Nostalgia: The Quest for Home

1. Chapter 5 분사

2. I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them among certain surroundings, but they always have a nostalgia for a home they don’t know.

3. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage.

4. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and widein the search for something permanent to which they may attach themselves.

5. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history. Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.

6. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle among scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

8. If you have lived a whole winter in the country, far from shops and cinemas, kept indoors much of the time, trudging to school through rain and mud and cold, you know what a marvelous relief it iswhen spring comes.

9. Imagine how much more relief it must have been to primitive man. He had no shops or cinemas anyway: he didn’t even have books to read in the long winter evenings: and if he had had books, there were no lamps to read them by.

10. He was often terribly cold. He worried whether the food he had stored would last him through the winter. Worst of all, he was never absolutely sure that summer would return at all.

11. So the first day of spring came as a miracle to him. Now he could be warm again: now he could go out into his fields and didn’t need to be afraid of starving.

12. That passionate desire of his for the end of winter, that feeling of wonderful relief when the weather at last began to turn warm, echoes through poetry right up to our own day. It is in our blood, so to speak, and that is why so much fine poetry has all through ages been written about spring.