I am, of course, for progress. Progress, understood as what makes human life easier or even more pleasant.
I have some doubts, though, about to what extent the place where I grew up has progressed or just become more unpleasant.
I cannot remember this place – not from growing up here.
Things have changed beyond recognition. It started with the highway that bisected the main road of the village in two, and in that way took out the heart of the village. Then, as the city of Porto grew to engulf it, the village bristled with stack-a-prole apartments. You find them in any country that has succumbed to socialism, particularly in the Eastern European countries – graceless and featureless concrete boxes, stacked one on the other, with perhaps the nominal balcony where the householder can allow his children to catch a gulp of non-recycled air.
Old Portuguese houses, even the very large ones built as apartments, have a certain Mediterranean charm adorned with red tile roofs and often graced with curving balconies or other small notes that lend the whole indescribable charm.
But at a certain point – I remember it – featureless concrete apartment blocks were the future, and that’s where these people wanted to go and where they hurried, after I left to the States. (I don’t want to imply I would have stopped it had I been here, but who knows. It is my considered opinion that not much can stop a determined woman with an opinion. Tanks and bulldozers tremble before a woman with her hands at her waist and an expression of sullen determination.) These apartment blocks are everywhere, facing other apartment blocks, with only the occasional park here and there, with maybe a dozen stunted trees.
I remember growing up in the village and spending time exploring the abandoned Roman gold mines amid the pine forests. Now the pine forests themselves have disappeared and the mines are, presumably, buried under these “developments.” I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like to be a kid in one of these apartment blocks.
They’ll find it natural, I suppose. And probably they have tons of little friends and lead lives quite unlike my lonely childhood. But I suspect they have less freedom and their visual landscape is far empoverished.
The new schools, set amid parks, are graceless brick boxes surrounded by chain link fence, looking more like minimum security prisons than like institutions of learning. Nothing like the old, whitewashed village school with one room for girls and one for boys.
I know you’ll say – or you would if you studied the matter – that nowadays, at least, these children have bathrooms in the home and are generally cleaner and better fed than we were. I realize it is probably stupid of me to feel the aesthetic impoverishment they suffer is worse than being food-deprived or dirty.
I read enough stories of people growing up in NYC in the early twentieth century to know one can learn to love an arid cityscape – even as a small child. But these apartment blocks are not set in the center of strongly linked neighborhoods nor are they even as well built as early twentieth century apartments, and I can’t help but wonder if the sterile surroundings impoverish the mind, the soul and the imagination.
Perhaps I’m just an old woman lamenting the passing of her childhood landscapes. It seems particularly pointless to me, since Portuguese population is not even growing. Instead, the villages and interlands are becoming depopulated while the city burgeons with rootless people.
I’d give quite a bit to walk again the streets of the old village where we knew everyone, but barring time travel that is impossible.
So I take my son down the old trails, and get lost, then find my way again as I trace it by a bit of an abandoned house, the ruined wall of a field where I once played.
You can’t go home again. At best, you can go to what remains of it, and trace it amid the present looking for bits of the past, like a blind man trying to read the faint impressions of print on a page designed for those who can see.
If you go home, you’re liable to find that not only do you not belong there anymore, but it too does not belong to you. Perhaps it never did.
Crossposted at According To Hoyt
Comments
8 responses to “You Can’t Go Home”
You can go home again. You just won’t be able to live there anymore if you do.
It seems particularly pointless to me, since Portuguese population is not even growing. Instead, the villages and interlands are becoming depopulated while the city burgeons with rootless people.
Apparently most Portuguese think it is better to live in an urban concrete box than a traditional village. Maybe I’m biased, having grown in such a concrete box myself, but I think they know what is good for them.
I both DESPISE and LOVE my Hometown.
It’s very little like it was when I lived here Sarah, but many of the same people are here, and there just happens to be a few new people, big deal.
When I’m here, and I chose to take part, I don’t think always (though sometimes) about how fundamentally better I am than everyone else, thanks to the fact that I made a choice, and they never did. But always IMMEDIATELY REALIZE “better?” NO!!!!!
I’m so fundamentally different from them in so many ways that I really don’t care. If you aren’t a scumbag, whatever your gig, don’t care, if you don’t harm anyoneone and we have a history? Even a violent one? if alls cool don’t care.
I’m from a place called hesseville. This is a true story Sarah, I was a promising student in university working on a mechanical engineering degree, I was friends with 2 other students int he engineering college, who happened to be friends or a relative of a friend.
We played a simple math game, and while playing the game, we titled ourselves “The Hessevillaines.” The other 2 guys took it a lot more seriously than I did, because I dropped out of school to join the Marine Corps.
The other guys set up the rules, “one semester of college at least, and in a REAL COLLEGE!” “ALWAYS BACK NICE GUYS!”
SOME of them (not the other two, and definitely not me) went to extremes, and got hessevilles zipcode tattooed as a marker.
A bunch of college students ,and by the time I got out of The Corps, GRADUATES walking in like gang members for the purpose of being nice guys.
Me coming back to a hometown that remembers something like that, and still knows it? Me likey.
Things change, but change isn’t bad, as I’m sure you know.
I missed a lot of work on that, CV wasn’t updating and I was doing the excessive clicky thing, sorry.
I realize it is probably stupid of me to feel the aesthetic impoverishment they suffer is worse than being food-deprived or dirty.
This is a very evocative piece of writing. I think you are correct to morn the loss of beauty, I think the people living through it will suffer for it.
Gertrude Stein famously said “There is no there there” about Oakland, her hometown.
“Her famous quote, “There is no there there,” haunted the city for decades.What she was referring to was that after thirty years in Paris she came back to find her house was no longer there, her school was no longer there,her park was no longer there, her synagogue was no longer there. So for her, there was no longer a there there.”
There had been so much development in Oakland that Gertrude Stein no longer recognized the place. Sarah had a similar reaction.
In visiting my hometown, I had a different reaction. So many places that in my childhood I had known as fields had reverted back to forest.I felt hemmed in.
I didn’t want to see what had been done to the house I grew up in, so I didn’t even knock on the door.
“If you go home, you’re liable to find that not only do you not belong there anymore, but it too does not belong to you. Perhaps it never did.”
True. While I love my home dearly, it is no longer the same. It was a wonderful place for me as a child. Now, I find myself nostalgic and filled with a strange sort of angst whenever I return to my village. Now, that I am older, I recall how I used to dream myself away from there. I left, and I am happy, and thankful that I did grow up there. I am one of those who would have stifled had I stayed.
Ori,
Part of me wants to agree with you. PARTICULARLY when they come from the villages, where the living conditions might not be one step above medieval. (No plumbing, animals in there with you, etc.) Part of me hates the sterile buildings and landscape. Perhaps it is the best that can be done in a way that can be afforded, but most of it seems dependent on government incentives and funny money. (Which is probably why the buildings look like eastern-block apartments and are already crumbling.) We drive past empty nineteenth century houses with lovely lines, and come up against the square uggliness. As I said, I’m all for individual choice and progress and I think generally the future is better than the past. It’s just that I know there are government distortions in there and I have trouble believing these people REALLY prefer the boxes. Perhaps they do. However, the height of “I’ve made it” is buying/building a stand alone house, even an old one. And yet, there are older homes that would require relatively little retroffiting (19th century larger homes, like here, already had bathrooms, etc, at the level they get in the boxes) which are bricked shut because no one buys them. Something is askew. Something is protectionist in Denmark. And I don’t have to like that.