but it was clear that he wished to speak to me as a representative of the literary world – the world he assumed that I aspired to above all others. His argument was based on the belief that once one had attained the metropolis, the literary capital, the worth of one’s origins was canceled out; there simply could be nothing worth going back to. What lay behind one had ceased to be a part of life, and had become ‘subject matter.’ And there was the belief, long honored among American intellectuals and artists and writers, that a place such as I came from could be returned to only at the price of
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