The Ides of March Approacheth

The Ides of March approacheth. Caesar, go not to the Capital. 

Me, I go to New York City for Spring Break. It is warmer in New York than here in Wisconsin where the temperature may get to 30 degrees and where the snow still remains on the ground. 

Jack Hardy, the folksinger, has died. And The New York Times doesn’t yet have a notice about his death. Thirty years ago I saw Jack Hardy at the Bottom Line in a show organized by Fast Folk, a magazine for the folk song community. I was at home there. As I write this morning, I’m listening to WUMB trying not to leave home. 

I have spent much of the last twenty years writing about home leavings. It is a complex subject fraught with contradictions and difficulties. I advocate the necessity for leaving, but I find it difficult to leave behind me everything I have amassed in my life. What books can I not do without? What music must I have? How much clothes should I pack? These are, I know, absurd questions, but they define not what I truly wonder but what I fear. They are what offers me comfort when I leave home. 

Whenever I travel far from home I enter into an unknown, and regardless of my familiarity at this time with New York, the move frightens me. Here at home I have almost total control over my self and environment, but there, there is little familiar about me, and every act requires more than a little effort. Traveling is searching, and I am never quite sure that I will have the energy to keep on keeping on when I am not certain for what I look. But I teach that the aim of education is finding lost objects, and I say that we only know an object has been lost when it is found. 

Bloom enters tentatively the whore house in the Circe chapter. He is looking for Stephen, but I suspect he finds a great deal more. I am following his journey home.