The place of our origin
Like a river born at the edge of remote mountains, man too seems to spend his life searching for the source from which he came.
It is not enough to know the origin of our existence, nor to trace back the thread of our family ties. We must also, and perhaps above all, feel deep within ourselves that we belong to that place in the world which we point to on a map, or evoke by saying: “I am from there.”
Whether that former here is still the here of today, whether it is loved or hated, it remains an inner landmark. Everything that comes after will, in one way or another, be measured against it. And yet, as the world grows ever more populated with exiles, expatriates, and people who have left behind the landscapes of their childhood by choice or necessity, I notice that, over the years, the path back becomes overgrown with wild grass and weeds until it is nearly impossible to follow.
We know where we come from. We still carry within us those images, those cultures, those times that saw us come into being. We can still say: “I’m from Paris, from Bavaria, from some village here or there.” We preserve the memory of the places where everything began for us, and of those where everything had begun before us, for our parents, and the parents of our parents.
And yet, we no longer understand them.
***
It happens, then, that when we return to what we once called home, we are moved by its familiarity as much as we are held at a distance by its new strangeness. We understand that distance, but also the efforts made to claim as ours the places we inhabited afterwards, have slowly cut us off from where we first belonged.
When I return to Paris, which is to say less than once a year, and happen to pass again through the neighborhoods where I lived as a child and teenager, I walk through them without quite recognizing myself there. Neither tourist nor inhabitant, I cross the city like a ghost, haunting once-familiar streets in search of the remnants of what I knew. I hear my language spoken. I smile at small habits I still recognize. I linger in front of a building that seems to be unchanged. But I no longer know what I am doing there, nor what still binds me to this city I once believed to be mine, temporarily anyhow.
Every person I met far from home told me, in the end, the same story. They did indeed come from back there, of course, but they no longer truly belonged to it.
Each of them knew themselves to be embarked upon an endless wandering, forced to follow a river whose origin they had long since lost, and without really knowing where it would lead them. We were condemned to drift between memories, the fragile nostalgia of returning home, and the hope that one day another place might receive us fully enough for us to say, without quite lying: “I am from here now.”
Somewhere, beyond the meanders of our movements, beyond each fragment of the world we have had to get familiar with, the murmur of our first belonging still echoes within us. Perhaps we still nourish the secret hope of returning to it, if not in body, at least in dreams. But that place remains forever lost.
***
What we have left behind ages differently from us. A few years hardly matter to it. A city, a village, a valley, a childhood home, a forest path, each can appear almost unchanged. Some remain restless, swept along by speed, noise, and the promise of constant novelty. Others seem to sleep in their stillness, stirred only by seasons and departures. Yet underneath, everything changes slowly, by movements invisible to the naked eye.
When someone returns after several years of absence, they first believe they have found the place intact. At first glance, everything still seems to be in its place. They recognize a street, a façade, a square, a bend in a country road, the outline of a hill, the smell of a stairwell, the familiar sound of a gate. They find again the secret passages they once used, that intimate geography into which they think they can merge once more. And yet, something resists.
As they move through that old cartography, they gradually understand that while the world around them changes over decades, sometimes centuries, their own existence has unfolded in barely a few years. It is not the streets, the houses, the landscapes that have shifted. It is their gaze. It is them.
And the years spent far from that place suddenly seem both long and derisory. This revelation seizes them with dread. Only then do they truly understand that the feeling once experienced before immense landscapes, the insignificance of their life, its fragility, its brevity, can also arise at the heart of the most familiar places. No longer before mountains, deserts, or seas, but before a familiar door, an ordinary street, a childhood garden whose color they had forgotten.
We are born, so to speak, somewhere provisionally; only little by little do we build within ourselves the place of our origin, so that we may be born there afterwards, more definitively with each passing day.Rainer Maria Rilke
Comments