Coming Home

         I've been thinking about home a lot lately. I don't necessarily mean my home, but rather the very idea of "home" - what it means to seek it, to idealize it, to lose it, even whether it ever can be an actual physical location. On the last point, I suppose my bias shows the most, as I've lived in many different places, including Ohio, Wisconsin (twice), Illinois, and Indiana (twice). In the latter, I suppose the most obvious candidate is the city of Rensselaer, the place I was born and raised, returned to after more than a decade away, then had to leave again a few years ago. Lately, though, perhaps as a function of getting older, watching my sons grow up, and wondering what form their reminisces of "when I was a kid" will take, I've come to see "home" not as a physical place but a state of mind. In that realm, it becomes a kind of myth not about any geographic location, but the revisionism of our individual pasts. 

         It's pretty obvious that this was what author Thomas Wolfe was intimating when he famously said, "You can't go home again." That phrase neatly describes the trap of nostalgia, something I've written about as well. The part that he leaves out is that we are drawn inexorably toward these myths of "home," a place that does not exist and perhaps never did. In the introduction to We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates completes Wolfe's thought, rightly (in my view) portraying the impulse to rediscover an idealized "home" or past in this way:

         "I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the made pursuit to be made great again, in the image of a greatness that never was, is tragedy" (10).

        As I often do, I turn to myth and literature as exemplars of any phenomenon, and they are replete with paradigms of this. Odysseus spends twenty years trying to return to Ithaca, only to find his home in shambles, overrun by suitors plotting to marry his wife and kill his son. This discovery is only the prelude to a gruesome orgy of bloody violence by which Odysseus satiates his desire for revenge. It is not exactly the epitome of a peaceful homecoming, and perhaps a timeless allegory for all those who come back from war forever altered to find their home similarly changed.

    Frodo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings leaves the Shire rather reluctantly to take part in the quest to destroy the One Ring, and once this is done, returns home with his friends. Yet, the wounds he has suffered -- physical, mental, and spiritual -- torment him and he can never find peace. Achingly, he confides to his closest friend Sam that, "the Shire was saved, but not for me." 

        Most recently, on a whim I read the novel Silas Marner, written by Mary Evans Cross under the pen name George Eliot. The book is predicated on these same themes, as the simple weaver Silas Marner is driven from his home after he is framed for a robbery and his good name is destroyed. Many years later, he resolves to return to that place with his adopted daughter, largely to see if the actual culprits had been caught and the truth had ever come out. It is not to be, however, for in the intervening time all the old landmarks of the town have been replaced or torn down and the people he once knew have either left or died. The place he knew no longer exists. "The old place is swep' away," he tells his daughter, "the old home's gone."

        These are nearly universal human experiences, and at times, they can even be seen as a blessing, if only in the moment. I recall about twenty-five years ago, as I graduated from high school (a place I found mind-numbing and soul-deadening) seeing the genuine distress on the faces of many of my classmates who did not want to leave what to them was a comfortable environment, a home they had enjoyed for four years. In those days of my youth, I was a far less understanding person and on my ride home after graduation I made sure to put my copy of Bob Dylan's MTV Unplugged set into my car's tape player (see, we still had cassettes back in the olden days), cued up to "Like a Rolling Stone," just to hear lyrics like these:

        "Princess on the steeple / And all them pretty people / Drinking and thinking that they got it made / Exchanging all precious gifts and things / But take your diamond rings / You better pawn them, babe. / 'Cause you used to be so amused / At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used / Go to him now, he calls you and you can't refuse / When you ain't got nothing left to lose. / You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal. / How does it feel? / To be without a home? / With no direction home, / Like a complete unknown, / Like a rolling stone."

        I recall shouting along with those lyrics, taking shameful joy in the sorrow that I knew others were experiencing in the closing of a chapter and the loss of a home that they had loved, but I had despised. 

        Well, the wheels turned round, the years passed, I got older and I found places that I liked being a whole lot better and had, inevitably, to bid them good-bye. Somewhere along the line I lost that cassette tape but just a few months ago happened to see the CD version at the local library. While listening to "Like a Rolling Stone" again, I remembered the incident from above and I no longer experienced any vengeful emotions, only sadness for how I had lacked all perspective in that moment. Dylan was no longer singing along with me, as I had imagined him doing years ago like some kind of Greek chorus of Furies, but was now serenading me, challenging me to finally come to terms with what it means, and will mean, to all of us, to lose home.

          Once again returning to the world of myth, I am struck by two almost polar opposite stories. First, there is the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden in Genesis, where the loss of the idealized home leads to enduring pain, suffering, and recrimination. Returning to Eden has animated a great deal of Jewish and then Christian thought, particularly apocalyptic speculation. On the other hand, there is the Great Renunciation in Buddhism, where Siddhartha Gautama realizes as a young man that his father's palace, though filled with all imaginable sensual delights, is really a cage he must escape. He flees home of his own accord, realizes awakening, then travels untethered to any "home," geographic or mental. The Genesis narrative seems unhealthy: our personal Edens are gone and seeking after them is an act of obsession. The Buddhist story seems unrealistic: must a person abandon everything to escape, including not just house but also family?

        And on that point, thinking of my sons, I wonder how they will look back on this time when they were young. Some day, when they're my age, will they be struck by pangs of sadness that those days are gone? I want them to look back on it fondly, but not with the escapist fantasy that they long to return to it as their one true home. I think the moral of the story is that once one erects that monument, that idol of the idealized home, it will be like the horizon: forever in sight, but always out of reach.

        Until the next time, take care.