You can never go home again
A quote, a misquote and a misattribution.
In 1940 Thomas Wolfe (not this Tom Wolfe) wrote ‘You Can’t Go Home Again‘, a novel about nostalgia in small town America. In the finale of the novel the protagonist, George Webber reflects …
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
I prefer the slightly adapted quote
You can never go home again
You can never go back to how things were, no matter how close it seems, no matter how easy it might appear. And I’ve tried.
I love this quote. You can never go back to how things were, no matter how close it seems, no matter how easy it might appear. And I’ve tried.
And when I’ve tried, the situation is a hollow shell of the previous times. It’s a copy without its essence and without its soul. And by being a copy it becomes a travesty of its original. It becomes eerie and sickening, toxic and appalling, inhuman and revolting. Everyone participates in the copy as if it’s the original, and they too become appalling empty facsimiles of what went on before.
By making the copy, the original is debased, and what was wonderful and touching when it was in the past, becomes nauseating and frightening when the copy exists in the present, and everyone continues to pretend that things where just as they have ever been. But they are not. And they never can be.
You can never go home again
Keep the past where it belongs – in the past.
Photo by Catherine Kay Greenup on Unsplash
