TWO names, one loss. Increasingly these days I come across people who use the names ‘Sukarno’ or ‘Suharto’ to place these presidents in a period sensed as lost. Those doing the yearning are, of course, various. But actually they are similar: in their melancholy, history is nostalgia.

History as nostalgia is the symptom of modern consciousness. Those with yearning do not live like people in societies where tradition plays a central role.