When “Home” Is No Longer Home (“You Can’t Go Home Again….”)
By Frederick J. Blahnik
“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”
—Thomas Wolfe
I went “home” last weekend after a long while away, but the place I visited was no longer home to me. It had changed; I had changed; more likely, we both had changed over the intervening fourteen years, and those weren’t just picayune, subtle changes either. No, these were highly significant alterations I’m talking about, and the words “subtlety” and “nuance” do not belong anywhere near this conversation.
I really don’t know what I was expecting. I guess I was probably thinking I would feel an emotional attachment to that place, an emotional tether that would exist forever—albeit in varying, gradually diminishing strength—but a connection that would nonetheless remain with me until the day I die. I was wrong. I didn’t feel any such thing. I didn’t feel anything really. The old place was different. It didn’t look the same, feel the same, seem the same. Everything about its appearance was different from what I remembered, but that wasn’t all. Setting aside the “look” part for a millisecond, please take note of the fact those other observations reflect directly on me and not on some small, sterile piece of ground situated in the southeastern toe of Minnesota.
No, the issue speaks directly to Yours Truly and my reaction to what I was witnessing at my old domicile. You see, the original farm has undoubtedly changed significantly in appearance and texture over the years, but I have changed more. Without question. Without doubt. Everything changes over time, inarguably, but human flesh and blood and human emotions–and especially human perspectives–change more than all the others. These distinctly human things change markedly more than the soil underpinning our earthly existence and every one of the non-carbon-based objects surrounding us.
I couldn’t go home again because I am an immeasurably different person from when I left that rustic place as a callow lad. I am completely different, so to call that place home now is a laughable misnomer. It was home to me at one time, true, but it is no closer to being home to me now than I can rightfully claim 1976 is the year in which we are presently living and breathing. That isn’t true, of course, and the place I left somewhat reluctantly a half lifetime ago no longer comes close to resembling a place I would now call home. As Thomas Wolfe noted in his brilliant treatise, changes are occurring all the time—many of them unbeknownst to us—and inasmuch as it is impossible to turn back the clock and undo past changes and experiences, the “home” we think of in the past is as illusory and imaginary as sipping a pluperfect elixir from the Fountain of Youth. You simply cannot return to something that doesn’t exist anymore. You cannot go back in time and relive parts of your youth purely because you are not satisfied with some of the outcomes that derived from your immature behavior and some of the choices—yes, agreeably hurried, rash choices—that you made at the time.
The word “home” is a cruel misrepresentation, an apparition—-a lie really. Home is where we happen to be at any given moment in time. Obviously home is liberally interpreted to represent the location where one was raised as a youth, but that place began changing—or rather continued changes that are eternally ongoing—the second you left it. And thus nowadays you don’t recognize it anymore. Not at all. Not any part of it. That “home” has disappeared for good. That “home” is gone.
Gone forever.
How can you go “home” to a place that no longer exists other than in your heart and in your hazy memories and in some nostalgic netherworld your brain has invented as an antidote against the bad times which occasionally rear their grotesque head in today’s frenetic world? You cannot. That type of feat would require a time machine, and of course those cryptic, esoteric things only exist in the fertile imaginations of sci-fi writers and lunatics. The home of your youth is no more accessible than the body of your youth, and forty pounds added to one’s flabby gut, five hundred terrible night sleeps punctuated by severe insomnia, and ten thousand gray hairs later–all “earned” while floating downstream on a relentless, unalterable temporal river–mean that wish is no more likely than finding forty eight ounces of pure gold in the malodorous depths of a cesspool. Not happening and never will. That revered home you grew up in decades ago is a thing of the past, and since the past is wholly inaccessible so too is the utopian place where you were raised and quite fantastically morphed into a responsible adult without realizing such a transcendent process was even occurring.
But majorly more profound than anything else, people change over time, and those dear souls who constituted “home” back in my youth are no longer the same ones I knew then either. Oh, they inhabit the same bodies as before and their voices still sound the same as before and they still sign their names exactly the same as before (albeit likely a trifle more tremulously with the passage of time) and they ardently profess to hold the same core beliefs and morals from when they were much younger, but trust me, they are not the same people I grew up with. Those individuals are only shadows from the past. Scepters. Holograms. Ghosts. Time has changed all the people I remember, some to a surprising extent and in a surprising fashion–not always for the better. If a chunk of limestone left exposed to the elements over a period of forty years suffers significant degradation over that same time span, why then would you expect something as fragile as flesh and blood and human emotions to be capable of resisting a similar natural onslaught?
The plain answer is: They don’t. Human beings change a lot over time, yet the most ironic aspect informing this dynamic is that the most significant change occurs inside their bodies, not externally. And when I say inside, I am referring to within one’s brain—within one’s psyche, where the machinations of consciousness are constantly evolving and devolving and churning about and processing new stimuli every minute of every hour of every day and forming new conclusions and opinions based upon any and all new information received, sometimes odd and convoluted ones—and not the more obvious fattening in one’s midriff and the frustrating hair loss and the embarrassing flaccidity over every square inch of one’s outer body surface.
They change; you change; the world around us changes; change is the only constant informing a life spent on Earth. Well, change and the Arrow of Time. People—each person currently alive—represent the chief variable, and change and the infallibility of passing time are the omnipresent constants which work non-stop to shape our earthly existences.
David Bowie perhaps said it best in one of his more famous songs: “Time may change me, but I can’t change time…..”
A big amen to that sentiment.
And a big nullity to sincerely believing that you can ever return to the home of your youth. That place—that Panglossian “home”–started disappearing the second you left it, and the disappearing act has only accelerated since that pivotal day in your life, although the patch of ground you left behind –if it could speak, which it obviously cannot—would say that it does not view the urgency of time in the same light as chronically desperate, frenzied, obsessively satisfaction-seeking members of the Homo sapiens species…..
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