Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

by Wright Thompson

The homogenization of America has left people wandering the land in search of a place to belong. We are a tribeless nation hungry for tribes.

JULIAN HAD BEEN FEELING NOSTALGIC, which I only recently learned comes from the Greek words for home and pain.

Close is always the only possible outcome when someone tries to make the present match up with his memory of the past. Home always seems warmer and safer than it really was. That’s where the pain comes from. We long for a fantasy that won’t ever come true and feel surprise at our inability to create it from force of will. That’s what Thomas Wolfe meant, I think. We can’t go home again because the home we remember never existed.

Families stay together because of active decisions, because of patterns that turn into rituals, and they are torn apart most often not by anger or feuds but by careless inertia.

Why, then, do we continue to pursue joys without substance? Merton wrote. Because the pursuit itself has become our only substitute for joy. Unable to rest in anything we achieve, we determine to forget our discontent in a ceaseless quest for new satisfactions. In this pursuit, desire itself becomes our chief satisfaction.

Maybe whiskey is so fragile because once the cap comes off, the past rushes out of the bottle and is gone forever.

LONGING FOR A VANISHED AGRARIAN PAST (that possibly never existed) dominates much of the American story. It’s human nature.