Odysseus and the Problem of Home
Hello R&W’ers! Welcome to this first Thursday edition of the R&W essay.
Quickly: If you missed our programming notes for May (for both the podcast and essays), you can get updated here.
On to this week’s essay.
What is Home?
“The worst thing humans suffer is homelessness.”
This is the claim of Odysseus, the hero of The Odyssey. He makes this claim deep within The Odyssey’s narrative, nearly two-thirds of the way into the story. Like so many of life’s most pressing but oft ignored realities, it’s a statement that can be easily missed; passed over in anticipation of the next “big thing.” In this case, readers are anxious to see how Odysseus is going to exact vengeance on those who’ve hijacked his home, and finally reclaim his rightful place as lord of his home.
It’s this buried declaration that is at the heart The Odyssey. It’s all about home. Knowing home, Claiming home, and getting back to home—against all odds, no matter the cost.
I want to admit upfront: Odysseus’s claim bothers me.
I recognize one significant reason for this is my personal aversion to extremist statements. Everyone knows by now: I don’t “do” favorites. I rarely make promises. Same with truth claims.
So when I hear a statement like Odysseus’s: The worst thing humans suffer is homelessness, I immediately think, Really? Is that really true? I mean, there are a lot of horrible things humans suffer: debilitating disease, war, extreme injustices resulting in torture and death, loss of a child, parent, spouse… need I go on?
Yet, when I look at that list I can’t help but recognize that at the heart of all those things is a ripping away of home. Whether this be overt, as in the case of war and all its horrors. Or, in a more metaphorical sense: the un-homing that happens in tragic loss of any kind.
The truth is, I do think homelessness is the worst thing humans suffer.
Furthermore, as is suggested by Odysseus’s wording (or maybe the translator’s translating), The suffering of homelessness is universal. If you are human, you will suffer from homelessness. Guaranteed.
Is Home a Cliché?
We all know the cliché: “Home is where the Heart is.” Just as I dislike extreme statements, I dislike this statement, too. I dislike it for all the normal reasons clichés are scoffed at (and still always used): it’s too simple, passive, and postage stamped.
But it’s worse than all that. It’s a term of disembodiment. It separates me from my physical place. It excuses me from doing the hard work of living and loving the place and people around me when those things don’t suit me. If it’s not where my “heart” is, then I’m absolved of any active participation in the home-making of my surroundings.
In his opening remarks of his anthology of poems, Home: 100 Poems, Christian Wiman says this:
Home may be hard to define, but it is primarily, blessedly, relentlessly physical…. In fact, any idea of home that is not first physical is not only doomed; it is itself both engine and agent of that doom.” —Wiman, p xxiv
Wiman then quotes Wendell Berry, who (in my estimation) is the voice of wisdom for our age when it comes to both the physicality and the heart in issues surrounding home:
“I had made a significant change in my relation to the place; before, it had been mine by coincidence or accident; now it was mine by choice.”
—Wendell Berry, quoted by Christian Wiman p. xxv
This leads directly to my second problem with the popular cliché: It doesn’t take into account the quite real possibility that my “heart” isn’t always healthy.
Like an unreliable narrator, we can’t always trust what our heart is telling us to be good or true. A heart driven by lust or egoism or unresolved woundedness is not going to lead its owner home.
This is a truth as old as the story of Eve and the apple. The Odyssey is only adding new melodies on the original theme. More than once in his journeying home, Odysseus’s arrogance and pride get the best of him, resulting in loss of men (eventually all of them), and being blown so far off course that at times he despairs of ever making it home.
Is Home a Myth?
For as much as I dislike the cliche, however, I can’t deny the nagging ways in which it’s true.
In his book, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, the late geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan (1930-2022; known as the “father of humanistic geography”), addresses the deep soul attachment humans have to their homelands; but also their astounding ability to recreate new homelands when necessary:
Human groups nearly everywhere tend to regard their own homeland as the center of the world. A people who believe they are at the center claim, implicitly, the ineluctable worth of their location…. Home is at the center of an astronomically determined spacial system. A vertical axis, linking heaven to the underworld, passes through it. The stars are perceived to move around one’s abode; home is the focal point of the cosmic structure. Such a conception of place ought ot give it supreme value; to abandon it would be hard to imagine. Should destruction occur we may reasonably conclude that the people would be thoroughly demoralized, since the ruin of their settlement implies the ruin of their cosmos. Yet this does not necessarily happen. Human beings have strong recuperative powers. Cosmic views can be adjusted to suit new circumstances. With the destruction of one “center of the world,” another can be built next to it, or in another location altogether, and it in turn becomes the “center of the world.” “Center” is not a particular point on the earths’ surface; it is a concept in mythic thought rather than a deeply felt value bound to unique events and locality. (p. 149-150)
In a very real sense, Tuan is saying: Home is where the heart is.
Home as a Hope
I can see what Tuan is saying. And yet, I’m torn.
I find myself yearning for home. And by home, I do mean a deep abiding connection with a physical location. One like I had growing up on my family’s farm in Illinois.
But, I also mean a heart location. A place where my soul finds deep abiding rest. Wholeness. Peace.
I want both. And I’m not sure either can be fully achieved this side of eternity. That’s why I said at the beginning, homelessness is part of our human condition. What else can explain that ache we all have inside us? We might call it by different names, and try to soothe it in different ways. But, at its core, it is a yearning for home.
I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing. A yearning for my true home can lead to hope. Not a flimsy kind of hope. I mean, a hope with hands and feet on it. A hope that turns my focus away from all the ways I often feel homeless, and toward the joy of being homeward bound. It’s the kind of home that actually sets me to motion in home-making wherever it is my feet are planted.
Christian Wiman captures this intuition well:
“As you set out for Ithaka / hope your road is a long one,” writes Constantine Cavafy; hope, that is, that the longing that sets you searching is never answered, or answered only insofar as the experiences along the way are intensified by their very insufficiency; hope, in other words, that hope itself becomes your home. (p. xv )
Hope that hope itself becomes your home.
Or, as St. Augustine prayed: You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.
There are a thousand more things I want to consider about home. But I’m out of time (and brain power) for now. However, don’t be surprised if this subject of home comes up again, soon.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on home: as a theme in literature, as a reality in life, etc.
Do you agree with Odysseus? Is homelessness the worst thing humans suffer?
Are there stories or authors you’ve read who breath into you a strong feeling for home? Either a longing for, or a coming home to?
How do you describe home? What are the complicating factors around your definition?
Are we all striving for home?
How does our culture shape our notions of home? How much does modernity shape it? How much does technology shape it? Are there ideas about home that are universal?
Books cited in this essay:
Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place
Christian Wiman (editor), Home: 100 Poems
Really enjoyed this! And especially what you say about the connections between home/lack of home and disembodiment