Can’t Go Back Home Again?: A Look Back on Twenty-Five Years of Life, Reading, and Reviewing

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. - Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again

2024 is shaping up to be a déjà vu sort of year for me.  Next month, I turn 50 and it will be 25 years since my first paid teaching job.  Yet after 23 years, I am returning to that school to teach history.  This is after I spent the last two months of 2023-24 school year teaching at another school where I did my student teaching in the spring of 1999.  Today, I just received a refurbished Dreamcast game console in the mail; I bought my first one on US release day back on 9/9/1999.  Next, I’ll probably turn on the radio and hear Santana’s “Smooth” or the New Radical’s “You Get What You Give” - both hits during the summer of 1999.

And yet so, so much has changed in the interim.  Every so often, maybe once every couple of months or so, I’ll try to follow links in my sidebar to sites that I used to visit and comment on frequently.  Take a look at it now:  it is more of a graveyard of sites, some who haven’t posted any updates since before my own gradual withdrawal from online book commentary that began in 2015.  The ones who do comment seem to not be talking much of anything new - I recognize still the authors, basic genres, and so forth - but yet there is a lot of silence even within those words, as if the writers (some of whom I would consider to be acquaintance-level friends even today, despite my near-total abandonment of reviewing in recent years) themselves are no longer as connected to something greater than a shrinking, small circle of like-minded people.

Of course, a lot of this can be seen in light of the technological changes since 2010, which seems to me to be around the highwater point of online book reviewing/blogging.  2010 was the year that I joined the then-Twitter and while it was exhilarating at times for the first couple of years getting to know even more people across 5-6 continents, communicating at times in 3 different languages, things just seemed to devolve the more “social” things got.  I’m not going to claim complete innocence in past comments on certain topics and people, but somewhere along the way, it seems that discussing a written work became less about how that work had a personal impact and more about what it could say about contemporary issues.  Not that there isn’t a time and place for such things, but when the Author(s) become the focal point of discourse, then what is contained within the Text(s) often becomes less important.  After a while, it was just a seeming hamster’s wheel of arguments over which authors should be considered for which accolades.  I never even bothered to get into the nascent Goodreads communities of a decade ago because of what I noticed going on in several of them that were linked to tweets that I read on my feed.

I just drifted away by late 2015.  I would read some, but I just didn’t fill fulfilled by writing about what I read or by what others were discussing.  I was just burned out by everything.  So I left.  Like Wolfe’s characters, I had to physically leave in order to find out something about myself, even if that meant a sort of permanent exile of sorts from a former time and “home.” 

However, lately I have begun questioning this line of thought.  Yes, me at 50 will be a very different “first year” teacher at my current school than the callow 25 year-old version.  Just like my experience in loading GD-ROM Dreamcast games that I played new back in 1999-2001, there is something “retro” about my relationships with what I wrote back 10-20 years ago compared to today.  Re-reading some of my reviews is akin to rediscovering things long forgotten.  And apparently, there were things written that were worth reading, considering the steady number of website visits I get for the “classics” or certain essays reviewing a line of thought compared to what was in “the rage” in other parts of the blogosphere that I visited.  Not everyone is satisfied with ***** commentaries with too-brief discussions and maybe a “dinosaur” such as this blog should write more to meet the needs of its creator and those who just maybe want something written that reminds them of a less group-centric literary discussion nature and something that, if not quite the home of years past, may provide something, or anything, that may serve to connect a lived past with an imagined present.

We’ll see, but I’ll try to start writing weekly or biweekly essays and occasional reviews of what I am reading, even if 99% of it is different from what I reviewed in 2008.  I am different now, after all…