You can't go home again, or can you?

At the end of Thomas Wolfe's novel "You Can't Go Home Again," the protagonist George Webber, realized, "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..."... Yet generations of Americans have longed to go home, either to their actual childhood homes or to metaphorical homes located somewhere in the past...

Susan J. Matt
writing in The Journal of American History,
September 2007



Ever since reading "Look Homeward Angel" by Thomas Wolfe as an English major in New Orleans many years ago, I have recalled the impressions his work made on me, and in particular, my concept of "home." I grew up in New Orleans, and, unlike so many people there, I could not wait to finish college and leave the city for good, despite all the fascinating and dreamlike qualities of the place, so unlike any other city in America.

Decades later, however, and especially since the images of the devastation wreaked on the city by Hurricane Katrina, and the great flood it brought, I have thought about returning to visit, to retrace my steps, paths, explore the home streets and sidewalks, trees, backyards, stores, and landmarks that decades ago in my youth were so much a part of me that I could not even imagine living anywhere else, even though from an early age I knew the city of my birth would not be my permanent home.

I think in this regard I am like so many people who are drawn to their hometowns, to their own familiar landmarks, street scenes, smells, sights, ambience and deep-rooted sense of place that we cling to, no mater where we live, work and are anchored in the present.

I find the Sunday New Orleans newspaper, The Times-Picayune, which I read most of my young life, at the local library, I go online and read New Orleans blogs and the daily news online, I think about the parks, walks, French Quarter, old neighborhoods and sandwich shops, my high school in old Algiers, across the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans. All these images and memories flicker by from time to time almost every day.

Even though i have no desire to go home to the physical "place" to live again, even in retirement, I find myself returning again and again in my thoughts and memories. So in that sense, we can "go home again," but never actually return. I keep in mind always that the "past is prologue" and the city where I was born and where I spent my formative years molded and shaped who I am today, for better or worse.

Over the years since I have left home, I have lived in quite a number of small towns and cities, each indelibly etching themselves in my memory. In each of them, I believe I sought out, however brief my stay, the links and ties to my original home that were there to be discovered deep within the structure and unique sense of place of each town and city where I subsequently lived. It's hard to describe. It was a feeling that soon came over me, part of the ongoing search for permanence, stability and roots. I did this consciously but probably mostly unconsciously, always with the thought in mind that this or that particular place could never be "home" as I once knew it to be. However, I often think about one idyllic, small college town where I lived for only seven months, and where I imagined I had found something akin to the home of my dreams. Alas, it was not to be.

Now that I have at last, after years of restless roaming and searching, found my "home place" here in Charleston, I have the luxury of indulging in my memories. Ironically, Charleston is where my ancestors are from and lived in the same neighborhood in the historic district where our family home is now. Life has a way of mysteriously completing circles.

I have never been homesick for New Orleans. I have no one there to visit now, no family or friends in that place. I have only my memories. And that is enough.