While I still have yet to replace all my European cards with my American ones (Charlie card, Bull Moose Musiccard, etc.), I have to admit that my UNH library card was snuggled into my wallet the day after I got back. Nerdy as it may be, it is such a good library, and I'd missed a decent selection of English reading. I just finished Thomas Wolfe's beast of a book, You Can't Go Home Again, last night. [See quotation that makes up the previous post.] My mum was concerned when she first saw the title, thinking it some result of reverse culture shock or your garden variety Garden State young adult angst.
Truth is, the "reverse culture shock" I experienced was minimal, if at all existent. And truth is, that was kind of disappointing. There's the obviously painful nature of the idea that "you can't go home again," but there's also, I think, something validating about that feeling. It's evidence that you've gone somewhere and done some things (apart from take more photographs of Europe's most photographed sites).
Interestingly, one of the last books of the novel dealt with the protagonist's time in Germany and the onset of World War II--issues that preoccupied a good deal of my semester abroad. Without really knowing it, I chose a very appropriate read to start the summer (after Ray Bradbury's more breezy Dandelion Wine). That "you can't go home again" is right, even if only in the smallest of senses sometimes. To finish the post (but not the pondering!), one more passage from the book. (Please excuse the angst that I'm indulging in.)
"It seemed that he had known it forever, and he felt as he always did when he left a city--a sense of sorrow and regret, of poignant unfulfillment, a sense that here were people he could have known, friends he could have had, all lost now, fading, slipping from his grasp, as the inexorable moment of the departing hour drew near."
(Below find a much more upbeat summertime mix that you can listen to if you so please!)
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