I have had an interesting time hunting for a document – my original title deed, for an easement from my kindly neighbor for the right to keep a 20 by 50 strip of rocky unbuildable land on a 250 acre block clear as a fire-prevention measure. The lawyer processed it, and sent the documentation to the Hobart Titles office. The Hobart Titles office demanded the original title. Now it has been some time, but I am careful with documents, and searched for it. Didn’t find. The written correspondence is in a box in the container… with several hundred other boxes. The e-mails from that far back are on a geriatric computer. I got it going and searched. And searched. And searched. eventually I tried Outlook search. It didn’t work… anyway, several other tricks later I found that I had put the e-mails in a safe place easy to find… hahaha. I did find them. They told me that my conveyancer had arranged to store the document in a safe place… The Hobart Titles office (the people demanding it of me). I can get it back – quite a process – and send it to them. Because that is bureaucracy at its finest.
So: about 10 hours of my life that I won’t get back, and a lot of stress. At least I did track it down. But it got me to think about circularity in writing. In books of course it often tends to echo the words from Stan Rogers Northwest passage: ‘like them I led a settled life, I threw it all away, to seek a Northwest passage at the call of many men, to find there but the road back home again.’ ‘There and back again’ for another example.
It’s a recurring theme – and a popular one: and thus as writers we need to explore just quite what makes it work. Those who return -sometimes with gold and glory, but always not as the same people, are in my opinion what makes it work. But also, well for many who went to war, or to work in some place far from ‘home’ – it must make a powerful dream. That we can go back.
I am not sure we can.
Mad Genius Club 
16 responses to “;Circles”
We can, though it may not be in our lifetime.
I’ve left home and returned three times, sort of. Most recently back to RedQuarters (ageing parents) proper. Each time I’m different, and home takes a bit longer to fit into – as I make a new home of sorts, with a new job, new colleagues, but the same house and family.
I’m starting to understand better R. A. Salvatore’s character Drizzt, the drow ranger, who decided that home was where his chosen people were, and that location wasn’t as important as people. I don’t entirely agree (culture, landscape, those are more important to me than I realized when I was younger), but I can understand better.
Shouldn’t the title be on file at the county seat, or equivalent? In our recent easement dispute with our neighbors, the lawyer dug up a 75+ year agreement for an easement that no one knew about, just being familiar with one from the sixties. (We reached a compromise that left us all a little unhappy, so it probably was a good one, and in theory cleared up all the ambiguity in the previous easements.)
I keep seeing these moments of “home” in my life…and no matter how much I want to go back, to believe that there is a future beyond those moments…
…the only way to have a future is to live in that future.
Completely off topic, but something I felt needed to be shared with the Mad Genii and their apprentices:
That’s why I don’t write westerns. Too much potential overlap!
I feel a bit like an orphan, psychologically — indifferent parents, no close relatives left (and few to start with). I’m happily married (thank heavens), but no kids, and his relatives were few and are all long gone, too. So, to some degree, the “Back” part simply isn’t part of my personal makeup. I’d like to have ties of that nature — one reads about them — but it was not to be. (And I really do believe in “that which does not kill me makes me stronger”, so there are compensations to wandering like a bit of an alien through human society.)
My characters reflect this, to some degree. They have adventures, but rather than returning, they build new lives, exuberently, and drag others along with them into the process. They don’t want to go back — there’s (often) more satisfaction to be had ahead in the choices they make for themselves, than in what shaped their lives in the past, even if the past was not actively bad. So, more of a “there” do-over, than a “back again”.
If you want to go back home you need a home in the first place, right? I get it.
My parents traveled a lot (and took us with them) when I was younger, so I tend to be very much in the “home is people” mode. (Fictional people, in many cases, from Mowgli to Fox Robin Hood, to Zorro, to Sherlock Holmes to most of the OG Star Wars gang, including at least one of the baddies).
Thrawn? ^.^
Tarkin, because he has some good oneliners and the male relatives enjoy mimicking the accent. Thrawn counts for “fictional people are part of home” in my book, but being post-ROTJ doesn’t really count for OG Star Wars.
I don’t know if it was an actual quote, or an author being insightful, but I’m fond of the line about how “A man can not step in the same river twice; for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.”
You can get really, really similar, sometimes– and close enough can be quite enough.
Probably close enough for Heraclitus since it’s certainly in translation.
In more ways than one… if I remember correctly, it was Uncle Iroh saying it!
Marcus Aurelius also nods to it in his Meditations.
Ah, home again.
In some of my works, the main character returns home because of inheriting it, visits home for a time only to return to her new home, marries and the new spouse insists on a new home, and just returns home only several people there have left.