There is a strong relationship between home and yearning. When you are young, you yearn to get away from home. As you age, you yearn to find home again. For some, this means a return to home. For others, it becomes a realization that such a return is impossible. You’ve changed too much, and home has changed too much as well. Even if you manage to return, it isn’t the same.

Language itself is a revenant—that is, a ghost that walks again by repeating and being repeatable. It is older than the speaker, and it will live long after the speaker has died, thus indicating a future to come that is a repetition of the past and the present but still different. Language speaks the speaker, as if ghosts of past generations possesses them in order for them to express themselves to ghosts of the present as well as those of the future.

The People

Some people have begun to come into my dreams
from a long way away,
traveling over the mountain passes
that nobody living knows.
Old people who smell like fog
and the soft bark of redwoods.
They talk together softly.
They know more than I know.
I think they come from home.

Ursula K. Le Guin (2018)