The Paradox of Home

Perhaps the paradox of home is that you ought to long for it but can never go back. Even in the nostalgia of poems and songs for home, there is often a hint that it is unachievable:

Who says you can't go home
There's only one place they call me one of their own
Just a hometown boy, born a rolling stone, who says you can't go home
Who says you can't go back, been all around the world and as a matter of fact
There's only one place left I want to go, who says you can't go home


It doesn't matter where you are, it doesn't matter where you go
If it's a million miles aways or just a mile up the road
Take it in, take it with you when you go, who says you can't go home

"Take it with you when you go" makes me think that, although the song seems to assert that you can go home, and in one sense you can, in another sense you can't. When you leave, however, you ought to leave with the memory of home.

And since we're pretty close to Christmas:


I'll be home for Christmas
You can count on me
Please have snow and mistletoe
And presents under the tree

Christmas Eve will find me
Where the love light beams
I'll be home for Christmas
If only in my dreams



Same idea--on the one hand, we have the assertion of homecoming; on the other, its impossibility.

And, since it is inadvisable to talk about home without quoting Wendell Berry:

Leaving Home

Whose light is this
that is mine, that
in the shine of the rain
flashes from every leaf
and brightens the rows
where the young stalks
rise, as if bidden
by a knowing woman's hand?
This is no time to go.
The new building stands
unfinished, raw boards
geometric in the air, a man's
design climbing out of the ground
like a tree. When I go
I will carry away its dream.
The light that is mine is not
mine. Were I, like all my kind, to go
and not come back, this light
would return like a faithful woman
until the pent stalk rose
to the shattering of its seed.
No time is a time to go,
and so any time is. Do not wait
to know whose light this is.
Once the heart has felt
the ever wakening
woman's touch of the light,
there are no more farewells.