Costa, Sierra y Selva

Have you never felt the gnawing call of home? Standing on a pier overlooking the wrong ocean, you can feel it in the breeze blowing in from childhood’s towns, where gulls dived and hats fluttered. When sky’s curtain, yet undrawn by the hand of dawn, plays screen to the films of yesterday, you will know the voice. Loneliness obligingly opens wide the door to memory, and in tiptoes the cunning messenger: Return to nest and hole, to kitchen table and cotton field, to dancing dune and thunderous cloud; return, return, return.

The Mole felt it. “Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands pulling and tugging, all one way!…The call was clear, the summons was plain. He must obey it instantly, and go.” Dante felt it, too. Estranged from his fair Florence, he spoke these words: “Thou shalt prove how salty tastes another’s bread, and how hard a path it is to go up and down another’s stairs.” And I feel it, strong and steady as a draft horse, pulling me closer and closer to that place which has existed always a few steps beyond the realm of possibility, but now lies but a few days away.

The man who believes he can never go home will learn to deal with this voice. He will attempt to drown it out any way that he can, spending his days clanging together pot lids. By and by, he will learn to suppress it through more subtle means. And in the end, he might even kill it. But add a little hope, and that voice will grow. Hope is the fuel that makes the fire of desire burn bright and glorious. A man can grow warm by such a fire, no matter how distant the shore on which he dwells.