You can't go home again

I think of the … young man of fourteen I used to be back then, and of myself now, and of the person I might have been had I stayed here thirty years ago.  I think of the strange life I'd have led ….  And I think of this imaginary self who never strayed or did the things I probably regret having done but would have done anyway and don't wish to disown, a self who never left Egypt or ever lost ground and who, on nights such as these, still dreams of the world abroad and of faraway America....

I wonder if this other self would understand about him and me, and being here and now and on the other bank as well -- the other life, the one that we never live but conjure up when the one we have is perhaps not the one we want.

--André Aciman, False Papers, "Alexandria: The Capital of Memory"

As six months of student life in Florence, Italy, drew to a close, one of my classmates pointed out that our time of feeling at home in Italy was almost over, and that it had been a feeling that would never return.  We probably would return to Florence in the future, she said, but always as tourists.  Not as men and women who felt -- however ludicrously -- that we were honorary Italians.  And, of course, not as college students.

In fact, I have returned many times to Florence.  And every time I've returned, I've walked toward the Fiesole hills, walking up via della Piazzola to No. 43 -- to Villa San Paolo, our home away from home.  Each time, I've stood at the gate in front of the three-story stucco building, and looked up at the green-shuttered room that another guy and I shared for six months.  Each time, I've hoped for the sensation that I've returned home, that someone from the Villa would emerge to welcome me back.  That I could enjoy even an instant of reliving the past.  Each time, I walk away -- glad I returned but with a sense of disappointment.

I'll be back in Florence again in August.  I'm sure I'll once more make that pilgrimage.  I'm sure the pleasure, shadowed with disappointment, will be the same.

I experience analogous feelings whenever I return to my home town.  I wander the streets, visiting each of the neighborhoods in which I lived growing up.  Deep down, I hope to see a childhood friend emerge from one of the houses and greet me, a friend unchanged from the time I was 8 or 12 or 16.  As I walk about, I remind myself of the 1950s Twilight Zone episode in which an adult man dreams constantly of his happy childhood and eventually, miraculously, ends up a child again, playing baseball with other kids.  The guy seemed rather pathetic and creepy when I watched the show as a teenager.  I'm more understanding now.

The author André Aciman has made something of a career out of studying this phenomenon, this desire to relive our pasts, and the impossibility of doing so.  His obsession, if that's what it is, was triggered by his family's expulsion from Egypt when he was fourteen, torn from the once-cosmopolitan city of Alexandria where he was born and grew up.  Many of his essays, including the one quoted above, deal with his futile attempts to relive the past -- even just in his mind -- by returning to Alexandria. 

But beyond Alexandria, he has found the same difficulty in dealing with past experiences throughout his life.  For example, living in New York he is nostalgic for his experiences as a teenager in Paris, but when he arrives in Paris he feels nothing.  He can regain his nostalgia for Paris only through developing a nostalgia for New York, specifically, a nostalgia for those times in New York when he was brooding nostalgically for Paris.  (See "Square Lamartine" in the same collection of essays.)

He concedes, resignedly, that these labyrinthine workings of his mind and imagination drive his friends and family batty.

Most readers understandably read his best-selling novel Call Me by Your Name as a summer romance between two boys, and the movie based on his book certainly was just that.  But Aciman's underlying concern in his novel was our inability to return to the past, and his haunting sense that our lives split into parallel universes with each critical decision we make, in only one universe of which we can actually live.  

By the time we're middle aged -- or at least by the time Aciman was middle aged -- we are inundated with thoughts of the possible lives, both better and worse, we might have lived.  We go back to earlier times and places to see how we might have decided differently, but our lives in those earlier times can't be relived as they were originally lived.  We find ourselves instead watching a grainy, poorly preserved film image of our earlier selves.

We go back to Florence, hoping to still be the student we were then.  But we can't relive, with the proper intensity, our worries about future careers or our concerns about how our friends view us. Nor our joy at seeing for the first time sights to which we've since become accustomed -- e.g., that Easter morning after our nighttime arrival, stepping for the first time out into an Italian street and seeing ancient women, clad in black, vigorously washing and sweeping the steps in front of their buildings.  Instead, all we see now, standing on the same street and looking back, is a clueless kid wandering around a foreign city.

Most of us understand this, subconsciously at least, and have long ago made our peace with it.  Aciman has built a writing career struggling with its necessity.  And taking us along with him for the ride.