The Unfamiliar Return, Nostalgia and the Evolved Self

“ And all because of the illusion that we shall see them as they were—that Time has stood still waiting for our return, and by and by, to our surprise and grief, we discover that it is not so; that the dear friends of other days, long unvisited but unforgotten, have become strangers. This human loss is felt even more in the case of a return to some small centre, a village or hamlet where we knew every one, and our intimacy with the people has produced the sense of being one in blood with them. It is greatest of all when we return to a childhood's or boyhood's home. ”

“ I am foolish, John, but some way, I want my little boy back—the one who used to sit with me so long ago, and play on the guitar and sing 'Sleeping, I Dream, Love.' I don't like your new music, John; it's so like clanging cars, and crashing hammers, and the groans of men at toil. ”

“ To the old it brings a bewitching strain from the harp of memory, to the middle-aged it brings up happy thoughts, while to the young it is a reminder of all that is near and dear to them. Our hearts turn with unchangeable love and longing to the dear old home which sheltered us in childhood. Kind friends may beckon us to newer scenes, and loving hearts may bind us fast to other pleasant homes; but we love to return to the home of our childhood. ”

“ This is not a ‘boarding-school’; it is a household, whose memories moisten the eye and stir the soul; to which its scattered members through the fleeting years look back as to a neglected home, with father and mother dear, whom they long once more to meet as in the tenderness of boyhood days; a cherished remembrance which, like the ‘house upon a hill, cannot be hid,’ but sends abroad its light unto many hearts who in those early days sought the loving shelter; a bright star in the horizon of the past, a glow that ne’er grows dim, but only kindles and brightens with the flood of years. ”

“ I could tell another I did not love him without remorse, but I know your noble heart is so truly in earnest, and its love is so sincere, that it almost kills me to turn it away and to offer only in return that bitterest of all words—friendship. But, John, by all the magnanimity of your generous nature, I beseech you not to hate me now, but hold me still as the same little Lulie of the nursery, when our hearts knew love as only childhood’s friendship. ”

“ Studies of children, in the warm and tender colouring of personal reminiscence, are the chief matter of the book; children do not appreciate the love and insight that makes it poetry; they will not stand still to trace, in these portraits of brothers and sisters, a likeness to the gentle authors. Grown-up persons, acquainted with the family history, understand the little girl’s patience over her broken doll and her studied kindness to “dear little craving selfish John”. ”

“ The dream of home, the ever-present thought to the exile’s mind, suffers the rude shock when comes the hour of testing its reality; happy for him if he die in the delusion! Early remembrances are hallowed by a light that age and experience dissipate for ever, and as the highland tarn we used to think grand in its wild desolation in the hours of our boyhood becomes to our manhoods eye but a mere pond among the mountains, so do we look with changed feelings on all about us, and feel disappointment where we expected pleasure. ”

“ The curtain falls on our past when our mother dies; it is then for the first time that our childhood and youth be come nothing more than a memory. And then the same process extends; the friends of our youth, our teachers, our ideals of those days, all die, and every day we grow more lonely, and ever colder breezes blow about us. ”

“ On being introduced to all those outside his present circle of acquaintance on this evening, and viewing the dazzling glow of splendour which shone, through spectacles of wonder, in all its glory, Sir John felt his past life but a dismal dream, brightened here and there with a crystal speck of sunshine that had partly hidden its gladdening rays of bright futurity until compelled to glitter with the daring effect they soon should produce. ”

“ The world cheats us continually and yet we love it." Love not the world, nor the things which are in the world," St. John warns us. Ah, my dear children, if we gave some thought to what the world really is, we should pass all our lives in bidding it farewell. When one reaches the age of fifteen years, one has said farewell to the pastimes of childhood; one has come to look upon them as trifling and ephemeral, as one would the actions of children building houses of cards or sand castles. At thirty, one has begun to put behind one the consuming pleasures of passionate youth. ”

“ I began to be astonished with myself, for, walking along country roads, intense and passionate imaginations of another world, of an interior nature began to overpower me. They were like strangers who suddenly enter a house, who brush aside the doorkeeper, and who will not be denied. ”

“ That it should find me out here in this wilderness of all places—the place to which a man might come to divest himself of himself—that second self which he has unconsciously acquired—to be like the trees and animals, outside of the sad atmosphere of human life and its eternal tragedy! ”

“ Ah, what a pleasure to me was that journey, and what reflections passed through my mind as I thought of the more pregnant journey I had taken on the roads of life since I had torn myself from my native village! It is good occasionally to give one's self up to these thoughts. At such times the trouble and vexation of our days sink into insignificance, and are of less importance than the bird which flies in the air, than the leaf which flutters in the wind. At such times we learn the truest lessons. ”

“ Working, walking, driving; in church; anywhere and at any time, when I could be alone a moment, I lived in my world apart. If people spoke to me, I awoke and answered them; but real life was a dull thing to offer, and the daylight very dim, compared with the movement and brightness of the land I lived in—while I was master of my dreams. ”

“ If we lose the memory of our former lives, and if at the same time hereditary faculties and tendencies, of the existence of which we were unaware, suddenly become active in us, we are practically new personalities. Then say the vital current resumes its old course; we regain our memories, our old faculties, while the newly developed ones sink again into quiescence. We are once more our old selves. ”

“ No inevitable necessity requires the complexion of our future, to correspond and harmonise with that of our past lives. This feeling, which seems to assure me that such things cannot happen to us, is but one of the cheats and illusions of a shrinking and self-pitying spirit. All the memories that cluster about a happy childhood, all the sweet associations of home and kindred, afford no guarantee against the new and bitter experiences which seem about to open up upon us. ”

“ And accordingly we find that, where the resemblance and the continuity are no longer felt, the sense of personal identity goes too. We hear from our parents various anecdotes about our infant years, but we do not appropriate them as we do our own memories. Those breaches of decorum awaken no blush, those bright sayings no self-complacency. That child is a foreign creature with which our present self is no more identified in feeling than it is with some stranger's living child to-day. ”

“ Underneath the tenuous memory continuum that is the chief basis of all feeling of identity between our present and former selves, deeper even than every unity of life plan and persistence of disposition, are the great changes the years bring. These are, indeed, so great that although they very commonly modulate, each into the next stage of the series by almost imperceptible gradations, we all really live not one but a succession of lives. ”

“ When, during the last year before his return to America, the great teacher passed from his sight, it seemed to John that he had lost a dear father as well as a wise counselor.
Now, with name and fame established, with an enviable social position attained, together with an assured competence, he had come back to his own country, his heart beating high with the hope of a blessed reunion with his dear ones—a hope that had been suddenly dashed to earth during his recent interview with Helen ”

“ A great day indeed is that of the home-going, when the freshman retires to the bosom of his family and to the joys of Christmas. How great is the anxiety of mother lest her darling's brain should have been for ever exhausted in the racking toils of "Little-go"; how narrowly a less romantic father scans the college bills and the cigars which John has brought back with him. And whatever else he may forget in the years of 'Varsity life to come, the memory of this first term will long be with him. ”

“ They love their son John, they worship him, and they consecrate their lives to their only boy; and because of their love for him, also to his wife and the newly born baby. They have but one sorrow: their son has turned away from religion. Still greater their grief that John is an admirer of Darwin, Spencer and Haeckel and other such men,—sinners, heathens all, who will burn in purgatory and hell. To protect their beloved son from the punishment of God, the old folks continuously pray, and give still more devotion and love to their erring child. ”

“ Never again would Honor be the bright, light-hearted girl who had first won John’s love when she played with the merry children in the woods, laughing and shouting in their joyous mirth. Never again would he, secure in his home happiness, and with a conscience not only void of offence towards God and towards man, but with a heart unburdened by a sense of wrong done to any soul that lived, wear upon his kindly face the genial smile which gladdened his many acquaintances, men as well as women, young as well as old, when he waved them a cordial greeting on his onward way. ”

“ And once John had come in contact with life itself, how could she be sure the pressure of his thoughts would not be tinctured with regret. What more bitter inheritance, what more accusing testimony of her failure than that?
Not always a faun could she keep him. Not always with a dryad could he play in happy meadows. The world it seemed had grown too old, too worn, for that. Something must happen to stir human nature to its depths and rearrange the threadbare and accepted values before it could ever be young again. ”

“ The restlessness of the born traveller, the craving for the large and lonely spaces in the outlandish corners of the world, the incurable intermittent fever to be moving, ever moving amongst strange peoples and under strange skies—these were deep-rooted qualities of the man. Passion might obscure them for a while, but they would make their appeal in the end, and the appeal would torture. The home would become a prison. ”

“ They bring the wanderer to his home, the child to his mother’s arms, the ox to his stall, and the weary laborer to his rest. But to the gentle-hearted youth who is thrown upon the rocks of a pitiless city, ‘home [Pg 123] less amid a thousand homes,’ the approaching evening brings with it an aching sense of loneliness and desolation, which comes down upon the spirit like darkness upon the earth. ”

“ Do you know what it is to acknowledge no tie of blood that binds one life to another and makes for a common interest in joy or sorrow? To ask yourself: Do I belong here? To wonder, perhaps, why, in fact, you are here? To feel your isolation in a crowded thoroughfare, your remoteness in the midst of an alien family life? To feel, in truth, a stranger on this earth? ”

“ He is, as it were, the eternal passer-by; he is a wanderer from his birth; he sees the old château, or the farmer’s cottage, or even the bright theatre, or the desert tent; he sees the daughters of men that they are fair and dear, in moonlight, in sunlight, in the glare of the footlights, and he looks, and longs, and sighs, and wanders on his fatal path. Nothing can make him pause, and at last his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of this earth, and far from the human shores ”

“ We speak today for everyone who walks this world, for he is not at home. He goes uncertainly about in endless search, seeking in darkness what he cannot find; not recognizing what it is he seeks. A thousand homes he makes, yet none contents his restless mind. He does not understand he builds in vain. The home he seeks can not be made by him. ”

“ These are mere house-bred feelings and fancies, perhaps morbid; he who walks out of doors with Nature, who sees life and death as sunlight and shadow, on witnessing such an incident wishes the captor a good appetite, and, passing on, thinks no more about it. ”

“ The burning sense of regret, the anguish of nostalgia, the relinquishment of an accustomed sphere, its prospects and ideals, the revolt against the uncouth and rude conditions of the new status, the gradual reluctant naturalization to a new world,—these were forgotten save as the picturesque elements of sorrow and despair that balanced the joys, the interest, the devil-may-care joviality, the adventure, the strange wild companionship,—all that made the tale worth rehearsing in the flare and the flicker of the fireside glow. ”