Home is where the heart is. It's a cliché, but it's a cliché with good reason. Home is never a place, it is a feeling, it's the people that you are with. "Hell is other people." It's nihilism most pure, but its inversion is beauty. Hell might be other people, but so is heaven.
We're a strange group of jumped up monkeys. We prize individuality above all else, but the worst and most damaging torture imaginable is sensory deprivation. Cutting off a person from other people entirely. We lock people in cages to punish them. Without community, even the nominal "hello", "goodbye" of polite social stricture, we go insane. This strange spark of consciousness buried in our skulls sputters in a vacuum. "Cogito ergo sum", I think therefore I am, it's a logical defense against an unknowable reality: if my senses all lie to me then I can still infer that I exist based on my capacity for thought. But while we may be black boxes of thought, we are not made to survive while the whole plane burns around us. Without connection, without community, we wither quickly.
We define ourselves by others, whether by comparison or differentiation. Isolation cells by any logical measure should enhance our identity, they remove all other people, strip down the universe to just ourselves. But the opposite happens, we lose all focus and definition, our consciousness disintegrates. As the distinction becomes sharper between others and ourselves we become more brittle.
The road trip is one of the standbys of any genre, people go from point A to point B, but the magic is all in the journey. Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Lord of the Rings, even the original Star Trek are all about those journeys, those wanderings. We miss home when we are on the road, but we miss the road when we are at home. Some people never manage to find their way home again after long enough on the road. They realize that if you carry your home with you, your family by your side, home as a place rapidly becomes a deprecated concept.
That's why you never can go home again, because although you left a place, you carried your notion of home with you where you went. The place of your old home diverges from your path, you become distinct entities, with distinct histories. You can sometimes bring some fire back to your old place, a measure of salvation in return for memories, though you can never stay. It's why Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings failed in the end. The Scouring of the Shire is the entire point of the story. You grow, you change, you stagger through the fires of hell, which burn away the parts of you that cannot survive. You come out stronger, harder, a different shape than that which came before. You're now a square peg trying to go back to your round hole. But for a story to be complete, the attempt must be made. You don't come full circle until you return home, changed, right wrongs with your newfound strength, leave again melancholy but somehow content.
The last few generations have broken something in America. We scatter across the nation generation by generation, moving nearly constantly. The world is a tiny place compared to even half a century ago. No one is born, lives, and dies all in the same town, not in these latter days. The nation used to be a metaphor for family: motherland, fatherland, homeland. They're all metaphors for a certain way of seeing the state. That's faded now like an old saying that's lost any literal meaning. The nation has become a place, not a family.
It would be one thing if in our internal diaspora we really did carry our homes and families with us. If we carried community on the road. But we don't. We slide from town to town, job to job, an entire nation slipping between the cracks. Community seemed to die with the churches, and for the most part we haven't replaced it with another conduit for connections. Robert Putnam wrote an interesting book a few years back called Bowling Alone. He noticed a trend, one of those curiosities that mean nothing on their own but everything once implications are traced. He noticed that participation in amateur bowling leagues has plummeted even while individuals go bowling by themselves in record numbers.
Our worlds have collapsed to little bubbles, individual isolation cells that we carry everywhere we go. Everyone alone in a crowd. And we are drowning.
We're a strange group of jumped up monkeys. We prize individuality above all else, but the worst and most damaging torture imaginable is sensory deprivation. Cutting off a person from other people entirely. We lock people in cages to punish them. Without community, even the nominal "hello", "goodbye" of polite social stricture, we go insane. This strange spark of consciousness buried in our skulls sputters in a vacuum. "Cogito ergo sum", I think therefore I am, it's a logical defense against an unknowable reality: if my senses all lie to me then I can still infer that I exist based on my capacity for thought. But while we may be black boxes of thought, we are not made to survive while the whole plane burns around us. Without connection, without community, we wither quickly.
We define ourselves by others, whether by comparison or differentiation. Isolation cells by any logical measure should enhance our identity, they remove all other people, strip down the universe to just ourselves. But the opposite happens, we lose all focus and definition, our consciousness disintegrates. As the distinction becomes sharper between others and ourselves we become more brittle.
The road trip is one of the standbys of any genre, people go from point A to point B, but the magic is all in the journey. Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Lord of the Rings, even the original Star Trek are all about those journeys, those wanderings. We miss home when we are on the road, but we miss the road when we are at home. Some people never manage to find their way home again after long enough on the road. They realize that if you carry your home with you, your family by your side, home as a place rapidly becomes a deprecated concept.
That's why you never can go home again, because although you left a place, you carried your notion of home with you where you went. The place of your old home diverges from your path, you become distinct entities, with distinct histories. You can sometimes bring some fire back to your old place, a measure of salvation in return for memories, though you can never stay. It's why Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings failed in the end. The Scouring of the Shire is the entire point of the story. You grow, you change, you stagger through the fires of hell, which burn away the parts of you that cannot survive. You come out stronger, harder, a different shape than that which came before. You're now a square peg trying to go back to your round hole. But for a story to be complete, the attempt must be made. You don't come full circle until you return home, changed, right wrongs with your newfound strength, leave again melancholy but somehow content.
The last few generations have broken something in America. We scatter across the nation generation by generation, moving nearly constantly. The world is a tiny place compared to even half a century ago. No one is born, lives, and dies all in the same town, not in these latter days. The nation used to be a metaphor for family: motherland, fatherland, homeland. They're all metaphors for a certain way of seeing the state. That's faded now like an old saying that's lost any literal meaning. The nation has become a place, not a family.
It would be one thing if in our internal diaspora we really did carry our homes and families with us. If we carried community on the road. But we don't. We slide from town to town, job to job, an entire nation slipping between the cracks. Community seemed to die with the churches, and for the most part we haven't replaced it with another conduit for connections. Robert Putnam wrote an interesting book a few years back called Bowling Alone. He noticed a trend, one of those curiosities that mean nothing on their own but everything once implications are traced. He noticed that participation in amateur bowling leagues has plummeted even while individuals go bowling by themselves in record numbers.
Our worlds have collapsed to little bubbles, individual isolation cells that we carry everywhere we go. Everyone alone in a crowd. And we are drowning.
My father's peripatetic nature - which led to my being "the new kid in class" an agonizing 28 times - prevented our family ever feeling as if we had a home. When we weren't moving from town to town as my father searched for an unspoken dream of happiness, my sisters and I were shuttled from one relative to another as my mother would try to break away from such bleak circumstances by striking out on her own. Failing to find a way out for herself and her children, we would again be gathered together and made to follow along to whatever destination the old man felt would be, at last, the mecca he was yearning for.
For those reasons, we five decided early on that home existed wherever the siblings were together and that is how we maintained our sanity through those years of being constantly uprooted, ever fearful of being forced to be "the new kids", ever reluctant to make friends because the pain of parting became unbearable. We relied on each other for comfort and companionship; as the oldest, I was able to wander far enough from home to return with library books and magazines, newspapers and stories so that my sisters could see beyond the walls of whatever house we might briefly occupy. We argued and debated and laughed and cried together, bonding in shared misery and always, always wishing that we could stop just long enough to really know the city we were living in and the people who lived there. It never happened and now that we are grown, we somehow cling to the concept that home is where are own families are. Yes, we've all put down roots and given our children that sense of place, of being home; allowing them to know the joy of community and long-term friendships. Still, I want my daughter to know that, as she ventures out into the world, home will always be wherever her mother and I reside and that she will always be embraced upon her return.
I write poorly, sir but I'm glad that I have a place to do so and for that I thank you.
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