The Good Old Days

“The Good Old Days” is both a phrase for nostalgia and a way of measuring the speed of change. In Smilla’s account, it begins as a new, sentimental revolt against development in Thule; later, it marks the disappearance of small-scale Greenlandic life beneath oil infrastructure and a new criminal economy. The phrase’s changing force makes the past less a refuge than evidence of how rapidly the present is being displaced.

A New Nostalgia in Thule

Smilla situates the phrase in her childhood in Qaanaaq during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Even the European clock, she recalls, seemed to move relatively slowly. Change came at a pace that allowed people time to notice it and protest. That first rebellion took shape as an idea of “the good old days”: nostalgia was not an ancient habit but a newly available response to development in Thule.

The distinction matters. Smilla describes sentimentality as humanity’s first revolt against development, but she does not present that revolt as an adequate answer to what is changing. The phrase preserves a moment when people could still register change as it happened. Its warmth carries a warning: a backward-looking protest may already be losing its force while the world it mourns is being remade.

When the Present Becomes the Past

Smilla argues that the pace of events has made this earlier reaction obsolete. Mourning native soil is no longer enough when change moves so quickly that the present itself may become the good old days at any moment. The phrase thus shifts from a name for a remembered past to a prediction about the near future. What was once a sentimental comparison between then and now becomes a measure of the instability of now.

That shift gives the expression its critical edge. Nostalgia can register loss, but it can also confine protest to lament: the pace of transformation demands a different response. Smilla’s reflection makes the phrase unstable on purpose. Each time it is used, it risks describing a world that has already vanished, turning memory into an index of how little time remains to recognize what is being lost.

Oil Development and a Vanishing Scale of Life

The contrast becomes concrete in Lukas’s recollection of Exringehavn. Until 1992, he says, Polar Oil was the only operation there: a communications station and fish cannery on one side of the fjord, the plant on the other, under the management of the Greenland Trading Company. Ships could dock stern-fast, and when floating hoses were brought out, the crew went ashore. The settlement had one building for living quarters, a galley, and a pumphouse; five men ran the place, and Lukas remembers sharing gin and tonics with the manager in the galley.

The specificity of that memory matters. It gives the older world a human scale—five workers, a single galley, an ordinary drink—rather than an abstract label such as “the past.” Smilla calls this sentimental side of Lukas new to her, and answers with teasing irony. His recollection nevertheless shows what the phrase can hold: not a claim that the earlier arrangement was ideal, but a record of the intimate, limited scale that large-scale development has displaced.

The change is not simply from one settlement to another. Smilla explains that oil discovered off North Greenland took ten years to extract because of the ice. The Joint Venture Warrior, a proposed drilling platform developed cooperatively by the United States, the Soviet Union, and Denmark’s largest shipping company, A. P. Møller, was designed on a monumental scale. Its prototype was to stand sixty feet above the water and provide work for 1,400 people. But an iceberg about 325 feet high, with roughly 1,300 feet of ice below the surface and an estimated weight of 20 million tons, rolled over it. Afterward, Arctic equipment was designed to be dismantled in twelve hours, the warning time available from the Ice Center. The engineering ambition and its defeat by ice give the phrase a further contrast: development can transform Greenland, but it cannot simply make the Arctic environment yield.

The Phrase Aboard the Kronos

Aboard the Kronos, the phrase recurs in a different register. Smilla identifies Mayam, an intermediate product between raw opium and heroin, as Tørk’s development and part of his agreement with Verlaine. Because of its high oil content, it must be refrigerated. She reasons that the ship may unload it at a Greenland port such as Holsteinsborg or Nuuk, possibly through connections on the Greenland Star. Her account places a new market in the landscape of development: the old smuggling of liquor and cigarettes has passed, cocaine is now plentiful in Nuuk, and a Greenlandic upper class lives like Europeans.

Here, “the good old days” is not a fond recollection of a galley or a slower clock. It is a cutting measure of how quickly one illicit economy has been replaced by another, larger market. The phrase connects the transformation of Greenland’s economy to the transformations of its social world, while its return aboard the ship carries the earlier warning forward: what feels like the present may soon be remembered as a vanished phase.

Across these uses, the expression holds together contrasting scales of change: childhood time in Qaanaaq, Lukas’s five-person oil station, the immense platform destroyed by an iceberg, and a refrigerated drug product bound for a modernizing market. The phrase does not settle into a simple celebration of the past. It registers nostalgia as protest, exposes the limits of nostalgia, and gives the novel a recurring way to name the speed at which a place and its present are being remade.