A WOLFE IN PAST'S CLOTHING...?

"You can't go
home again" said
THOMAS WOLFE -
and in one sense he
was right, and in
 another sense he
wasn't. I've done
it, you see. Allow
me to explain.

The house in
which I now reside,
I've lived in before.
My family moved
here in 1972 and
we were here for
eleven years until
we relocated to another house in a different area in 1983. Four years later,
we moved back - I'll spare you all the boring details as to why. At first, it was
as if we'd never moved, but - ah, "but" - I'll get to the "but" shortly.

Being able to "go home again" depends on various sets of circumstances;
what age you are at the time, how long you've been away, to what extent
(if any) things have changed since you left and (if not) whether they'll stay
the same for the forseeable future.

Referring
to an earlier post,
my memories and
associations of
all my previous
residences are
anchored in
specific periods
of time, fixed
and immovable,
from which they
can never be
sundered. For
example, when
I think of one
particular house,
it's always set
within the years 1965 to '72, and when I think of another, it's set between
1983 to '87.

Sometimes, when out walking in one former neighbourhood, I think to
myself how nice it might be to stay in my old house again. On one side
are the same neighbours as when we moved to the area in the mid-'60s -
still there after all this time. That sense of continuity is an important aspect
in considering whether it's possible (or even desirable) to recapture the
feeling and flavour of bygone days by such means.

When we're young,
our life seems to
unfold before us
like an unravelling
ball of string;
however, when
we look back
many years
later, we don't
see that string as
the continuous,
uninterrupted
strand it seemed
to be at the time,
but as separate,
severed segments,
each in its own little
compartment of the mind. Or perhaps a chain would be a better comparison,
with links missing at various intervals which would otherwise connect every
individual recollection (or set of them) with the ones before and after, rather
than leaving them in apparent isolation to one another. (I'm overstating the
case of course, but you get the idea.)

Consider the following hypothetical scenario: You're eight or nine years
old and move to another house in another area. Six months later, your
parents realise it was a mistake. The house is a dump, the area is a slum,
the school is a joke and the neighbours are cold and unfriendly. By a
fortuitous stroke of good fortune, you can move back to your previous
house in your old neighbourhood - and do. All your former friends and
neighbours are still there, living their lives as before. Under those happy
conditions, you would merely be resuming your old life after a temporary
hiccup in continuity. Truly, you would have gone home again.

If, on the other
hand, you don't
move back until
twenty years
later, many of
the factors which
made living in the
area so memorable
would no longer
exist, chief amongst
them being your
youth and all
its attendant
properties. (A
sense of wonder,
enthusiasm, etc.)

The surrounding neighbourhood would no longer be your very own
adventure playground, merely the street where you live. The friends with
whom you played in bygone days would by now have grown up and moved on,
once-familiar local faces flitted or expired. True, you'd have your memories of
happy times past, but these would still be yours wherever you happened to live.
No doubt you'd derive some satisfaction from once again inhabiting your child-
hood home, but unfortunately that might not be enough of a comfort when the
realisation finally dawns of all the inevitable, irreversible changes that have
occurred in your absence.

(I daresay it's the same even if you've lived in only one place all your
life. Changing circumstances over the years can conspire to make the
experience of living in a long-term home entirely different to what you once
knew. If new people move in next door and are an absolute nightmare to
live beside, then you may suddenly find yourself consumed with a desire to
quit the place of your unforeseen and seemingly never-ending torment -
despite it being the only house you've ever known and in which you
were previously blissfully content.) 

Moving house
when young is a
bit like parting
company with
your wife or
girlfriend when
you're older. You
eventually meet
someone else and
you get on with
things, but when
that lost love re-
surfaces in your
life and wants
you back, you
remember all the
good times you
had and may be tempted to pick up where you left off. It's happened - I've
read of people leaving their partners for old boyfriends or girlfriends with
whom they've become reaquainted through the auspices of Friends Reunited,
only to discover that, once the first flush of reconnecting with a cherished
part of their past has passed, they really have nothing else in common.

It can be the same with houses - or anything, in fact. Human nature
being what it is, we always miss what we don't have. When we get it,
we then start to miss whatever we gave up to acquire it. (Or something
else in which we imagine our happiness resides.)

Case in point: In 1987, when the opportunity arose of returning to the
house we had left over four years before, I did so without a backward
glance as I'd never wanted to move to begin with. Twenty-five years later
however, I increasingly find myself, unbidden, recalling happy times
associated with the place we so heartlessly abandoned in favour of
our once previous and now current abode. Don't misunderstand me -
I'm still glad to be back here, but, as I say, I also now think fondly of
the house we left behind. (As I do the other former homes my family
have inhabited down through the decades.)

The fact may
be however,
that it's not
actually childhood
houses (and other
places) which we
miss per se, but
our childhood -
that time of awe
and enchantment
and sense of
eternity that
seemed to rest
within our grasp.
The houses are
just symbols of
those times and
experiences, the places with which we associate our feelings of wonder and
joy, plus long sunny summers and frosty snow-bound winters in a magical
kingdom where time held no sway and we thought we had forever.

When we visit the grave of a loved one, we do so with the full realisation
that the person we knew is not actually there - only their shell, not their
spirit, or essence, or whatever you may care to call it - but we still feel
the need to go to that specific spot to 'reconnect' with them. Recently,
I've begun to ponder whether revisiting an old house or neighbourhood
is like visiting the grave of my childhood - there it lies, dead and buried,
and I'm merely looking at a monument to its former existence.

Hopefully I'm wrong. Hopefully, the spirit of childhood yet resides in me
as a living, breathing reality and will never forsake me. Perhaps that's the
simple truth - it's not so much that childhood forsakes us, but that we
forsake childhood.

So, can one go home again? They say that home is where the heart is -
but the heart is sometimes a fickle and indecisive organ, and not always
to be trusted.

What would your answer be?

******

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy the following one: http://kidr77.blogspot.com/2011/11/subtleties-shadows-and-shades.html