On Leaving Home

James Wood, who teaches literary criticism at Harvard and on occasion reviews books for the New Yorker, was born in Durham, England. He has lived in the United States for 18 years and says he never expected to stay this long. He writes about his ambivalence at living here, on what it means to return to his home that still feels like Durham, and the strange sense of exile he feels in this country. (Times Literary Supplement 2/20/14)

When he came to the United States, he had no sense of what might be lost. To lose a country or a home is “an acute world-historical event, forcibly meted out on the victim, lamented and canonized in literature and theory as exile or displacement…It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.”

While I have often written about my search for a home, a Querencia in the Spanish sense of the world, I’ve never experienced anything like the sense of exile Wood describes or the more extreme exile that a person must feel when they leave the country of their birth, either intentionally or by force, for a place where they don’t know the language or a single person.

And I’ve always known I would return to the place I left, even if it didn’t feel like home or the home I was searching for. And I never felt the sense of homesickness discussed by Wood when he says he is sometimes homesick as he longs for Britain. “It is possible, I suppose to miss home terribly, not know what home really is anymore and refuse to go home, all at once. Such a tangle of feelings…”

He says he has made a home in the United States “but it is not quite Home.” Wood says so much has disappeared from his life, the English reality that he craves, the English voice, the peculiar English phrases and puns. All of that is but a memory and he confesses he knows little anymore about modern life in England. “There’s a quality of masquerade when I return, as if I were putting on my wedding suit, to see if it still fits.”

After reviewing the works of authors who have written about exile—Edward Said, Geoff Dyer, W. G. Sebald, Teju Cole—Woods concludes by returning to the time, 18 years ago, when he left England. Then he had no idea how it would “obliterate return.” “What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time…”

Isn’t this true of many of the decisions we have made throughout our life? We are woefully deficient in predicting how we will feel about the decisions we make and often only become aware of what we have done long after the choice was made, when it’s too late to do anything about it, should we wish.

A Sense of Place

You think if you change location, your problems will vanish, so you move somewhere or change something radically in you life and then, well, there you are again. Jennifer Vandever

Over the holidays I moved to a small village in the south of France, not far from the coast. There are two small bookstores a block away. Next to each one is a small, family run bistro where I can take my meal each night. Down the way a bit is a market with fresh fish, vegetables and fruits.

There is a cinema in the next block that I often frequent and across the street a coffeehouse where I feel welcome to linger for a while. There is a university two blocks away where I sometimes audit classes and make ample use of its exceptional library. It is a delight to be among students once again.

The village has become my querencia. Querencia is a Spanish word that refers to the place one calls home and the sense of well being and belonging that it gives rise to. You are glad to be there. It nourishes and informs you. You are at peace in your querencia and feel a deep affection for it.

How I wish all this was true. I’ve been searching for such a place all my life. The search itself, I suppose, has become my querencia. While the quest is never far from my thoughts, I was reminded of it once again by a special issue of a journal, “The Writer’s Sense of Place,” that a friend sent to me recently.

The journal consists of a number of author’s responses to questions about the importance of place in their work. The authors are not well known, at least to me and they vary widely in their views about place. One poses the following hypothetical question:

…what kind of books do you think Marcel Proust would have written had he been born in Sundance, Wyoming, and what kind of books would Mark Twain have written had he been born in Paris?

Elsewhere I wrote: In her "Reminiscences" Dostoevsky’s wife, Anna, records how thrilled Dostoevsky was to be back in Florence once again and was working productively on The Idiot. Yet, it did not take him long to realize there is more to writing than being in this benign place, even Florence in the summer. He soon began to miss his friends or any form of congenial company.

During a summer in Florence, Dostoevsky wrote to his niece: I cannot write here. For that I must be in Russia without fail, must see, hear and take a direct part in Russian life; where’s here I am losing even the possibility of writing, since I lack both the essential material, namely Russian reality…and the Russian people.

Some of the authors in the volume describe a similar sentiment. They were largely from the South or from a western state where they lived in rural areas of open spaces, not isolated but far from a city.

Most days I don’t feel at home or that I’ve found my querencia, regardless of where I am. No doubt I am one of those doomed to chronic dissatisfaction and restlessness. If anything my desk has become my home.

As long as I have a few books around me, a bookstore and library nearby and nimble fingers to hit the keyboard, I am relatively content. It isn’t a grand sense of happiness or overwhelming pleasure. But if the sun is out and the days are warm, I can manage just fine and continue to feel grateful to be here on this island in the middle of the Pacific.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Bob Dylan

Share-It Square

Something is wrong with too many places in America today. Mark Lakeman

Where are the public squares in this country like the piazzas in Italy where people gather to chat with their friends or anyone else who happens by? I recall a suburban square, one like countless others in this country, that was recently built on the main street in a town outside of San Francisco. I have driven by that square many times and not once have I seen anyone there or even anyone approaching the place.

I admire the square, the trees and benches that have been abundantly distributed throughout. I hope that it will eventually become a popular gathering place. But in all honesty, I have no reason to believe it will, as long as you have strap yourself in your three-ton utility vehicle every time you want to go there.

Think of the even more numerous intersections in this country where only automobiles gather to wait for the signal to change. What is an Italian piazza anyway but an intersection where cross streets come together? What might be done to create a more public setting in the lonely intersections of this country?

I first read about how to reinvent the intersection in an interview with Steven Johnson discussing his new book, Future Perfect, in which he discusses once again the importance of peer networks in developing new ideas. He describes a fellow in Portland, Oregon who realized that “throughout human history, cross streets have been places where civic culture happens.”

So he got together with people in his neighborhood to start sprucing up the intersection, now known as Share-It Square after the intersection streets, SE 9th and Sherrett Streets. They built a small lending library, a food stand, 24 hour solar powered tea station, a bulletin board and placed paintings here and there. The idea caught on. Soon there was another one in Portland known as Sunnyside Piazza and then several others, at last count over 20.

After Share-It Square had been developed, the organizers surveyed their individuals in the immediate area and found that an overwhelming majority felt that crime had decreased, traffic had slowed, and communication between neighbors had improved ((85% on each of these measures).

The Sunnyside Piazza intersection is said to attract people throughout the day. Neighbors say they intentionally detour through the intersection to and from the nearby streets, perhaps to visit the kiosk, run into friends, or simply participate in whatever is going on there.

What did it take to change a neighborhood intersection into a public square? One person, who apparently realized on a trip to Italy that cross streets have historically been places where people gather. Initially, the civic officials in Portland resisted his idea, but eventually relented, then neighbors joined together to transform the intersection, and once Share-It-Square became so successful, the concept spread rapidly, as these things do these days.

Imagine what might happen if this idea spread throughout a number of the many empty intersections in this country. Instead of being a boring old cross streets where only cars drive through, they became neighborhood-gathering places. Perhaps, a few might become what they are in Florence and almost any other city in Italy.

“Now at Florence, when the air is red with the summer sunset and the campaniles begin to sound vespers and the day’s work is done, everyone collects in the piazzas. The steps of Santa Maria del Fiore swarm with men of every rank and every class; artisans, merchants, teachers, artists, doctors technicians, poets, scholars. A thousand minds, a thousand arguments; a lively intermingling of questions, problems, news of the latest happening, jokes; an inexhaustible play of language and thought, a vibrant curiosity; the changeable temper of a thousand spirits by whom every object of discussion is broken into an infinity of sense and significations—all of these spring into being, and then are spent. And this is the pleasure of the Florentine public.” Richard Goodwin The American Condition

Role of Place in Literature

In Florence I begin to wonder about the role of place in literature. So many writers have come to this city--Montaigne, Shelly, Byron, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Henry James, George Eliot, Goethe, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and Dostoevsky.

Some settled here for long periods, others stayed for only a short time during their travels, and many have returned time and time again. More often than not they come to Italy and to this city in Tuscany to escape the cold, damp areas of the North and for some hoping that its sun and warmth will cure them of some ailment, primarily tuberculosis. However, once winter arrives in Tuscany they very quickly learn it can be as bitterly cold and damp here as it is in the North

How has living in Florence affected their writing? Would they have written differently had they remained in the city they left? If being here influences their work, does that depend on how long they stay?

Lawrence Durrell wrote, “What makes a “big book” is surely as much to do with their site as their characters and incidents." Eudora Welty agreed that, “fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?”

We know that Florence has been the setting of the many of the writers who have come here. One need only think of Forster’s A Room With a View:

“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not, with a painted ceiling…It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine, with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.” Yes, very pleasant!

But what we really want to know is whether or not being here shaped their style or turned them in a new direction or solved a writerly problem they were facing. In general, is being here a source of literary inspiration?

Albeit a single example, I think the clearest answer to this question is provided by Dostoevsky, who came to Florence for the second time in 1868, then to escape the “damp and cold of Milan, where he and his wife [Anna] had been living for two months.”

In her Reminiscences Anna records how thrilled Dostoevsky was to be in Florence and that he was working productively on The Idiot. Yet, it did not take him long to realize there is more to writing than being in this benign place. He soon began to miss his friends or any form of congenial company. Anna writes in Reminiscences:

We did not know a single soul in Florence with whom we could talk, argue, joke, exchange reactions. Around us all were strangers, and sometimes hostile ones; and this total isolation from people was sometimes difficult to bear.

And in a letter to his niece, Dostoevsky wrote: I cannot write here. For that I must be in Russia without fail, must see, hear and take a direct part in Russian life; where’s here I am losing even the possibility of writing, since I lack both the essential material, namely Russian reality…and the Russian people.

Then the summer arrived and he and Anna found it almost unbearable to deal with ever increasing heat of this city. Some people seem to thrive in hot weather. Apparently Dostoevsky was not one of them for he found it almost impossible to write under such “hellish” conditions.

At other times he felt differently. When the sun shines, it is almost Paradise. Impossible to imagine anywhere more beautiful than this sky, this air, this light.

In A Literary Companion to Florence, a rich source of information for this post, Francis King claims that Dostoevsky not only completed The Idiot in Florence, “but also began the gestation of The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov.”

Let us just say, then, that being here in this Tuscan town can offer some writers a comfortable place to work and sometimes give spark to their work. But that these sparks can occur just about anywhere, regardless of place and climate.

The life that Dostoyevsky led in Russia gave him a subject matter that ultimately led to his masterpieces. However, he did not have to be there to write them, at least, not all of the time. Eventually, he needed to return to the source of his tales. And while he did not write novels about the people or places he knew in Florence, he was able to write well while he was here, but only if it wasn’t too hot.

In answer to the general question about the role of place in literature, let us conclude that, as with all general literary questions, there are no general answers. Place has a role, but its role is highly variable and dependent on so many other factors that is impossible to disentangle its effects from all the others that influence a writer.

First of All

Kenneth O. Hanson was a Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland Oregon where I taught for many years. I didn’t know him well but I was aware of his dedication to teaching and his students throughout the thirty-two years he was at the College.

I also knew that each summer he traveled to Greece which he apparently discovered in 1963 and where he moved to permanently after retiring from the faculty. I was relatively unfamiliar with his poetry, but there is one poem that he wrote that is among my favorites. I have framed one of the few linocut impressions made of it and it always hangs on the wall in the room where I have my desk.

The poem, First of All, conveys much of what I have tried to describe elsewhere in my search for a place. In both Hanson’s and my case, place refers to a geographical and community setting where one feels at home. Hanson found his home in Greece.

Others have found find it in the writing they do as Jhumpa Lahiri has: "I never felt that I had any claim to any place in the world. But, but in my writing, I've found my home, really, in a very basic sense — in a way that I never had one growing up."

Or in books and walking in the woods, as Patrick Kurp, author of the blog Anecdotal Evidence, has: “Most days, I can feel at home in two places -- among books, in a library or shop, and walking in woods and fields. In these settings I know equilibrium, which should not be confused with anything so grand as happiness, contentment or security.”

Or in the very search for a place itself as Zadie Smith suggests: “Our endless and impossible journey towards home is in fact our home.”

In First of All Hanson describes what he is looking for in this search and what it is like in the place where he found his home. The poem is shown as it does in impression that I have framed.

First of All Kenneth O. Hanson

First of all it is necessary
to find yourself a country
--which is not easy.
It takes much looking
after which you must be lucky.
There must be rocks and water
and a sky that is willing
to take itself for granted
without being overbearing.
There should be fresh fish
in the harbor, fresh bread
in the local stores.
The people should know
how to suffer without
being unhappy, and how to be happy
without feeling guilty. The men
should be named Dimitrios
Costa, John or Evangelos
The newspapers should always
lie, which gives you something
to think about. There should be
great gods in the background
and on all the mountaintops.
There should be lesser gods
in the fields, and nymphs
about all the cool fountains
The past should be always
somewhere in the distance
not taken to seriously
but there always giving perspective.
The present should consist of the seven
days of the week forever.
The music should be broken-hearted
without being self-indulgent.
It should be difficult to sing.
Even the birds in the trees should
work for a dangerous living.
When it rains there should be
no doubt about it. The people
should be hard to govern
and not know how to queue up.
They should come from the villages
and go out to sea, and go back
to the villages. There should be
no word in their language
for self-pity. They should
be farmers and sailors, with only
a few poets. The olive trees
and the orange trees and the cypress
will change your life, the rocks
and the lies and the gods
and the strict music. If you go there
you should be prepared to leave
at a moment’s notice, knowing
after all you have been somewhere.

The Influence of Place

I write about place again. Are we shaped by the places where we have lived? Can the cities and countries where we have spent some time influence the sort of person we become? These questions loom large in my thinking about the role of place in our life.

In the Opinion section of The New York Times this morning six writers ask how Barack Obama has been influenced by the places in which he has lived—Indonesia, Honolulu, Chicago and Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Universities.

The editors write: “We are shaped by the places we have lived. And Barack Obama has lived in a lot of different places. His memoir “Dreams from My Father” recounts formative years spent in Indonesia, Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York City, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Chicago. How might these places have helped to mold the man who will be the next president of the United States? What might he have taken away from, say, Jakarta in 1967? Or Columbia University? Six writers who lived where Mr. Obama lived—when he lived there—reflect on those questions.”

Endy Bayuni writes that “Anyone going to a public school in Jakarta would have had early exposure to a vast array of cultures.” By “growing up respecting cultural and religious differences probably helped pare him for his return to the United States, a society still divided by race.”

Lois-Ann Yamanaka writes that he was similarly affected by the years in spent in Honolulu where the cultures are both diverse and stratified. Margot Miffin suggests that the years he spent at Occidental College taught him the key values the college promoted—critical thought and social justice.

At Columbia where he completed his undergraduate degree, Kevin Baker suggests Obama read everything he could get his hands on and that being in New York “taught Barack Obama how indomitable people can be, even in a city that has been written off…It was a poorer town then, a harder one, but still a place of vaulting ambition, of indelible beauty. We thought we could do anything. We felt such pride to be there.”

John Matteson writes that the major lessons Obama learned at Harvard Law were “the finitude of one’s own powers; the twin, paradoxical necessities of self-reliance and interdependence; and the humanity that comes when one finds oneself a long way from perfection, and then finds new ways of striving….He appears to have learned that he, to a degree quite rare, possessed the confidence, the serenity and the supreme resilience to accomplish goals to which he may have feared he was not equal.”

Finally, Aleksandar Hemon his days in Chicago surely taught Obama the “gruff solidarity of survival [that] is an essential part of living in Chicago….What Mr. Obama should have learned living in Chicago is that it takes far more than gut feeling and bulling, far more than fuzzy-warm nationalism and fantasies of greatness, to run a country as vast and complicated as Chicago is a city.”

Indeed, each of these authors conclude more generally that place exerts its influence in terms of what a person learns from the most salient features where he or she has lived. Perhaps what makes Barack Obama’s experiences so distinctive is that he has lived in an extremely wide variety of places, places where he has been exposed to situations that have given him the opportunity to learn a rare combination of extraordinarily valuable lessons. He has clearly learned them well.

Andre Aciman

Andre Aciman is a master of longing. He can long for the place where he is currently located. And he can long for the place he just left the moment he arrives in the place he had been longing to go to in the first place. And then the reverse, once he returns to the place he had originally left. Is this a journey familiar to you? At times, it has been to me.

I now reside in the town where I had dreamed of living for years. At the same time, I yearn for the town I left, one where I had lived for most of my adult life. Yet, I only long for certain elements of it, not its dominant feature, well known to anyone who has lived through its very long and cold, and very wet winters.

Aciman is also the master of ambivalence. His mind is a constant journey of shuttling back and forth between one idea and the next. In Pensione Eolo he writes:

"By missing Manhattan, I learn to long for it, to love it, though I am now conscious that I’m losing Manhattan because I’m about to revisit a place I’ve always suspected I loved more than Manhattan but will not really allow myself to think I’ll be able to revisit unless it, too, like Manhattan, becomes a site of nostalgia, something I can lose, might lose, have lost. Place, in this very peculiar context, means something only if it is tied to its own displacement. I posit one point, but then I posit a second, which sends me back to the first, which then sends me back again to the second, and so on."

In a way, Aciman is the Ingmar Bergman of the page. He seems to have a special pass to inner workings of the mind, at least to his mind and the way it swirls around from one pole to another.

He is also a student and admirer of Proust whose influence is unmistakable. That should be evident from the following passages I recorded from his Letter from Illiers-Combray: In Search of Proust:

"…the Proust who perfected the studied unveiling of spontaneous feelings. Proust invented a language, a style, a rhythm, and a vision that gave memory and introspection an aesthetic scope and magnitude no author had conferred on either before."

"It reminded me of the way Proust’s sentences roam and stray through a labyrinth of words and clauses, only to turn around—just when you are about to give up—and show you something you had always suspected but had never put into words."

"Illiers itself was simply a place where the young Proust dreamed of a better life to come. But because the dream never came true, he had learned to love instead the place where the dream was born."

And then there is the ever-present nostalgia that underlies so many of Aciman’s recollections. Longing, Ambivalence, Nostalgia, the three features that characterize so much of his writing, including his tale Pensione Eolo from which I made note of the following passages:

"…I continued to purchase French and Italian magazines so as not to let go of Europe knowing all along, however, that I’d unavoidably lose touch and that despite my promises to hold on to the old, the new invariably had ways of demoting old things."

"In this state of anticipated nostalgia, which is how those who fear homesickness try to immunize themselves against it—by experiencing it in small persistent doses beforehand…"

"…the confused, back-and-forth, up-and-around, congested nature of ambivalence, of love, and of nostalgia."

"…nostalgia is his (Ulysses) home, the way that, in exile, only paradox makes sense. He finds his home in the purely intellectual realization that he has no home. The site of nostalgia is nostalgia itself. The site of nostalgia is writing and speculating and thinking about nostalgia."

"Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that lost."

"I never went to Italy that year. Pensione Eolo remained a whirlpool of fictions and fantasies and of the memory of an imagined winter spent with a defrocked nun, a marine biologist, and a Hungarian musicologist. I remember as though it were yesterday the day I pictured myself running to the ferryboat one evening to get my mail, only to find that none had arrived that day. The woman in New York whose letter I would have craved to read in Italy was in the next room sulking, while I, in her living room, would look outside over to Riverside Park like a prisoner imagining his imminent liberation, envying those lucky enough to be alone in the park that weekday evening. I hadn’t even told her I had applied for a job abroad. I simply wanted to get away, and kept looking for the slightest pretext to tell her that we couldn’t live together, that she should look for someone else, that I couldn’t wait to be back where I thought I’d be among my own."

"That winter, when it was all over, I would walk or ride a bus past her building. Sometimes I’d think how lucky I’d been to have spent a year with her there and how gladly I would give everything now that I had been back with the same woman, staring out those windows whenever she went sulking into the other room, imagining and envying those strolling outside, never once suspecting that one day soon I might be a stroller, too, looking in, envying the man I’d been there once, knowing all along, though, that if I had to do it over again, I’d still end where I was, yearning for those days when I was living with a woman I had never loved and would never love but in whose home I had managed to fall in love with an ex-would-be-nun whose presence was indissolubly fused to an apartment on the Upper West Side that became dearer to me and made me love New York because from these rooms I had looked out windows facing the Hudson and invented a woman who, like me was neither here not there."

Raymond Carver

The interviews with writers in the Paris Review are almost always entertaining and informative. While the questions range widely across literature and the writer’s work, most of them also pass along a few tips on how they write and what strategies they use to overcome some of its difficulties. It is interesting to speculate about what effects they might have on other writers who read these interviews.

Like the first two volumes of the Paris Review Interviews, the third in the series collects those of some very fine writers. I read seven of the sixteen--Raymond Carver, Isak Dinesen, Harold Pinter, John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Rhys and Ralph Ellison. What an impressive bunch!

The questions put to Raymond Carver and his extensive answers interested me most. In response to the question, Do you write better on the West Coast—out in Washington—or here in the East? I guess I’m asking how important a sense of place is to your work.

Carver responded: Once it was important to seem myself as a writer from a particular place. It was important to me to be a writer from the West. But that’s not true any longer, for better or worse. I think I’ve moved around too much, lived in too many places, felt dislocated and displaced, to now to have any firmly rooted sense of “place.”….There are plenty of good writers with this sense of place that you’re talking about…But the majority of my stories are not set in any specific locale…In any case most of my stories are set indoors.

Originally I thought the interviewer was asking about the role of where you are when you write, rather than what you write about. I thought, example, Carver might answer in terms of how well he wrote in the Northwest, rather than when he was in other places in this country. But Carver interpreted place in terms of his subject matter that, as he points out could be anywhere but in his case is clearly indoors.

I know there are places, physical places, where I seem to be working at my best. They tend to be in warm places where Italian is spoken and art treasures abound. And when I am moving around as Carter puts it, it is hopeless for me to try to get anything done.

A few questions later, Carter is asked a question that is central in my thinking about literature: How do you hope your stories will affect people? Do you think your writing will change anybody? Carter responded:

I really don’t know. I doubt it. Not change in any profound sense. Maybe not any change at all. After all, art is a form of entertainment, yes? I’m not saying there isn’t spiritual nourishment involved too…

I remembered in my twenties reading plays by Strindberg, a novel by Max Frisch, Rilke’s poetry, listening all night to music by Bartok, watching a special on the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo and feeling in each case that my life had to change after these experiences, it couldn’t help but be affected by these experiences and changed….

But then I found out soon enough my life was not going to change after all. Not in any way that I could see, perceptible or otherwise….Art was a luxury and it wasn’t going to change me or my life. I guess I came to the hard realization that art doesn’t make anything happen…

Maybe writing fiction about particular kinds of people living particular kinds of lives will allow certain areas of life to be understood a little better than they were understood before. But I’m afraid that’s it, at least as far as I’m concerned. Perhaps it’s different in poetry. Tess has had letters from people who have read her poems and say the poems saved them from jumping off a cliff or drowning themselves, etcetera.

Clearly Carter vacillated from one extreme to the other in considering this question. From “I don’t know” to “not a profound change” to specific instances (Strindberg, Frisch, Rilke, etc) where says he was “affected…and changed” and back again no change at all. In that uncertainty Carter reflects the wide disagreements that characterizes present day discussions of this issue. For readers who would like find out more about the effects of reading literature see my own review in the last essay at www.the-essayist.com/literary


The remaining passages I made note of in the Carter interview follow:

I think most of my characters would like their action to count for something. But at the same time they’ve reached the point—as so many people do—that they know it isn’t so. It doesn’t add up any longer. The things you once thought important or even worth dying for aren’t worth a nickel now. It’s their lives they’ve become uncomfortable with, lives they see are breaking down.

I’ve done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story.

That life is simply gone now, and I can’t regret its passing. I have to live in the present. The life back then is gone just as surely—it’s as remote to me as if it had happened to somebody I read about in a nineteenth-century novel.

The past really is a foreign country, and they do do things differently there. Things happen. I really do feel I’ve had two different lives.

…he [John Gardner] believes good fiction is moral fiction. It’s a book to argue with, if you like to argue.

Good fiction is partly a bringing of the news from one world to another.

But changing things through fiction, changing somebody’s political affiliation or the political system itself, or saving the whales or the redwood trees, no.

On Place

It is cold once again, very cold, in fact. When it is like this, I try to recall those blazing warm Sundays in a remote Tuscan hilltown. No one is on the street. All of the stores are closed. The shutters of the surrounding apartment buildings are shut tight.

You park the car in the single open square, get out, and are enveloped by the heat. It is startling. It is wonderful. You look for a place to get a drink. The local bar, where you can get an expresso, a Panini, a cold drink, etc. is the only place that is open.

The TV is on and a few old men are staring mutely at it. On the screen is a soccer game somewhere in Italy and the crowd is roaring. Otherwise, it is utterly silent in the café and on the street. And it is hot. It is perfect.

I begin my inward journey by writing about place. Some do so by writing about love, war, suffering, cruelty, power, God or country. I write about place, or the memory of place. Andre Aciman

All we knew was that we helplessly loved the place [Florence], and did not pause to ask why. C. S. Lewis

Nowhere else is nature so subtle, elegant, and fine. The God who made the hills of Florence was an artist. How could it be possible that this violent hill of San Minato, so purely and firmly designed, be by the same author of the Mount Blanc? By comparison all else was gross. Anatole France

Henry James call it [Florence] the “rounded pearl of cities…Its sweetness, its “delicate charm” restored him—as it restored, at last, even poor suffering Montaigne “to perfect equanimity. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Eventually he realized he would never feel at home anywhere. He wasn’t quite sure why, except that he was a Jew and a philosopher which taken together doomed him to chronic dissatisfaction. Zadie Smith

That our endless and impossible journey towards home is in fact our home. ….impossible journey home is in fact your home. David Foster Wallace

Andre Aciman

Andre Aciman is among the most aware writers I know. And by “aware” I mean in touch with layers and layers of his internal life--emotions, fictions, and feelings. He describes this world with extraordinary sensitivity and insight. It is his world and impossible to know if anything comparable belongs to anyone else.

But in reading his work, I find myself realizing how often I have felt the same and how rarely have I been aware of it. He is in touch with himself to a remarkable degree and in his essays he lays a path for his readers to discover the deeper layers of their own world.

Aciman grew up in a Jewish family that lived Egypt and eventually moved to Italy, then France, and finally the United States. He has written about his early days in Egypt in Out of Egypt and has also published a good many book reviews, memoirs, and essays, some of which are collected in False Papers.

In Intimacy, published in the Summer 2008 issue of The American Scholar he writes about visiting with his wife and three sons the neighborhood of his youth in Rome. The visit unleashes a cascade of reflections and feelings that took him by surprise.

The neighborhood as he saw it then, and as his family surely saw it too, was not the neighborhood he remembered. More importantly it was never his neighborhood in the first place. For the neighborhood that he lived in during those three years of his youth was entirely a world of his own creation. He writes:

“In that room on the Via Clelia, I managed to create a world that corresponded to nothing outside. My books, my city, myself. All I had to do then was let the novels I was reading lend their aura to this street and drop an illusory film over its buildings…”

And later:

“It dawned on me much later that evening that our truest, most private moments, like our truest, most private memories are made of just such unreal, flimsy stuff. Fictions. Via Clelia was my street of lies.”

Perhaps you have also experienced a desire to return to the neighborhood of your youth. Maybe it was also an ambivalent one as it was for Aciman. After leaving the town where I was born, I have returned to it on several occasions but never once visited the neighborhood where I lived, nor have I ever wanted to. But after reading Aciman’s account, I am giving second thought to that decision, although I dread the inevitable disruption of all that I recall.

You will get a glimpse of Aciman’s prose and an appreciation of the moods he brings to it from a few of the passages I noted in Intimacy:


…to settle into the experience [visiting the Roman neighborhood of his youth], gather my impressions, and unlock memory’s sluice gates, one by one.

Does writing, as I did later that day, seek out words the better to stir and un-numb us to life—or does writing provide surrogate pleasures the better to numb us to experience?

Could parts of us just die to the past so that returning brings nothing back?

The romance of time had fallen flat. There was no past to dig up here…I might as well never have lived here at all.

But then, coming back from the West, perhaps it was I who was the shadow, not this street, not my books, not who I once was.

So why shouldn’t Via Clelia feel dead now? It had never been alive.

The walk from one bookstore to the other without paying attention to the city itself became my way of being in Rome…

I’d grown to love this Rome, a Rome that seemed more in me than it was out in Rome itself, because, in this very Rome I’d grown to love, there was perhaps more of me in it than there was of Rome…

It would take decades to realize that this strange, shadow Rome of my own invention was everyone else’s as well.

We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us.

Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me…

What my favorite authors were asking of me was that I read them intimately—not an invitation to read my own pulse on someone else’s work, but to read an author’s pulse as thought it were my own…

I told my wife and sons I was happy they had come with me. I told them it was good to come back, good to be heading back soon, good they didn’t let me come back alone. But I spoke these words without conviction, and would have thought I hadn’t meant them had I not grown used to the notion that speaking without conviction is how I hope to be honest. What roundabouts, though, for what others feel so easily. Roundabout love, roundabout intimacy, roundabout truth. In this, at least, I had remained the same.