hiraeth: n. - Welsh English; deep longing for a person or thing which is absent or lost ![]() Photo by Billy Williams on Unsplash It started with a dining room table and chairs, enough for a small dinner party where we would converse about the composition of novels or maybe music or film (not movies, but film or cinema). I even bought furniture for the front room of the house I was renting, a closed-in porch that pretended to be a sunroom, but was too hot when the sun was out, too cold when the winters of Indiana settled in. Nobody ever sat on the couch, and I never occupied the chair, save for in my imagination when we moved from the table to have dessert and discussions about politics or art or other Important Issues. Or maybe it began when I looked through catalogs: one from public radio with shirts emblazoned with Not now, Carmen, I’m Bizet or Books: The Original Hand-Held Device and ties modeled from Frank Lloyd Wright designs or one from Levenger filled with barrister bookcases with a B chiseled into the glass and fountain pens that cost more than the engagement ring I bought for my first wife, the one who would leave before I could ever afford one shelf, even without the engraving. I fell in love with skyscrapers and public transportation, so I traded in the mountains for a metropolis, of sorts. And now when I go home, or a place that looks like it—difficult to tell the difference—the one-fingered wave on the steering wheel that once welcomed me home has transformed into a finger flipped at a foreign entity with bumper stickers for the other side. Or maybe I’m the one who’s changed. In “Thinking as a Hobby,” William Golding writes, “It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.” To a boy from Carter County, Tennessee, who ended up in graduate school in the Humanities, it was impossible to know what a different life could look like, so I missed a world I never had, a world where books matter more than football scores, where philosophers filled my mind more than the family I left behind. I never knew what I had lost. I never knew what I had gained. I never knew which was which.
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