Searching for Home
in a World becoming Stranger
So, what is home? What is my home? That seems an easy one. Home is where I now live — but surely also where I once lived. Home is my address.
But which address: the local post office, my e-mail, my Social Security or National Insurance number, my usernname? Maybe home is not only a location but also a search, a lifetime quest. But a quest for what? Does the search for home represent something on the edge of our peripheral vision, remaining slightly out of focus, lurking on our personal borderlands, a slightly disturbing liminal experience? If we think about it. Which often we do not.
Home is the intersection of family, place, time, culture, and language. Fair enough. Certainly, home is about my past, who I once was and where I came from. Home also tells me who I am at this present moment. And, if home is also that for which I am searching, then home is about my future. A future that which according to contemporary physics is open and undetermined, a future that is a little scary yet wondrous in possiblities. Home is very real: it is a particular house, city, nation, culture, and language. Yet, is not home also symbolic and mythical — a golden thread which organizes the narrative of our lives?
T. S. Eliot wrote, “Home is where one starts from. As we get older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated” (East Coker, 1940). Home is our first and deepest reference point in the space-time continuum, the center of our corner of the universe — and the place to which we can always return. Or maybe not. As Prufrock feared, perhaps we dared to “disturb the universe.” Perhaps the world moved on without us. So maybe, if that is the case, we really can’t go home again.
But we try to. We try to remember our childhood home, some apparently with clarity while others recall but glimpse and hints. As we search for home, we might experience deeper and elusive dreams of Eden, or we may be haunted by other darker visions. In his amazing autobiography, Nabokov opened with these sombre words, “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness” (Speak, Memory, 9).
Several years ago, I wrote, “for some, the search for home is a process of looking back to our childhood, trying to find an indefinable something that has been lost. For others, this search is a tacit shaping of our present experience, a quest for something intangible and yet deeply significant that we may have lost or only dreamed that we had. Home is the assurance that we have both a place and a time in the universe, a present context and relevance, a dwelling place in which we can feel valued, understood, and nurtured” (“The Great Gatsby and the Transformations of Space-Time,” 105). The search for home may well occupy us for a lifetime. But why not: you have something else more pressing to do, perhaps?
In his dark yet poignant poem Little Gidding (1942), crafted amid the terrors of World War II, T. S. Eliot wrote, “The end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” What does it mean to know the place “for the first time.” Those who like me cut their narrative teeth on Science Fiction might well remember Isaac Asimov and his suggestive Foundation Trilogy (1951-53). Are we talking Deja Vu? Is this a matter of Return, Recursion, and Strange Loops? Sometimes, life does seem to fold back on itself, does it not? Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979) could be a useful though challenging commentary on such speculation.
The Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot died in 1965, and his ashes were interred at St Michael’s Church in East Coker. This was the same village in Somerset, England, from where in 1667 Eliot’s ancestors had emigrated to America (Kenner 263). In that English church, on a simple wall plaque, are words from the poem East Coker (1940), “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.” Life does present unusual patterns.
If the search for home were to involve arriving back where we started, yet knowing the place “for the first time,” what would our reaction be? If this were to be the case, do we find the result frustrating? Or depressing? Would we regard it as a sick cosmic joke, complaining in Arthur Dentian fashion to our good friend, Ford Prefect? Or would we regard the end point of such a complex, recursive search for home to be not a joke but a delicious irony of grace? Just asking.
Raymond M. Vince, 16th March 2014
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For Further Reading
Asimov, Isaac. Foundation. Doubleday, 1951. Print. Foundation and Empire. Doubleday, 1952. Print. Second Foundation. Doubleday, 1953. Print.
Buechner, Frederick. The Longing for Home: Recollections and Reflections. Harper, 1996. Print.
Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950. Harcourt Brace, 1952. Print.
Hofstadter, Douglas. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. Basic Books, 1979. Print.
Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. London: Methuen, 1965. Print.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Everyman, 1999. Print.
Vince, Raymond M. “The Great Gatsby and the Transformations of Space-Time: Fitzgerald’s Modernist Narrative and the New Physics of Einstein.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 5 (2006): 86-108. Print.
___ “Reflections of Time Past: Pattern, Time, & Memory in Norman Mailer.” The Mailer Review 3.1 (Fall 2009): 357-375. Print.
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An earlier form of this paper was published on 10th February 2012 in my blog: http://rayvince.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/the-search-for-home/
