You Can’t Go Home Again… But You Never Should Have Left

* I have moved this from my older blog in attempts to consolidate *

I re-read You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe this weekend.

“Some things will never change.  Some things will always be the same.  Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen.”

I have for many years been in awe of Wolfe and his epic-time-description.  And to put my sentiments quaintly… nothing changes.  His words impress more deeply upon me each time I lift his pages.  With each passing moment of my life, his literal life seems to become a greater mirror of mine.  Even if you have never missed and longed for someplace so violently that even in your unconscious dreams it brings a blunt and wakeful pain to your heart… his words are worth your while.

“You found the earth too great for your one life… But it has been this way with all men… You have faltered, you have missed the way… And now, because you have known madness and despair… We who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us—we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”

The man knew how to pull a pen across a page- and make it last, make it momentous.  It is all very real, very true.  He does not mimic… for there are mortal recollections and emotions more memorable than pure sadness that only those who have left their true and beloved home—left it against their better judgement—have felt.  It is a unique pain, a different yearning.  A desperation unknown before that first foolish, weary step.

“…it was silly, anyhow, to feel as he did about the place.  But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth?”

It’s not depressing; though I know it may seem tiresome.  It is rather, a companion to lonesome wanderers.  A textual beacon from the past that has ceased to fade.  Will never fade so long as there are restless fools such as myself who act with stubborn insistence upon a sporadic and momentary urge to move.  A mistaken epiphany leads dreamers and wanderers much further into solitude with such unceremonious brevity that it is years before one can even begin to notice they are no longer home; that they have left, and kept moving.  It is quite a time before one realizes that the faces surrounding are not the same, the streets have changed their course, the music sings of foreign loves; Time has passed, the past is now your future.

“…and he had an instant sense of something re-found that he had always known—something far, near, strange, and so familiar—and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream.”

Ironically, the restless wanderer has kept stagnant while the immovable past has fled.  As long as there are those who once believed that love was something that one could do without, as long as we— the simply ridiculous and clearly delusional—continue to flee, his Homeric lamp will burn.

“…Must the beggar on horseback forever reel?”

“All he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.”

Originally posted April 6, 2008

• Quotes: Thomas Wolfe

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Posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 5:40 AM Categories: Quotes, Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, books . Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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