5/28/2023 0 Comments The long flight home book review![]() ![]() ![]() I had been away long enough, and surrounded by Europeans thoroughly enough, to get these mixed up. The desire to return to it, the moment you know it no longer exists. Part of the confusion, once the desire to go back got off the chart, arose from the suspicion that this was simply, at least in part, the first shock of maturity: a realization that home, where you grew up and belonged-belonged with and without your own volition-no longer exists. The line rising clear off the chart at last and stabbing into the air above it, without footing, but without coming down, for how many years now? Beginning in my case before I set out, and rising through delight and hostility and wonder and everything that has been the experience of Europe. On the chart one does not see the long line of wanting to go back. Strange, now I am going back, to think that I have been in Europe without a break, ever since I was a minor. Or the day (one or two days before?) when we first came in sight of the Spanish coast. I wish I could remember what day it was, in July 1949, that I landed in Genoa. They say that after seven years every cell in your body has changed. The notes that follow are taken from a journal he kept at the time.)Īugust 27, 1956, A barber shop in St. Merwin flew home after seven years in Europe. (In August 1956, the American poet and playwright W. ![]()
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