There’s a passage in The Hobbit where Bilbo, far from his nice hobbit-hole and embroiled in dark and dangerous doings, falls asleep to dream that he is home again, searching though the familiar rooms for “something he could neither find nor remember what it looked like.” I never really had any guesses what that lost thing might be, and was left merely with the unsettling impression and sense of loneliness the dream conveyed, for what is more lost than desire without memory?
I know now what it was that he was looking for, because I have had the same dream. I was walking through the empty rooms of my house, searching in vain for something I could no longer picture, and when I woke up I knew it was my self. The inhabitant of the house who no longer exists, the self so changed that I can’t remember what it looked like and perhaps would not recognize even if I met it in its old haunts.
It’s not a tragic loss- or, if it is tragic, the tragedy is the old mild tragedy of aging, learning, and growth. Who could dispute that it’s a better thing to be a bold resourceful hobbit than to be a fussy timorous homebody hobbit? The sorrow, perhaps, is in the fact that the heart does not grow at the same pace as the soul, that old loves do not always change because it is a new person doing the loving. A subtle rift is introduced; you cannot go home again.
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