Night Train to Lisbon pulls you back by the elbow. Pascal Mercier writes:
“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
Carl Jung would have pushed back. For him, meaning was never in the place itself — we pour the unconscious into it, project our inner life onto brick and pavement until the address feels charged with something that was ours all along.
I don't think either of them is wrong, exactly. Something does stay snagged in a place, the way Mercier says. But going back is never simple retrieval. It's closer to holding a myth up against the actual walls and floors that are supposed to hold it, and finding out whether it still fits.
Sometimes the place goes first. A corner store left to decay, or a super typhoon taking it whole, and there's nowhere left to hold the myth up against.
In the book, Amadeu de Prado calls a former home a time capsule. Walk into an apartment you lived in ten years ago, and the wood floor still bears the scuffs of your boots — a mark you left behind long after you turned over the keys. That's the wire, still live. Standing there, checking the myth against the evidence, is the projection meeting the world, and it either holds or it doesn't.
My own version of that threshold wasn't a home; it was the office on Alaihai Avenue. Unlike Prado's apartment, nothing there has fallen apart. The building still stands and the company still operates out of it. A few people I used to sit near are probably still at their desks. Nothing forced the myth to break. I just stopped being the version of myself it was true for, and the wire doesn't know that yet — it's still live, still snagging on a self that technically has nowhere left to be, since somebody else is sitting in that chair.
No responses yet. Tell me what this brought back for you.