You Can’t Go Home Again
I like Thomas Wolfe’s novel of the same name as this title and I like the themes and characters in his novels. There are parts of his life, his attitudes that rub me wrong, but we all have flaws, some big and some small. Knowing this is useful, but not necessary.
When I published a commentary a few days ago about what it was like to grow up in a small town, a relative asked if I still had contact with my childhood best friend, Paul. I haven’t seen or interacted with Paul since we climbed a mountain together in New Hampshire in the late 1970s. The last time I heard about him was from another relative who had a jaundiced and inappropriate view of an interaction with Paul from a long time ago.
The song “Genesis,” from members of the Jefferson Airplane, describes what happens in life when people are parted (sounds a bit like the Beatles). “And living turns into an endless web.” Omar Khayyam in the “Rubaiyat” says it also: “The moving finger writes and having written moves on. Nor all your piety nor all thy wit, can cancel half a line of it.”
My ninth-grade English teacher, Miss McCormack, had our class memorize lines from literature and stand and recite those lines in front of the class. God help the person like my acquaintance from those years, John, who got up speechless in class one day during a recitation. “Want to do something big, John Franklin? Go wash an elephant!” Wow, and Miss McCormack was an elitist par excellence. She treated higher college divisions, or tracks, with more respect than lower ones. I was in a middle track, so it depended on the day and whether or not Miss McCormack was in a good or bad mood. I did learn lots of good literature from her and never faced the prospect of washing an elephant.
No matter where a person casts a line into the stream or river of time, you can’t go back and living does turn into an endless web that changes people, as does time itself. We become, eventually, different people. It’s not just a change at the cellular level.
During the winter of 1968-1969, I drove to the East Side of Providence, Rhode Island, also called College Hill just after a significant snowstorm. There was lots of snow, in fact Brown Street had an artificial snow barricade of snow made by snowplows not able to handle the intensity of the storm. I romanticized that trip and if someone said do it again today, I’d say that person was probably somewhat daft. Proust quotes an earlier writer: “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” That’s true at all kinds of levels from the practical to the symbolic.
On New Year’s Eve 1969, I was on a much longer trip from central Rhode Island to South Hadley, Massachusetts in another snowstorm to meet a friend from a work experience in a summer camp in Waterford, Connecticut the previous summer. Objectively, driving through all that snow was a bit of an act of lunacy, but youth imparts a kind of fearlessness that a person would not repeat in different circumstances. Most, later in life, would remain home.
You can’t go back again with friendships, as I mentioned with Paul. My best friend from college, Joe, violated our relationship on a trip to see a family acquaintance in Ontario, Canada. We traveled with other people and Joe crossed the line and despite our efforts many decades later at a reunion, the hurt from what happened made that reunion impossible. The line had been cast in that river of time, the moving finger went on, and we couldn’t go back or make it over. Maybe the learning from those experiences was what came out of it, but it does not feel that way even all of those distant years ago. To think otherwise is rationalizing.
The screenwriter and actor Kenneth Lonegran has his character Sammy speak the words “People suck,” in the movie “You Can Count on Me” (2000). I think that is true most of the time, but not all of the time with a nod to Lincoln, but this is not about fooling people, but rather, relating to them.
The movie “Splendor in the Grass” (1961), with its connection to Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality,” sets forth the idea of taking sustenance from past relationships and then moving on. It’s a lot like Khayyam, but here let’s not drift over into the territory of the Renaissance Man or Woman.
I’ve found that people generally are uncaring and that applies no matter their political persuasion. As a society, social and economic and political differences, driven to an extent by the isolation the Internet bestows on masses of people, have made the experience imparted in the book Bowling Alone (2000) apparent. I think that we’re not meant to bowl alone. Kids certainly are not meant to bowl alone even in the age of the Internet, and as a kid bowling down those duckpins, we never bowled alone because we lived in a more connected society. People depended more on one another for all kinds of issues from family to neighborhood friendliness. Those values and actions do still exist, but they are much diminished today. I get on my bike and ride miles and see few people out and fewer people outside of the immediate environment of their homes.
Someone contacted me because they had read my writing at CounterPunch where I once contributed commentary articles. I’m going to meet with that person, but chastened. I don’t expect much, or anything for that matter to come out of this meeting. Youth bestows the ability to connect, and the times, the late 1960s and early 1970s provided all kinds of opportunities to connect with people and the issues that are mostly missing today. It’s not impossible to connect, but the societal forces working against those connections are daunting.
As a footnote, I’d rather write for myself and others here than contribute articles that take hours to complete for nothing in return aside from knowing that a few people read what I’ve written. Writing for someone else, who makes money from that writing, is a waste of time and a ripoff.
You Can’t Go Home Again