In an essay for the London Review of Books, critic James Wood considers what is to be an immigrant and the desire to return home even though one can’t:
When I left this country 18 years ago, I didn’t know how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have done? It’s one of time’s lessons, and can only be learned temporally. What is peculiar, even a little bitter, about living for so many years away from the country of my birth, is the slow revelation that I made a large choice a long time ago that did not resemble a large choice at the time; that it has taken years for me to see this; and that this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’, which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.
I’ve lived in Canada for over 10 years now and I don’t have a ‘home’ to return to either. My parents no longer live where I grew up. My friends are scattered across the UK. Yet I still get pangs of homesickness at surprising moments — walking in a Toronto park on a rare foggy morning, or the smell of urban wood smoke — and it is a strange experience to feel nostalgic about a place that no longer exists and never really quite did. I know the England (and Scotland) that I miss is a fictional place — one that exists at least in part in books, film, and music as well as my memories — even as I miss it. It doesn’t mean my feelings aren’t real, it just means that I know I can’t go home again. And it’s all right.