As a freshman at Stanford, especially my first term, I was desperately homesick. And yes, it's possible to love the place in which you're living and to be homesick at the same time. I know. I lived through it.
For some reason, the men's freshman dorms didn't have mail delivery, as did the other dormitories. We had to go to the campus post office and pick up mail sent to us "General Delivery." It wasn't really a burden, as the old post office -- the tiny, old, Spanish mission style building no longer exists -- was located in the center of campus, next to the student union and across the road from the old bookstore. So each day, between classes, I'd drop by and pick up my mail, eagerly hoping for a letter from home, along with my home town newspaper which I subscribed to.
I vividly remember one morning, during an hour between classes, sitting on a ledge near the main library, perusing my day's mail. A good day: my mail included a letter from my mother. After reading her letter, reading between the lines where appropriate, and scanning the rest of my mail, I just continued relaxing in the warm California sun. Unusual even for California, from September until I returned home for Christmas that fall, we had not one drop of rain. It was unbelievable to a kid from the Northwest Corner, and I sat with the sun at my back enjoying it, even while wishing I were home where my folks and siblings were "having fun" without me. Although I'm sure they were tired of rainy Washington, and may well have been envying me.
As I enjoyed both the sun and my longing for home, I had something of an epiphany. It dawned on me that some day, by the time I was, say, thirty, I'd be longing for the life I was then having at the university. Not just the California sunshine, but the ability to sit in the mid-morning sun, unconstrained by office life, staring off into space. I guess I foresaw my future life to be that of a worker bee: eight hours a day sitting at a desk doing unfathonable, but deathly boring, tasks.
I envisioned that "future me" looking back on "college me" sitting near the main library, staring at the fountain in front of me, surrounded by bright fellow students rushing back and forth on their way to class, and sadly wishing I were then where I was now. An office worker feeling homesick for college life. Homesick even for the experience in college of feeling homesick for my childhood home. Homesick even for the experience in college of thinking about how someday I would be an office worker homesick for myself in college worrying about how I'd feel in my future office.
These convoluted thoughts come to mind because I've been reading André Aciman's just-published new book of essays, Homo Irrealis. In his 2007 memoir, Out of Egypt, and in a number of subsequent essays, Aciman describes how his large extended family, along with all other Jews, was expelled from Egypt in 1965, when Aciman was fourteen. Unlike the adults, Aciman was fed up with Egypt, and longed to live in his idealized picture of France.
But everyone, even he, found themselves thinking about how nostalgic they would feel, once in Europe, thinking back on life in Egypt. As he writes in the foreword to his new essay collection:
[I]f we spoke about our anticipated nostalgia frequently enough, it was perhaps because evoking this looming nostalgia was our way of immunizing ourselves against it before it sprang on us in Europe. We practiced nostalgia, looking for things and places that would unavoidably remind us of the Alexandria we were about to lose. We were, in a sense, already incubating nostalgia for a place some of us, particularly the young,, did not love and couldn't wait to leave behind.
This sense of nostalgia, compounded and complicated in numerous ways, runs as a constant theme throughout Aciman's novels and, especially, essays. It's perhaps his primary theme, one he has embellished upon to a dizzying extent. For me, it's always been a pervasive feeling, but not one I obsess over to the extent that Aciman does (or, at least, as his writing does). In one of his earlier essays, he tells us how, as a New York father, he walked every day to the corner to meet his sons' school bus. Each day, he imagined the future sense of loss he'd experience once the boys had left for college -- again, intentionally immunizing himself now against the full impact of that loss when it would occur in reality.
As a freshman, my feeling about college life was a mixture of the disparate feelings about Alexandria felt by various members of Aciman's family -- I loved the university, but my love was alloyed by my longing for home and family. But my realization that someday I would be nostalgic for the life I was then experiencing, not altogether happily, was simply a realization -- I wasn't intentionally immunizing myself against future nostalgia.
And yet, I fully understand and empathize with Aciman's nostalgia obsession, as that obsession occurs throughout his life and writings. I never looked back from that feared office job on my greater happiness as a student. By the time -- later in life that I had expected as a freshman -- I was sitting in an office, I was doing work that I actually enjoyed, even enjoyed rather intensely. But I've always looked back on freshman life at Stanford -- epitomized in my mind by that memory of reading my mail in the sun, by the main library -- as a golden period in my life. I look back on it that way even though I have never forgotten the longing for home as well as the normal stresses and fears of student life.
In a sense, for me, even if arguably not so much for Aciman, what I now look back on with pleasure is simply the experience of being an 18-year-old. And, in the same way, what was I really looking back on with nostalgia when I was a student of 18? I've read, somewhere, a psychologist's remark that when college kids, in the early months after leaving home, feel homesick, they are only partly nostalgic for a place and for people. Primarily, they grieve for the loss of their own childhood.
I have a soft spot in my heart for that young freshman, thinking his Aciman-esque thoughts about the past and the future. Aciman himself has a black and white photo of himself at 14, taken two or three weeks before he left Alexandria forever.
I look at the picture of the boy posing for his father with the sun in his face, and he looks at me and asks, What have you done to me? I look at him, and I ask myself: What in God's name have I done with my life? Who is this me who got cut off and never became me, the way I cut him off and never became him?
Aciman is wondering what his life would have been like if he could have remained in Egypt. But his conversation with his 14-year-old self is the conversation we all have with the child we once were, the child that we vividly remember being, yet the person we no longer are. The boy's searching question, "What have you done to me?" and our response, "What in God's name have I done with my life?"
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