The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“I had been driving toward a house that had not existed for decades. I thought of turning around, then, as I drove down a wide street that had once been a flint lane beside a barley field, of turning back and leaving the past undisturbed. But I was curious.”

The narrator understands that sometimes a person shouldn’t return to old places: It may revive bad memories and reduce the visitor to the way they once were, all their weaknesses and mistakes suddenly inescapable. Still, he needs to revisit his past: Something in it contains lessons that still await him.

“I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my life. Some of them. Not all.”

Art is an act of making something out of nothing. Often, it’s an attempt to communicate a feeling or idea; sometimes, it’s simply the pain of nothing that inspires artwork. The narrator signals a deep dissatisfaction about something in his life, something his art hasn’t reached. The quote can also be seen as a brief aside by Gaiman—who, like the narrator and all creative people, can never completely control the artistic process.

“Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.”

Searching for the link between his formative years and the middle-aged man he is, the narrator meditates on how time changes people’s perceptions of their own youth. It’s hard to judge what we’ve become if we can’t accurately remember how we started. Without a reliable compass to guide us through our youthful memories, we can feel lost—or simply misremember the past in ways that flatter us and hide what truly happened.