When I left home to go to school in North Carolina, my dad gave me a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel.” Don’t think too directly about that correlation. It reliably makes me cry.
A story as much about progressive self-discovery as it is about the perpetual struggle to return to some defined sense of self, “Look Homeward, Angel” reminds me of one of the more famous Thomas Wolfe quotes: “You can’t go home again.” (Sadly prophetic, given that Wolfe couldn’t return home comfortably after writing his semi-autobiographical story — the people in his town, thinly disguised in his writing, were insulted by his exploitation of friends and family.)
My dad inscribed the inside of the front cover, his handwriting spiky and slanty and generally indecipherable: “You can go home again.” Wolfe and his writings felt, suddenly, personal.
When I found myself in Asheville for Fall Break, I had to go see Wolfe’s house. Think about the metaphorical resonance — leaving my own home, and discovering, through books and traveling, someone else’s in the process. Think, additionally, about the connection I invariably felt to this particular author, with his themes of home and family and land and identity.
Like Wolfe, I find myself repeatedly conflating home and house. Contentment during a family dinner is intrinsically linked, for me, to the warped, prickly wicker chairs around our dining room table; a sense of reflective solitude is palpable in the pale blue walls of my childhood bedroom.
“You can’t go home again” — the seeming impossibility of my ever fully living at home again, both refuted and strengthened somehow. I can, of course, return to my house, but “home” is a less singular concept. The fuzzy red carpet in our sunroom, where patches of light became dustily diffused; the richly red dirt of Wolfe’s homeland, shaping his family’s obsession with owning the land they inhabit. Physical remnants of a feeling of a place. It’s there, somewhere. Links, through words, to people, which link to places.
I couldn’t actually tour Wolfe’s house. That was OK, though. To be there, surrounded by friends I had aggressively manipulated into joining me, was enough. Stories themselves are powerful, but I’m interested in the intersection of the physical and fictive; the potential for a place or thing to become its own story.
And this, my Kindle-loving friends, is why I remain a loyal book buyer. The weight, and the crack in the spine, creased from re-reading, and that old paper smell. The small thrill of possessing a physical, dense thing — like Wolfe, apparently, I have a penchant for ownership. I know I sound like an overly enthusiastic librarian, but I will never succumb to the soulless ease of a Kindle.
Books become their own stories. When I look at my copy of “Look Homeward, Angel,” I think of home. When I look at a Kindle, I think of Amazon drones and high-speed internet. I know which one I would rather be reminded of.
