Preparation for a returning

What is return? Tell me.

I might say that I returned a book to the shelf. I mean that from the same place I previously lifted it, I have, after some period of time, placed in back again. Implicit in returning is the idea that the object's content has remained unchanged. For if, having taken the book from the shelf, I removed pages, crossed out words, wrote new passages. In sum: added and deleted where I saw fit. And then placed it back in a bookshelf that had been repainted between two books that had likewise been re-edited. Could you then say that I returned the book? Or would it be more appropriate to suggest that the situation was too disparate from the original to consider it a returning?

How can a man then ever be said to return? He, who never passes a moment in which he does not die and experience rebirth. He, who sheds his cells day by day and is remade. He, who finds himself entering a place at once familiar and foreign to him, a place, like him, molded like clay by the hands of the clock, and is familiarly greeted with, "My friend, you've returned at last."

He might reply appropriately, "Neither am I the I who departed in time passed nor is this the place from which I departed. Both have passed beyond this realm." But who can understand this? So he might choose instead to satisfy his friend and say, "Yes it is I. I have returned."

Each is then left to puzzle over the changes that have occurred, as if any other outcome where possible.

No. Say not that I have returned, but that I have come again, for the very first time.