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It's the same old story, really, and I want to dust off the same old quote from Thoreau--"The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels."--because my mind's been circling around like it hasn't got anything better to do. Maybe it hasn't. But I recently read another piece about home, and about the way we as humans upend our lives to move between places and countries. It's called 'On Not Going Home', and it's by James Wood, a English ex-pat living in America. It's a long one, and I'm not going to try to offer a precise summation; mostly I want to burrow back into my own feelings about living abroad. The subject dogs me.

Over the summer I picked up a copy of Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast,' and I read it this fall, looking for some sort of insight about what it means to be an American abroad. I didn't find it. I am not Hemingway (nor was meant to be); the Lost Generation isn't mine; Tromsø isn't Paris (I have hopped from one city nicknamed after Paris to another; Saskatoon is ostensibly 'the Paris of the prairies', and Tromsø's been called 'the Paris of the north'). Hemingway's Paris was not just the city: it was Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and James Joyce. I have a ragged sort of community here in Tromsø, but I wonder at how American Hemingway's Parisian community was, fundamentally.

Even if Hemingway's expatriate life was a different breed then mine, the quote the title of 'A Moveable Feast' was drawn from aligns with how I see the world: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." I've never been to Paris, but I carry moveable feasts with me nonetheless; sometimes it seems that every place I've ever lived is somewhere in the knapsack of my mind. This week I was reading Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History', which takes place at a thinly veiled simulacrum of Bennington College and sends its characters gallivanting around the tri-state area. The book is about a murder and the leads are largely unsympathetic, but the landscape is familiar and the writing is evocative, and when the characters stopped in at what could only be the Cambridge Hotel (again, thinly veiled, but I can't imagine it's a place many would bother to recognize), something inside me ached. It's been a little while since I felt something I could tag so completely as homesickness; I savored it.

Which brings me back around to Wood's essay, where he notes, "For me, English reality has disappeared into memory, has ‘changed itself to past’...In America, I crave the English reality that has disappeared; childhood seems breathingly close." Wood has lived outside his home country for 18 years; I will not pretend I can match that measure. But I think Wood captures a fundamental piece of the moveable feast: the places we depart primarily live, for us, as part of the past. The Cambridge Hotel has, after all, closed. Hemingway's Paris was people as well as place. This is not to say--this is not to say anything in particular, except that maybe even a place that counted as home will not be the same on return. I am charting a course home, now, but I rather suspect that whatever I find there will be nearly as foreign to me as what I've found here; that the place I miss is not just a place, but a time. Still, my moveable feast feeds me well.