I’m not sure which matters more—where the seed comes from, or where it takes root and grows.
I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.
Home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.
Somehow, the prairie dust gets in your blood, and it flows through your veins until it becomes a part of you. The vast stretches of empty fields, the flat horizons of treeless plains. The simplicity of the people—good, earnest people. . . . When you leave, everything you experience outside of Kansas will be measured against all you know here. And none of it will make any sense.
We’re a shifty, sliding population. . . . What we refer to as “home” may be a place we haven’t seen in years; a place where there’s no one left who knows our name.
I ached abruptly, intolerably, with a longing to go home . . . to those things, those places, those people which I would always, helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me.
It’s one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you’re boozing with Yankee writers in Martha’s Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It’s something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed’s drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. . . . You can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha’s Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is, but it’s no place to spend Wednesday afternoon.
Home is always the impossible subject, multilayered and maddening.
I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.
I should like to save the Shire, if I could—though there have been times when I thought the inhabitants too stupid and dull for words, and have felt that an earthquake or an invasion of dragons might be good for them. But I don’t feel like that now. I feel that as long as the Shire lies behind, safe and comfortable, I shall find wandering more bearable: I shall know that somewhere there is a firm foothold, even if my feet cannot stand there again.
Miss Froy loved her home with that intense perverted passion which causes ardent patriots to desert their native lands and makes men faithless to their wives. Like them, she left what she loved most—for the joy of the return.
It is only when we are fully rooted that we are really able to move.
Paradise is home. Home as it was or home as it should have been. Paradise is one’s own place, one’s own people, one’s own world, knowing and known, perhaps even loving and loved. Yet every child is cast from paradise—into growth and destruction, into solitude and new community, into vast, ongoing change.
Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home, and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets.
A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.
