"'Oh, my poor little hawthorns,' I was assuring them through my sobs, 'it is not you that want to make me unhappy, to force me to leave you. You, you have never done me any harm. So I shall always love you.' And, drying my eyes, I promised them that, when I grew up, I would never copy the foolish example of other men, but that even in Paris, on fine spring days, instead of paying calls and listening to silly talk, I would make excursions into the country to see the first hawthorn-trees in bloom."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 153
It is the end of the annual holiday and Proust's mother is "forcing" him to leave and head back to Paris. While Marcus Aurelius assures us that the peace of green fields is always inside of all of us, we do always have those places where we understand true happiness to dwell. My best friend Dave Kelley one time told me that it always depressed him to leave New Orleans, but then it occurred to him that he could not imagine a universe wherein he wouldn't be coming back. So then leaving New Orleans was truly au revoir as compared to goodbye. I've been to so many cool places, and often I've been a little sad at the end because I assumed, as it turned out incorrectly, that I'd never be back. I remember leaving Petra for the first time and having this almost overwhelming sense of loss, but then I've been back four other times. It did get me thinking, what would be my equivalent of Proust's hawthorns? I don't even if it's a place anymore. Last year I was sitting in the back of a truck, freezing, with my student Keebee when we drove out of the Wadi Rum. I turned to Keebee (who almost went Bedu on the trip) and told her to lock it into her memory because it might be a while before either of us were back, but it never occurred to me that I wouldn't make it back.
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