"He would most likely not have embarked on that year-long enterprise had he not had profound assurance that return was possible, even though he himself might not return; that indeed the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of the globe, implied return.
You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world.
Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and reassuring than a mere lack of identity.
You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been." (p. 55)
- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Thanks, K.
Reminded me of these lines I often quote - "Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt." - Wicked : The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
ReplyDeleteWow, thanks. Will look for the book.
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