Postcard #21
Northampton, Massachusetts: 1970s
When a time/place presses itself upon you at distant and later times and places, it pays to take notice. I used to say that Northampton passed the butterfly test. Each time I returned after some absence, the butterflies in my stomach took flight.
Immanuel Kant noted that when homesick people revisit the places of their youth, “they are greatly disappointed in their expectations and so cured. Though they think this is because everything has changed there, it is really because they cannot relive their youth there.”
This is true, of course, even if my ailment about Northampton was never exactly homesickness. That is reserved for other locations. Northampton is not my childhood home, my site of family and earliest memories.
Northampton is someplace other. Site of my earliest leavings. My changes. Think about it. You likely have them too. Two or three places that drew you away from home (generating that primary homesickness) only to produce, in time, their own significance and bittersweet pathologies.
We take to the road, light out for the territory, to borrow from Mr. Twain. These are journeys of the youthful self: escape, separation, desire, and creation. So, for me, Northampton was one of a few places that made leaving home magical and transformative. It was Oz, rather than Kansas.
What ails me then, when I hear the word ‘Northampton’, is a ‘leaving-home-sickness’. A longing for our meaningful other worlds, and the people and histories associated with them. And Kant’s statement applies in one respect: we cannot relive our pasts in our other worlds any more than we can go back to the original home and recover what once was.
Yet, the butterflies persist. They stir, sometimes unbearably, when I think about the town, or tap out the letters of its name. They’re stirring now.
As you may know, I was born in Northampton (although raised in Easthampton), and lived there for a good part of my young adulthood. But even though "homesickness" could apply in my case, that doesn't alter the truth of your postcard, with its message of mutability and longing for "meaningful other worlds." I think it was Thomas Wolfe who so eloquently and compellingly wrote about homesickness in his "You Can't Go Home Again." But it was in another of Wolfe's masterpieces, "Look Homeward, Angel," that he touched the very soul of this issue, with his epigraph, "O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again."
I get it. Washington DC has an Oz effect on me. I know it wouldn’t be the same if I went back and saw my old neighborhood but I think it was a magical time…