can one ever return to the past he had left behind? if we are moulded by our past, why is it so hard to reconcile ourselves with it? would Ithaca still be the utopia it once was after twenty years of wandering? or would it be a strange land, unrecognisable even to he who once ruled over it?

immortality is premised upon overcoming the transcendence of time; mortality as the succumbing to it. the passing of time is the indefatigable enemy of our memory, eroding and gnawing at every sinew of our weak cognitive system. we never remember the past in its totality not because we do not wish to, but because we cannot. yet it is in our refusal to accept our own fallibility that we choose to return, thinking time has stood still for us.

the decision to embark on a homecoming is never an easy one to make. the biblical prodigal son may return to his father's warm embrace, but what of the displaced son? he returns to a foreign land so cold he cannot bear witness to it. his memory is incommensurable to what is before his eyes. his memory, however misguided, is also unrequited - the land, the object of his remembrance has abandoned him in the dust. but the real tragedy is that he does not know that.

if to come home entails pandering to emotions so visceral that one questions whether the journey was really worth the destination (and what is the destination anyway), then why return? because he wants to believe, he wants to continue living the hope that he has defied time, that image and reality are one and the same. he longs to tell himself that he has remembered. . .