Never go back
From our UK edition
Doctor Livingstone is said to have found the swamps of Elephant Marsh impenetrable. Ellis Hock has no such trouble. A long flight, hired car and motorcycle taxi carry the kindly American across the Malawian hinterland, where the Shire river feeds the Zambezi at its border with Mozambique. Lured by the ‘green glow’ of memory, Hock returns gratefully to the cluster of mud huts where, in the bright dawn of Independence, he spent four years as a graduate volunteer in the US Peace Corps. Now 62, every day of Hock’s adult life — as the nattily dressed owner of a menswear store in small-town Massachussetts — has been freighted with nostalgia. He recalls the local language, Sena. He remembers a capacity for happiness, an idea of the future.