Tag: Thomas Wolfe

You can’t go home again

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn home, writing

“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

Fans of the Hallmark series “The Way Home” see time-traveling characters talking about whether they can change the past and whether going there is an addiction that keeps them from living in the present. I like the series and the fact that it suggests to some of us that we can’t go home again and need to stop trying to do so.

Our family lived in this Tallahassee, Florida house from the 1950s through the 1980s. The first thing I notice when I Google the address is the ugly driveway that takes up a fair amount of the front yard. From pictures posted by a subsequent owner, I notice that the kitchen and dining room have been combined in an attempt to make the home modern; one of the kitchen windows has been covered over.

A look at neighborhood maps confirms what I worried about when I was young: the wonderful woods behind the house have been turned into an upscale neighborhood. The homes look expensive and less desirable than the woods where we played.

All of our former neighbors have moved away. My 1954 Chevy no longer sits in front of the garage door. In fact, the room is no longer a garage, but an office. The memories remain even though the changes to the house obscure the past to those of us who once lived there. I resent the changes to the house because they don’t fit a late 1940s home.

Now you see why I can’t go home again: home is no longer there. Even the huge azalea and camelia bushes have been torn out.

—Malcolm

Why you can’t go home again

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

“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 in You Can’t Go Home Again

You can’t go home again because the home you knew no longer exists. And even if it did, the you who lived there no longer exists.

I never go to reunions because everyone there is a stranger and so am I.

Home isn’t always a place, the place where you grew up, had a summer romance, first saw the world clearly, or experienced fear and pain that impacted what you have become but not who you were during those moments that call out to you years or decades after the fact.

Home for a writer is often his/her first novel. For me, home has always been The Sun Singer.  The novel has one sequel and I had long thought to write another. But I delayed doing that for various reasons. Last year I decided to commit to the project. But it didn’t work. I’m not who I was when I wrote The Sun Singer, nor is the location in which it was set, nor are a thousand other variables that shaped the book and myself when I wrote it. None of those things exist now except in my imperfect memory.

I like a comment from a favorite poet of mine Ada Limón from a May 16 interview in The Atlantic: “We want to grow as artists, as human beings; we want to have more access to the workings of the world. So every book process changes for me, because every book is a new way of looking at the world, and a new me: I’m different every time, though I’m bringing the older self—note I did not say wiser, but older—to the process.”

Not to change, would be stasis. . .as a person, a spouse, an author. We have fresh eyes always. New influences. Experiences that changed us a little or a lot. If I tried to go home, however, I defined that, I would be a stranger in a strange land. The Sun Singer and its sequel Sarabande are as they are (or were) but the “me” I am today didn’t write them.

Change, as the I Ching tells us, is the only constant in the universe. We are better off flowing with it than fighting against it. Nostalgia draws us toward the past, but that past is an illusion, and trying to go there represents a failure to live in the present moments all of which want to have their say in our lives and our work.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the contemporary fantasies “The Sun Singer” and “Sarabande.”