To get to my point, allow me to quote Teju Cole, who is quoting Aciman extensively (the cross-generation agreement of principles)
“But there is something more than mere irony or dissimulation going on in Aciman’s case. In one passage he writes,’What we missed was not just Egypt – what we missed was the Egypt where we dreamed of Europe’…’I’d grown to love old Rome, a Rome that seemed more in me than it was out of Rome in itself, because, in this very Rome I’d grown to love, there was perhaps more of me in that there was of Rome’.”1
I think I have felt a similar way in the United States, or I feel the same way to Switzerland. When I have been back to Kenya, a country I would like to spend a major part of the rest of my life in, I have been confronted with my dreams of the United States, of Switzerland, of the world abroad. And, by dint of my time away, I have been confronted with a discrepancy between what I have thought beforehand (dreamed), and what I have lived (reality). Not in a shocking way, or disappointing manner, but rather in a nostalgic sense for a feeling I knew so well. To quote Teju Cole again: “The appeal was in the awayness of it, the estrangement that one could count on…I was most at home in Switzerland precisely because I wasn’t. It made me happy because it couldn’t”.2
When I first took the train from Bex to Villars-Sur-Ollon – aaaaaah! The sweet moment of dream matched by reality! The rolling alps, the verdant landscape, the cottages and the railway creaking up and up. In that moment, there was more of me on that scene, in that memory, that it can never be a bad one.