On Home
One of my favorite scenes in film is the evacuation and rescue at the end of Dunkirk. Just as the boats are pulling in, one of the men is asked what he sees. “Home,” he responds. I’m also a fan of Vogue’s editor Anna Wintour. In a Q&A she’s asked what her favorite vacation spot is. “Home,” she says.
Home. It means something different to all of us. As we get older we lose our sense of where that place actually is or if it even exists. The homes we were raised in seem different when we visit them, and there’s a longing nostalgia for what they were, mixed with the disconnect of what they’ve become.
So maybe we move on to find our home somewhere else. We try our luck in a new city, through a university affiliation, with a group of friends, at a church or work or with a club. We orient ourselves in the world through this new point. But that longing for home never leaves us. We never lose that idea that there’s somewhere we’d rather be, somewhere where we’re meant to be. Some place we’re from that’s waiting for us to return.
This longing for home might be one of the reasons for the comfort in religious tradition and why people maintain this or any other sort of specific continuity across time. And it explains our literal and psychological need for maintaining communities — or tribes as Sebastian Junger would call them — that help stabilize us as we move through life.
But it seems that these places can never exactly mimic this home we’re looking for. They might be able to get us close, but they aren’t quite the same.
The philosopher Roger Scruton says, “Human beings, in their settled condition, are animated by oikophilia: the love of the oikos, which means not only the home but the people contained in it, and the surrounding settlements that endow that home with lasting contours and an enduring smile.”
And more profoundly he writes:
“We are needy creatures, and our greatest need is for home — the place where we are, where we find protection and love. We achieve this home through representations of our own belonging, not alone but in conjunction with others. All our attempts to make our surroundings look right — through decorating, arranging, creating — are attempts to extend a welcome to ourselves and to those whom we love.
… our human need for beauty is not simply a redundant addition to the list of human appetites. It is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition as free individuals, seeking our place in an objective world. We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.”
As Scruton elegantly shows, home is one of the reasons why we’re so exact in decorating our living spaces, making sure they’re furnished with those things that make us feel at peace in the world, or the things that provide the nostalgia of things long gone. That shaping of our environment helps to stabilize us and remind us of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed. We’re at our best when those three things are aligned as best as they can be to create a cohesive narrative.
The longing for home might be why a pitcher feels most at peace on the mound, or the writer staring down a stick of wood toward paper. It might be why people from places that are difficult to live in still can’t leave, or why the doctor prefers to stay at the hospital and attend to others rather than his own.
We all choose our own unique places in the world so that we can call them home, whether they’re actually a dwelling place or not. The hope is that we find the ones truest to ourselves, and then spend as much time there as possible, for as long as we’re alive, until we finally return home.
