The difficult homecoming

The Greeks had a word for the return home: nostos. It gives us nostalgia, which has since been reduced to a soft feeling about the past. In the original it is not soft at all. The return is the hardest part of the story, harder than the war and harder than the sea, because the person who comes back is not the person who left and the place has not waited.

This is a better description of what a serious education does than anything in a prospectus. A fellow leaves a familiar profession and a familiar set of assumptions. They spend several days among people from other countries and other disciplines who do not share those assumptions and are willing to say so. They read texts that were not written to flatter them.

Then they go home. And home is the same, which is precisely the difficulty. The colleagues are the same, the arguments in the national press are the same, the shortcuts are the same shortcuts. What has changed is the capacity to see them.

The journey out is the easy half. What is demanded on return is harder and less celebrated: to work in the place one comes from, with a clearer view of both its achievements and its evasions, and without either contempt or sentimentality. That is what the Academy asks. It is also why the network matters. The return is easier to sustain when several hundred people across the continent are attempting the same thing.