Can’t Find My Way Home
CAN’T FIND MY WAY HOME
Old books can harbor new surprises. Often when I reread, something quite different strikes me than what struck me on my first reading. All the more so if a book was first read very long ago.
I was thinking about Marie Kondo’s decluttering manifesto and lamenting all the cool stuff I discarded over the years. I was reminiscing especially about the books I wish I had kept. In that spirit of nostalgia I pulled Dinners and Nightmares off the shelf and started to read it.
It had been calling to me, but I was reading another book and kept telling it to wait. Finally I pulled it off the shelf and started to read. It’s a short book so I allowed it to divert me.
I wondered why I kept feeling drawn to the book. I suppose it’s because Diane Di Prima is so good at representing the Zeitgeist of her generation. She conveys the mood of the new bohemians better than anyone else.
Dinners and Nightmares is a memoir of the mundane – food, conversations, music – and that’s what I like about it. Rereading it in a state of heightened nostalgia and resurfacing memories, I instantly connected with Di Prima’s memory of a book she foolishly discarded. (Though a replacement came her way later on.)
“In San Francisco last year I found another Keats almost as small and carriable, bound in blue leather and bought it. Someday, too, I’ll find another opal.”
What happened to her opal I do not know. I know what happened to mine. I was young and careless and I cracked the stone. The gold setting was undamaged, but the square opal with the perfect blend of purple and green was broken. And a broken opal is indeed irreparable, for every opal is unique.
I had completely forgotten that ring until I reread Dinners and Nightmares. So thank you Diane for giving me back, not the ring, but the memory of the ring and how much I enjoyed it while I had it.
However, this is purely personal and idiosyncratic. Di Prima does more than just awaken a latent memory in me. She also expresses a universal truth.
“Walking out again, and down the stone steps after. The peace of the morning, the stores beginning to open. The smell of the cheese hanging there so fine. Understanding homesickness is not for where you have been but for where you will never go, where the cheeses are hanging, the children playing in mud. A goat maybe tethered beside the house. Understanding that order, that universe better than this.”
In this otherwise ordinary memory, Di Prima offers a taste of the spiritual homesickness that the Germans call Sehnsucht. This is the nature of nostalgic longing – the peace of the morning, the smell of the cheeses, the goat which may or may not be. The memory of a time outside of time. Of a place that feels more like home than home. I go there sometimes in my dreams.