YOU  MUST  GO  BACK

 If less can ever be more, perhaps going back may help you in going forward. If the urge to go back is there, how can you relax till you do? I don’t mean going back home. After all, plenty of people have made that pilgrimage, only to report you can’t go home again. But I write of something much bigger and much more important to one’s fulfillment as a writer, involving geography. Here are three brief stories to illustrate what I do mean.

 The first story perhaps the whole world knows about now. A National Geographic photographer, Steve McCurry, had to go back to Pakistan to look for the young woman he caught on camera in 1984, just one child among several he photographed in the school tent at a refugee camp. What captivated him, when he saw his finished pictures, were her enormous sea-green eyes, in a land where eyes are so brown, they look black. A portrait that “sears the heart,” her picture ran on the cover of the June 1985 National Geographic. 

McCurry went back and found the girl, now a married woman and the mother of three children, but with the same “haunted and haunting” eyes. These eyes haunted McCurry for seventeen years.

Many people might think this silly, a waste of time and energy. But I understand the man and applaud his efforts. In addition to intriguing people like me, it made a good story for National Geographic and for television. One might say, if you could use a little excitement in your life, go back somewhere to finish a dream or a story, but not back home. Home would be too subjective a destination; you need to be objective about this.

The second story appeared as an episode during an escape on foot over the Pyrenees Mountains during World War II, before America got into it. In Yours Is the Earth, Margaret Vail, an American married into the French upper crust, stays in France as long as she dares, to be as close as possible to her husband, Robert, in a German prison camp. She waits so long to leave France that her only way to escape is to travel on foot with her four-year-old daughter Rose-Hélène, across the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, in a group of eight, with a guide.

When they rest for the night in the house of strangers, sitting by the fire and listening to their hosts and each other talk, after Rose-Hélène is asleep, Margaret hears the lady of the house say the young man who appears not so intelligent is smart. “He has read that book over there,” she says. Margaret Vail wants to get out of her chair and see what the book’s title is but she is too tired to make the effort. She leaves the house the next morning, before day and without learning what the title is.

Margaret Vail determines at that point she will return someday to that house in the Pyrenees to thank the people there more thoroughly for their kindness and help. She also wants to find out the title of that book.

When I read this, perhaps ten years after Vail wrote it, I too wanted to know the title of that book. This wish nagged me so, I finally wrote to the author, in care of her publisher, to ask her the title. That began a most pleasant period of correspondence with an American lady in France, who had her husband back from the war, but who lived in a huge ancestral house on vast lands where everyone spoke French and some working on the estate could not even read their own language. Robert knew English because of his private schooling and Rose-Hélène grew up speaking both French and English equally well. Yet Vail was lonely for communication with a native of her own language. In her first letter to me she said she had not returned to the house in the mountains, and still didn’t know the title of the book, but she was still planning to make that return journey, with Robert.

I’m sure she never did. If she had, during the years we wrote to each other, she would have told me. We corresponded until one day her light blue, dark-blue-lined envelope with family crest arrived with only an almost incomprehensible bit of scratch saying she’d had a stroke and could no longer write. I doubt she was able to make such a trip after that.

I did not have to travel to go back, for my return would have been entirely through Margaret Vail. I merely wrote to ask her if she had gone back. But I believe my need to know the book’s title was as great as hers. Her never satisfying her desire to know has not put closure to my frustration.

Perhaps all three of us presented here were unreasonable but I’ve never heard reason is a prerequisite for what writers do. Margaret Vail was a journalist before her marriage. The photographer’s job must be akin to writing. All three of us merely followed some drummer others didn’t hear. What did it do for us?

Only one of us three truly went back. Photographer McCurry was bound to have experienced some disappointment, possibly enough to shatter a dream he was happier with than he was with the reality. But if it was only all in a day’s work, he was successful and may live happily ever after.

Margaret Vail could have forgotten all about her anticipated going back when her illness struck. And yet, in the strange ways of the human mind, going back to that cabin in the mountains to learn the title of a book might have been the very thing that stayed with her, while she forgot everything else. Who can know what goes on in the brain of a stroke victim?

As for me, I have remained frustrated over not knowing that book’s title. I will probably never be normal again—if I ever was—until I write this story as fiction in a geography I know, not an escape from Hitler, but from something else. The most exciting aspect of such a story for me will be choosing a title for the elusive book

We must go back—not to experience full memories that can be merely recalled and, if your brain is alive and well, fall short of joy and cause useless nostalgia—but go back only for the memory that never was finished and needs to be. If such an unfinished memory should actually be “back home,” go back just for it and avoid all roads that would lead to nostalgia. When we do that, we are still looking to the future, for we seek knowledge of the unknown, one constant attribute of a true writer. It helps to keep you young, to boot.