Best Description Of Nostalgia Ever

Yep, it's another quote from Truck. The set-up: Michael Perry travels to New York to meet with editors and publishers. While there, he makes a pilgrimage to the Whitney Museum of American Art to see Edward Hopper's Seven A.M., a painting that makes Perry ache with nostalgia. A photo from a truck brochure from 1950 has a similar effect, which is where today's reading picks up:

Not all the neural paths fire in such obvious sequence. The first time I saw those sun-blasted palms backdropping the yellow International, I thought immediately of chase scenes in The Rockford Files ... The theme music, ongoing answering machine joke, Jim's put-upon wit, the way he ran like a stove-up ex-jock, I am fond of the whole package. But whenever he is in flight or in pursuit, my eye is drawn past the Pontiac Firebird into the background where California lies apparently lazy and hot beneath a sun whiter than the one we know here in Wisconsin, and beyond the set I see the new highways and the bare hillsides and I think of the subdivisions and teeming engines to come, and I become petulant over the fact that I can't wander in there. Never mind that the series was shot between 1974 and 1980 and we're hardly talking about garden of Hesperides. It's not about the preservation or the loss. It is that I have been cheated of that place in that moment. This is something beyond nostalgia and verging on saudade, a Portuguese word I first encountered in a Jim Harrison essay in which he spoke of obtuse sentimentality, childish melancholy, and a sense of life irretrievably lost.