In my 20s, I was enamored of Thomas Wolfe—who is not to be confused with Tom Wolfe, author of “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “The Right Stuff”—whose fame seemed to be more connected to his penchant for wearing tidy, all-white suits than his literary prowess.
Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), on the other hand, wore dark suits and as my young daughter would say, always looked “a tinecy, tinecy” bit disheveled. He was 6’ 6” and famously wrote with pen and paper, using the top of his refrigerator as a desk. His novels—“Look Homeward Angel,” “Of Time and the River,” “You Can’t Go Home Again,” “The Web and the Rock,” among others—are long, prosaic, and expansive in scope. His sensibility and style is akin to Joyce and Faulkner—polar opposite to Hemingway. By today’s standards, people would likely say his prose is overwritten and rambling.
At the time I read his books, I wasn’t a writer, but I was intrigued by the mystery of the endeavor. And for someone just starting to feel the wild rush of life, Wolfe’s lyricism, the sheer force of energy driving his prose was inspiring. His novels were like mad trains hurtling into the dawn of an America that in retrospect seems like a dream. Reading his books was to feel both the exuberance and foreboding of the pre-World War II era.
I was haunted by one of his books: “You Can’t Go Home Again.” The novel is the story of George Webber, who returns to his hometown after publishing a successful novel. His return, however, is met with anger and indignation as family and community feel exposed by his too candid depictions of them. An outcast in his own hometown, Webber flees to the social life of New York, then Paris, and finally to Germany where he experiences the dark veil of fascism falling over the land. In the end, Webber returns to America with a renewed sense of hope and love.
Why did the book haunt me? Perhaps because it was a statement of something you know is true but don’t want to be true. Who hasn’t felt the anguish of returning to a place central to your very being only to find it irrevocably changed?
The depth and breadth of that anguish depends a bit on your concept of home. What exactly is home? Is it a place, a handful of people, a moment in time? A conjoining of the three?
When I think of home—the times and places elemental to who I am today—several come to mind. The first was a suburban almost rural America that offered just about everything to a little boy: family, stability, and budding friendships forged in creeks and fields, catching lizards and playing football in the mud. In a sense, it was the simplest promise of America: security, freedom, raw happiness.
For a time, home was in Africa, where I first saw the world in its pristine state. It was, to quote another pillar of literature, a place “Where the Wild Things Are.” That experience of wildness worked its way into my nascent consciousness and became a credo of sorts.
As a young man, my home then moved to the rivers of the West, where a group of similarly tempered people—in humor and sensibility—lived and worked. We shared the joy of seemingly limitless youth and the freedom that comes with it.
And, finally, I found home in the mountains with marriage, and a different but equally joyful experience of childhood played out vicariously with my own kids.
Over time, I have returned to all three of my previous homes, and, like George Webber, felt the anguish of change in returning. The empty fields and sleepy little town of my childhood have been replaced by the absurd wealth of tech wizards and venture capitalists. High gates and security systems prevent kids from even roaming far enough to make friends. Africa has devolved into a myriad of political battles and poorly executed economic transitions. And as far as the river world goes, we all got older, married, and moved on. While the rivers were and are the same, the chemistry of time and place and people has gone poof in the night.
As time marches inexorably forward, the world changes but so do we. At some point in our lives, we traverse a great chasm, which is our relationship to time. On one side of the chasm, we are able to live outside of time, whether in the blissful ignorance of youth, or, in fearing life’s unpredictability, choosing to live our lives in the moment.
On the other side of the chasm, we become keenly aware of the finiteness of time and our limited time on this earth. Friends, parents, grandparents, people we don’t really know but with whom we travel through life, all get old, some get sick and recede from the scene, some die. While change can be the majesty of our lives, as we get older, faith in that majesty requires some fortitude.
When I look back at, say, life on the river, I can so clearly feel the joy and rightness of being with those specific people in that specific place. Certainly, that junction of time, place and people will never occur again, but the memory of it travels with me, the feeling of home is still there. Though you can’t touch it, you can’t actually be in it, you can still feel it in a fleeting way, the generalized sense of belonging, which, when it comes down to it, is all you need.
Maybe, as Wolfe says, you can’t go home again, but I do believe you can take home with you. Home, whether you have one or many, can be a talisman for your travels.
“You Can’t Go Home Again” ends with the following passage:
Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. Saying:
"To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth—
"—Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, towards which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”
While Wolfe was talking about death—and, in fact, I read this passage many years ago at my dad’s memorial—it doesn’t have to be.
It could just be about finding home when you need it, a home bright and strong just around the bend.
This article is soooo relatable to those of us experiencing what you speak of——the twilight years of our lives. And looking back and saying to ourselves, having lost parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and close friends—-and home as we knew it, “Where in the world did it all go!” You’re a master of capturing all of our thoughts. We’ll written.