( On Not Going Home)
A wonderfully written and enjoyable article by Richard Cohen. It is always in our subconscious but never much thought about the question and subject. It is worth expressing your thoughts on the subject in comments section. (F. Sheikh) Some excerpts;
” In a fascinating recent essay in The London Review of Books, called “On Not Going Home,” James Wood relates how he “asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood.”
It was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.
That question is worth repeating: If I had only a few weeks to live, where would I go? It is a good way of getting rid of the clutter that distracts or blinds. I will get to that in a moment.
In the essay, Wood, who grew up in England but has lived in the United States for 18 years, explores a certain form of contemporary homelessness — lives lived without the finality of exile, but also without the familiarity of home.
He speaks of existences “marked by a certain provisionality, a structure of departure and return that may not end.”
This is a widespread modern condition; perhaps it is the modern condition. Out of it, often, comes anxiety. Wood does not focus on the psychological effects of what he calls “a certain outsider-dom,” but if you dig into people who are depressed you often find that their distress at some level is linked to a sense of not fitting in, an anxiety about belonging: displacement anguish.
Wood describes looking at the familiar life of his Boston street, “the heavy maple trees, the unkempt willow down at the end, an old white Cadillac with the bumper sticker ‘Ted Kennedy has killed more people than my gun,’ and I feel … nothing: some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection, no past, despite all the years I have lived there — just a tugging distance from it all. A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: How did I get here?”
“Wood writes: “Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness,’ which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: It is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.”
Yes, being not quite home, acceptance, which may be bountiful, is what is left to us.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/opinion/cohen-in-search-of-home.html?hp&rref=opinion
Very interesting question. Its hard to answer because assuming that you have a few weeks to live, and actually finding out about the end, are two very different scenarios. If I am to assume this right now I might have the same answer, of longing to go home, “ET go home”, but I am pretty sure if I found out that actually I have only few weeks left, I would be so devastated that I wouldn’t want to go anywhere. In fact if I was visiting home of my childhood and found this out, I would definitely want to return to my present home where my present family and my children are. The place would not mean anything but my loved ones would mean everything to me. Here again the real answer will depend on the real situation; suppose when I found this out and I was home where I grew up and my loved ones are also at the same place, and my condition is miserable, rather humiliating, so badly incapacitated physically, that I have to be spoon fed and not able to attend call of nature by myself in privacy, then I would want to perhaps go away in hiding and die alone….I mean of course every one dies alone, what I mean is to die like some animals do, in seclusion. Bucket list is entirely a different question.
It is true that in the last few weeks of your life you want to be at a place where you are surrounded by your loved ones. But following aspect and piece of the article grabbed me the most;
” In the essay, Wood, who grew up in England but has lived in the United States for 18 years, explores a certain form of contemporary homelessness — lives lived without the finality of exile, but also without the familiarity of home.
He speaks of existences “marked by a certain provisionality, a structure of departure and return that may not end.”
Mr. Wood is from England and even though he is living in a similar culture, but still he is not able to shake off the feeling of ‘foreignness and provisionality’. How about other immigrants who are from lands with a different cultures and set of values! Although all of them consider America their new home, but there is always this subconscious tinge of feeling that you are in transit and cycle of journey is not complete yet-till you reach back home.
After I came to USA many years ago, for a long time the main topic of discussion in the gatherings was the plans to go back home. Many of us bought homes and offices back home to return to the towns where we grew up. With time our children grew up here, and that discussion faded away but some feeling of ‘ provisionality’, as Mr. Wood put it, never went away.
As Mr. Mustafa rightfully said, we want to die where we are surrounded by our loved ones, but with a ” structure of departure and return that may not end” .
Fayyaz
I would love to be glued on a sofa in my study reading Rumi’s Masnavi and enjoying his verses full of deep thought, philosophical reasoning, spiritual awakening, and Love of every thing. Death won’t be my end, but a renewal as Rumi says:
Life, like a stream of water, is renewed and renewed,
Though it wears the appearance of continuity in form.
Even if it comes to stay, it seeps deep or evaporates,
Pours down or springs up, renews and is renewed;
In a new form, in a new way . . .
Mirza Ashraf