Why was it, in such moments just before I leave the South, did I always feels some easing of a great burden? It was as if someone had taken some terrible weight off my shoulders, or as if some old grievance had suddenly fallen away. The big plane took off, and circled in widening arcs over the city, over the landmarks of my past, and my people’s. Then, slowly, with a lifting heavy as steal, it cirlced once more, and turned north toward home.

Just seemed quite relevant to me to read such a passage on a flight from Memphis to Washington, D.C., after spending a wonderful weekend visiting with so many old friends, and making so many new friends that I couldn’t count them all with my socks and shoes on.

“I spent that night with an old friend from Mississippi, in a cramped apartment high above Washington Square. He was teaching now at the New York University Law School. The last time I had seen him had been the previous summer, at the Ole Miss law school, to which he had returned from Oxford, England to finish three courses; outside class that summer, he had spent his whole time getting drunk in front of an electric fan, either that or indulging himself in wild, uncontrollable outbursts against the young middle-class racists who were his fellow students. He was a “liberated Mississippian” who had just joined New York’s burgeoning and implacable Southern expatriot community; he was the first of many Mississippi ‘exiles’ I would see in the Big Cave – for, in truth, as I would come to understand, Mississippi may have been the only state in the Union (or certainly one of a half dozen in the South) which had produced a genuine set of exiles, almost in the European sense: alienated from home yet forever drawn back to it, seeking some form of personal liberty elsewhere yet obsessed with the texture and the complexity of the place from which they had departed as few Americans from other states could ever be.”

I’m currently reading “North Toward Home” by Willie Morris. While reading today, I came across this wonderfully well written, and in my case, particularly relevent, passage. I recommend anyone from the South read this book, especially if you’re from Mississippi, and particularly if you no longer live there, but have instead opted for a big East Coast city. Mr. Morris truly captures the thoughts, feelings, and curious differences between growing up in, and living as an adult in, two extremely different places.