The Last Day is the First Day

Dear Reader,
There is an old expression, “You can never go home again.” This is taken from Thomas Wolfe’s 1929 novel, “Look Homeward, Angel.”

…And at the end of it [self-appraisal] he knew, and with the knowledge came the definite sense of new direction toward which he had long been groping, that the dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back–but that you can’t go home again.

The inference being that: “You can’t go back to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame” (unknown). Or there could be deeper meanings such as the illusive and metaphysical Archetypes of Carl Yung or the revelation of Plato’s cave. Whatever it may be we all want to return to something. And of course there are among us those that haven’t even given it a moment’s notice. I suppose that a greater sense of appreciation to such a thought is sharpened with age, when you have more history than future (I speak as a mortal), you know more dead than alive, and people and places are vanishing before your very eyes. And then there are those that are doing more to forget those painful memories of “home” like in a popular song by the Eagles, “Some dance to remember, some dance to forget”. I wonder if you’re like me, and have actually gone back to visit old places from the past and tried to conjure old memories? I wonder if you felt the same disappointment, profound sadness, and shocking bewilderment? ‘You can never go home again’ then becomes more than an expression that you once heard or read but a nagging sense of reality that keeps getting larger and swallows us up.

C. S. Lewis in his sermon, “The Weight of Glory”,  said,

“Our common expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; and what came through them was longing. These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For the thing itself….Now we wake to find… we have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed, or taken in… Our life-long nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.”

This blog is dedicated to this journey, this pilgrimage. May we all find our way back home.

Robbie Warner, December 31, 2009