Louis Roney: Can you go home again?

When I was a student in high school as well as college, Thomas Wolfe was a red-hot "man of letters," who influenced American literature precipitously. That Wolfe was a Southerner (Ashville, N.C.) who studied also importantly at Harvard, which put him and me in the same sphere of action and thought in various ways.

Wolfe's tumultuous life was cut short by brain cancer while he was still in his 30s, his energies at their peak and his life experience sufficient to provide plenty of biographical material for lengthy and extraordinary writing.

I am now far past Wolfe's age at the time of his death, and he has remained a thoughtful friend through the years. I believe that I have a kindred understanding of Thomas Wolfe's moods and manners. I think he was probably a nicer guy than I am, and that his thought proceeded from verb to verb a bit slower than mine. My patience is not as introspective as his, and my conclusions are probably quicker but less full of the milk of human kindness. My return to the place of my raising is similar to Wolfe's, but the times today move at a different pace, and have a way of running rough-shod over changes that used to take many generations longer.

Thomas Wolfe's “You Can't Go Home Again” proposes that there is no way to return realistically to the place and time of one's earlier days. Everyone who attempts to write about himself runs headlong into the problems of reviving a past that is gone forever. Ernest Hemmingway told us in a college class that, "Everything one writes is necessarily autobiographical…" and Einstein stated that, "Time is the fourth dimension" – that fourth dimension that so many philosophers before WWII were seeking.

Many of the decisive things in our lives can be somehow traced to coincidence. Wikipedia tells us that synchronicity is: "the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner."

The concept of synchronicity was first described in this terminology by Sigmund Freud's Swiss teammate, psychologist Carl Jung, in the 1920s. Chance synchronicity ties things together that have no actual reason to be linked.

Going back home and expecting to find what one left there years ago is both puzzling and futile.

The Winter Park that I came back to in 1980 looked in many ways the same. The lakes were still there. Many of the older houses were still there, but the size and the pace of the community are certainly different. The population has increased many fold. The little town that Rollins' President Hamilton Holt asked us not to "brag about too loudly up North," is no longer the secret gem it had been for decades.

The high school where I had graduated and played football is still there, but growing at an alarming clip, and is now swallowed up among a collection of other buildings. Ubiquitous orange groves are no longer everywhere in Orange County.

In 1980 on the spur of the moment my b.w. and I bought a house on a lake in Winter Park and then returned to the Central Park South apartment in New York where we lived. The hiatus of the years from 1938 to 1980 were bridged as gracefully as possible and life went on with our new life to come in Winter Park. I accepted a position as Distinguished Professor at UCF and the second half of my Winter Park experience began.

Most of the people I went to school with are either far away or now gone. I am now your lone Old Winter Parker at many social get-togethers.

I have come home again, yes – but Thomas Wolfe was right: the home I "knew" is no longer here.