos—artists arguing, communities fracturing, manifestos contradicting each other within months of their publication. The Beat Generation we idealize was mostly a handful of friends trying to make sense of post-war America while dealing with addiction, mental illness, and the ordinary struggles of paying rent and maintaining relationships.

But our nostalgia for these movements reveals something essential about human nature: we need to believe in the possibility of collective meaning-making. When we fantasize about joining Tagore’s intellectual circle at Santiniketan or debating surrealism with André Breton, we’re really fantasizing about belonging to a community where ideas matter, where aesthetic choices have moral weight, where what you create is connected to how you live.

This longing becomes dangerous when it prevents us from recognizing the artistic movements happening around us right now. While we’re mourning our absence from 1920s Montparnasse, we’re missing the communities of creators forming in our own time—often in digital spaces, often crossing traditional boundaries between high and low culture, often addressing concerns that didn’t exist in the golden ages we romanticize.

Every time I watch a film about artistic communities of the past, I feel the same melancholy: these people seemed to know they were making history. They moved through their days with the confidence that their work would outlast them, that their struggles with form and meaning were part of something larger than their individual careers.

But maybe this is projection too. Maybe Hemingway didn’t know he was Hemingway. Maybe Virginia Woolf felt as uncertain about her place in literary history as any writer today. Maybe the sense of historical significance we attribute to past artistic movements is something we can only see from a distance.

What if the artistic movement I’m nostalgic for is actually happening now, all around me, and I’m too close to it to recognize its shape? What if the conversations I wish I could have had with past generations are the same conversations available to me today, just in different forms, with different people?

The real tragedy of artistic nostalgia isn’t that we missed the golden age—it’s that our obsession with golden ages prevents us from fully inhabiting our own moment. We spend so much time longing for the artistic communities of the past that we fail to create the artistic communities we actually need.

Perhaps every generation feels like it arrived too late for the real conversation, that the essential work was done by the generation before them. Perhaps this feeling of belatedness is actually a sign that we’re ready to begin our own movement, our own attempt to make sense of existence through collective acts of creation.

The artists I admire from past movements didn’t spend their time wishing they’d been born earlier. They looked at their present moment—with all its uncertainty, fragmentation, and apparent meaninglessness—and decided to create communities of shared purpose anyway. They didn’t wait for permission to begin the conversation they wished they could join.

Maybe the movement I’m nostalgic for isn’t in the past at all. Maybe it’s the one I haven’t yet had the courage to help create.