Never Able To Resume "Normal" Life, After Living In Rural Africa

"I lived in Africa almost half a lifetime ago. I was very young when I went, not just in years, and I return home feeling prematurely aged. For months after coming back, like the ancient mariner with his gray beard and glittering eyes, I cornered anyone half willing to listen and try to describe what I had seen and done and been over there. I would tell the story......and the sympathetic nods would last about 5 min. before my quarry's eyes shifted toward the exit......the experience proved as incommunicable as the need to explain was urgent.
Family and friends waited for me to resume normal life, but I seemed unable to complete the trip back. Part of me remains stuck in Africa,..... I missed the intensity, the surprise, the sense that life was real and hard and lovely. Nothing in America made me feel as alive as I felt in Africa..... And yet I can't shake the sense of having left behind Africa and obligations I can neither fulfill nor escape...... The book was supposed to provide a resolution, but in some fundamental way my time in Africa remains unresolved. And, of course, African itself is unresolved,....."
( The Village Of Waiting. George Packer. Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 2001, pg 317-318)