The Idea Of Home
Today’s home is no longer a place of domesticity, it can be impersonal, temporal, plural or exist only in a corner of your mind.
It’s 7:00 AM on a Monday morning. I find myself in my old chair on the balcony, one that I’ve had since I was 13. My feet rest on the table; it’s the same age as my chair. This is the table I’ve written everything on — from school homework to resumes. It overlooks an early purple sky behind a small hill, a rare view in the city. I’ve been staring at it for quite some time since I got up at 3:00 and spent my time prancing around till I took a calm seat in the chair.
I was at home, my place of refuge, my sacred place of belonging, and yet I felt like anything but so. Home to me at that moment was an unknown place that lived in my future plans, it existed in memories of the past, it existed in some people, both near and apart. If my idea of a four-walled permanent place full of family, memories, leisure and comfort was disintegrating, was the world keeping theirs? What does home mean to people? What do the writers, poets, architects, artists, lawmakers think about home? How have we seen home through the ages? What is home anyway?
I did what most people do to find their answers. Google provided me with 25,27,00,00,000 results of what a home is. The top answer said, ‘The place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.’ Is home today truly a place of permanence? Do we live in homes, always as members of a family or a household? Is home always a place of care?
Going back in time
The earliest known homes to mankind, caves and trees, were designed by nature and were sought to seek protection from the wild. This idea of home soon evolved from a place of survival to a place of life. Through the agrarian and industrial age, the home was no longer a place of refuge but soon evolved into a personal space where families lived, children were reared, food was cooked and leisurely activities thrived. As the man climbed up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, so did the purpose of his dwelling.
Today the idea of home sparks many ideas — it is no longer a place limited to domestic activities with work and play seamlessly intertwining into it. The people we share our homes with today may no longer be our families, they can be strangers. Home may exist or change with the passage of time. It can be plural, not singular. Home to people may be built with bricks and stones or it may be built of plastic and flesh. It can exist on the street down the road or live only in a sacred corner of your mind. Here are some ideas of what this home can mean.
As an identity
Of the many things we use to establish our identity, what we call home is an important one. Voluntarily or involuntarily it comes to define who we are. In an article by the Atlantic, Susan Clayton, an environmental psychologist at the College of Wooster, says home is part of self-definition for many people. Strangers meeting each other for the first time ask ‘where is your home?’ ‘Where are you from?’ They do so to get a peep into what someone’s life is like or has been, and not just because it’s the safest question to ask apart from how’s the weather.
We may consciously want our homes to look a certain way that best represents our interests and ourselves. It can also be a place where we accidentally leave traces of ourselves behind. William Storr illustrates in his book ‘The Science of Storytelling’ how our homes can be a place where we make identity claims, where we leave behind behavioural residues which define who we are. He describes a scene from ‘Notes on a Scandal,’ where simply a protagonist’s (Sheeba) full display of dirty linen in her home, gives the other protagonist (Barbara) a sense of her bourgeois confidence. Looking at this eventually incites feelings of envy and melancholy in her. Home here becomes an extension of one’s identity or at least one that shapes it nonetheless, the one that you and others associate as being you.
A room of your own
In one of her most popular works, ‘A room of one’s own’ published in 1928, Virginia Woolf wrote (paraphrasing) — If women had access to 500 dollars and a room of one’s own, they could unleash their creative prowess and write with the freedom of their mind. They will write, not as men but as women, and Shakespeare’s sister would be more than just a dead poet.
We often look at places of solitude and privacy as catalysts for introspection, which in turn fuel us to be more perceptive and thoughtful. For a lot of people, that private place is home. For some, home may be the only place where they find the leeway to be themselves, to practise what they love and to make mistakes. This idea of a private comfortable space where one can grow and learn, protected from the watchful eyes of the world, has always been associated with homes.
For most of my life growing up, I was a shy single child with two working parents. I wasn’t much for playing outdoors with a huge swarm of kids, but home was my ultimate playground. I would pump life into motionless objects around me and create a world full of imagination and splendour. As time passed home became a safe space where I had the privilege to uninhibitedly create — poems, cartoons, a storm shelter for a family of six plush toys and a draft of my first slice of life novel at age of 11, which obviously never lived on any page except my notebook. Home was a lab where I could dissect my thoughts and listen to my own voice, louder and clearer than I would hear it anywhere else. For me too, it was a room of my own.
Routes over roots
It is very rare for someone to spend all their life in the same house as the one they grew up in. Given the connectedness of the world we live in today, movement has become an inescapable reality of our times. With this, how do we define a traditionally permanent place of home?
A research study examined young Tokyo residents’ dynamic sense of home. Their findings reveal that place attachment and movement should not be seen as contradictory but complementary to each other. Job requirements force people to move out of their homes and frequently relocate. When most people do relocate to big cities, they are spending most of their waking hours away from home; working in offices or commuting to work. Further, as a result of small living spaces and limited time bandwidth, many home-like activities are transferred from private to public spaces like using public locker storage, sleeping (in trains), using coin launderers, going to love hotels and so on.
This ultimately induces a dynamic sense of home in which routes are more significant than roots. People grow to have a sense of home-ness that is not restricted to a single static place but is understood as an attachment to their temporal and spatial activities in the city. The home here is a fluid and shape-shifting idea that may exist no longer than a few minutes and can leave its trails all over the city.
From the material to the metaphorical
It’s difficult to think of poets or singers who have never written about home. Of them, one that I always remember is a not so known yet beautiful song by Gabrielle Aplin, which goes…
’Cause they say home is where your heart is set in stone. It’s where you go when you’re alone. It’s where you go to rest your bones. It’s not just where you lay your head. It’s not just where you make your bed.’
We all seem to have embraced the idea that a home is no longer a place made of bricks and stones, where we lay our heads and make our beds. It can exist beyond that in other material forms and sometimes solely in our imagination.
Philosopher and writer Alain de Botton wrote in ‘The Architecture of Happiness, “Our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. Home can be an airport or a library, a garden or a motorway diner.” that couldn’t be truer. Today we could feel at home in pictures, in songs, in meals, in furniture, even in the smell of old soaps and shampoos (which I happen to vehemently collect). We could feel at home in a place we have never known before, or in the living and breathing people, we have always known.
Sometimes this home can surpass any known tangible form. In The Idea of Home, poet Ted Hughes writes that in his own imagination, “I was a character Tolstoy or Dostoevsky had created, I lived in their novels as their characters lived in me.” home to Hughes here is a place made up of pure imagination and fantasy. We need not look too far away to see how many people live this imagination — from simulating dream homes in SIMs to cosplaying like their favourite character, we love to find a home in fantastical worlds.
The Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade believes that mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside. Maybe that is what makes us call these places homes — Some form of emotional or spiritual stability that grounds us to them and connects our centre of gravity to theirs. The resounding quality in all of them is that they all make us feel like ourselves.
Home as a right
Sometimes home is really just a shelter to live and thrive under, and perhaps this idea is one that matters the most. This idea of a home is one that we have solidified in the laws and rights that guide our lives. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, recognizes adequate housing as part of the right to an adequate standard of living. Violating someone’s right to housing inevitably affects other human rights.
Access to adequate housing is seen as a precondition for the enjoyment of several human rights, including the rights to work, health, social security, vote, privacy or education. This idea of a home is real, visible, tangible, and solid. Perhaps only once this idea of a home is secure, do we lend ourselves the luxury of seeing other meanings of what a home can be.
