Going Back to Nassau Hall

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Princeton reunions are driven by a mythology of timelessness, the eternity of traditions, and the (preposterous) notion that your Princeton years were the best years of your life. We come back to Old Nassau, wax nostalgic, and sip beer in plastic cups under tents spread in the middle of campus. Every year the myth gains concreteness, just as the our actual memories shred and tear like a business card accidentally put through a washing machine.
I arrived on campus on friday evening, and was greeted by the eternal Princeton: the smell of damp grass, the slip and scrape of the soles of your shoes on the slate paving stones, the rain-darkened stone of the gothic archways. But this year, the spell is broken; my old dormitory is scheduled to be razed this year, and my old eating club recently went bankrupt. The past, it seems, will be truncated at 2006. Then the deluge began, and the battering rain sent us scurrying, birthed great muddy torrents running down Nassau street, a great flood to wash everything away. Ten years ago, I graduated a scientist, but in the intervening years, graduate school in the humanities (constructivism, relativism, subjectivism) has succeeded in erasing much of that previous self. It can be called growth, sure, but on the other hand I've yet to decipher the meaning of everything that I thought, and felt. Is that previous self still hidden somewhere inside, and do those old freshman-year debates about God and rationality still inform my ideas today? Or rather, does the past only exist to obliterate the present and future? More concretely, doesn't the past conclusively show us that nothing is permanent, that everything changes, that everything falls apart, that people disappear forever? And if we realize this, can the past not empower us to plot the future fearlessly, to reinvent ourselves fearlessly, because it teaches us that that which has passed is both irredeemable and irretreivable? To rephrase it in a concise axiom: historicity is the opposite of nostalgia?
Or, more bluntly, "If there's been a way to build it, there'll be a way to destroy it."