Look Homeward, Angel

I went back to North Carolina, despite Thomas Wolfe's express warnings against it, for the first time since leaving almost two years ago. Robin has already been back a few times but has never really written about it here. I understand now better why; it's a hard sort of thing to put into words, perhaps.

To begin at the beginning, the night before we left, a Saturday, I remember walking along the Promenade in the dark, looking at the lights from Manhattan reflecting in the water and thinking that I did not want to go back South. Maybe at some point, but not that particular next morning. It might just have been journey nerves, but I also felt: my life is here. What good will it do to go back there, into the past?

The following Saturday night, I remember standing in the driveway of the house where we stayed in Chapel Hill, looking up at the stars, thinking not only that I did not want to go back North, but that perhaps I had made a fundamental and unfixable error in choosing one life over another.

What happened in between? I can't really say.

The wide roads that lull you into a trance, the pine trees, the silence. Seeing people I had missed so badly. The smoothness and ease of life, the light. All that, and the oddity of being in North Carolina, a place where I no longer had a life or a home or responsibilities, but only memories. All this created a curious sensation of detachment that at moments reminded me strongly of my very first weeks in North Carolina, almost 20 years ago, when I arrived on a whim to visit a friend and decided to move to Chapel Hill for a while. I remember the sense of openness, of possibility, that here was a place to be optimistic in, and for some reason was reminded of that passage from Conrad that has stuck in my memories lo these decades:

"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more -- the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort -- to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires and expires, too soon, too soon -- before life itself."

But I came back of course, because this is my life now. It was hard to describe how strange Brooklyn seemed at first, as I saw it again with eyes that had gone briefly Southern: cold and gray and stony, the people skinny and crazed-looking and mean, the motorists unforgiving. And I thought: Home at last.