Home Again

I flew to Cleveland on Friday to visit my brother and his family, who live in our childhood home. I slept last night in the bedroom I occupied as a boy. Another child's books sit on my shelves. My sense of time displacement, of familiar objects vanished, altered, or staring back at me without recognition, is acute. The fields behind our house have turned into woods. The poplars have been replaced by a second, hardier, more shaded growth of maples and ashes. The fields are gone and old paths are obscured. Trees I knew are dead. The act of going home is an exercise in collage assembled in time, not in space.

One of the books I am reading is Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900. Of course, Freud (unfortunately) and Proust (most fortunately) invented childhood. Benjamin, who translated Proust into German and wrote usefully about him, adopts, customizes and elaborates on Proust's method:

"Everyone has encountered certain things which occasioned more lasting habits than other things. Through them, each person developed those capabilities which helped to determine the course of his life. And because -- so far as my own life is concerned -- it was reading and writing that were decisive, none of the things that surrounded me in my early years arouses greater longing than the reading box....The longing which the reading box arouses in me proves how thoroughly bound up it was with my childhood. Indeed, what I seek in it is just that: my entire childhood, as concentrated in the movement by which my hand slid the letters into the groove, where they would be arranged to form words. My hand can still dream of this movement, but it can no longer awaken so as actually to perform it. By the same token, I can dream of the way I once learned to walk. But that doesn't help. I now know how to walk; there is no more learning to walk."