This essay is a contribution to the fourth Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium, a monthly collaboration from STSC's writers around a set theme. Our topic in August 2022 is Home.
I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes. I will tell you a day in my life that has shaped me; such a day as comes only once…I stood on the shore of Balki the pool, which is the place of most awe in all worlds…But do you think it would have been so unless I had known that in Balki [deadly creatures] dwelled? There I drank life because death was in the pool. That was the best of drinks save one. ~ C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet
Some find it difficult even to think of Home, a place of rest and rootedness, amidst the restless times we inhabit. We have come to a time of endless possibility, choice without number, limitless access summoned with our fingertips. In an age of magic we are sated with all things except for satiety. The very concept of ends and emptiness begins to fill us with unease. We observe that all things begin to look the same, but this is because our hearts now demand that it be so in every way but the most trivial of variations. For things-as-things to confront us with their fleeting nature, their singular and irreplaceable quality, becomes insufferable to minds devoted to removing the possibility of loss. You might move your existence to another metropolis across the globe and reconstruct it within days, without carrying your life along but simply by resleeving your ephemera into new shells from cloud storage and repurchasing identical possessions to slot into an identical bedroom-kitchen box. And if this is possible for you, then you cannot have a Home.
As the cloud disappears and vanishes away, So he who goes down to the grave does not come up. He shall never return to his house, Nor shall his place know him anymore. ~ Job 7:9-10
Because what is Home after all but the single place where you have collected what is irreplaceable. The human relationships which would shatter you were they lost, the detritus that is unlike any other set of bits in the universe. To have a Home is to forsake wandering safely through deathless wastes and to store up inevitable ending and heartbreak into a single temporal-physical nexus. Everything that you could never recover is there. Home is where you drink the irreplaceable vintage, where you spend time that you will never reclaim. It is the place of cut off possibility, the realm of only-here and just-now. Remove from your house everything that you could get again, everything that doesn’t tug at your heart with a sharp pang of impossible fragility, and you will have found your Home.
And he preserved through many lives of Men the memory of all that had been fair; and the house of Elrond was a refuge for the weary and the oppressed, and a treasury of good counsel and wise lore. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien in The Silmarillion
But we shrink from it again and again, tending our worthless collection of identical nothings rather than facing the pain of loving the finite. Haven’t you caught yourself taking time away from your lover, your child, to spend on the disintermediated product of a screen that will never know your name? Don’t you anxiously check to see how many books or episodes are in the series, preparation for the discomfort an ending? We become studious avoiders of any good but the endlessly replicatable. As if the best singular joys were not worth far more than the weightiest sorrows of their loss. The only way to create a Home at the edge of the wild is to treasure up the most precious things and dare against their destruction. If your sanctuary against the tides is to prove homely to you and others, it will be because you lined it with the unique and the imperfect realities that slowly fade as they are used. Love best the things that you must cradle most gently. Have the courage to do yourself the little harms that come with living connected to people, to places.
Because we love something else more than this world, we love even this world more than those who know no other.
~ C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock
Look around you for a moment and accept that you don’t know how long you’ve been given. Love the clumsy mortal things that you know best, not the deathless coldness that claims to know you best. If Home is the place of birth pain and arguments and heartbreak, then accept these things as worthy prices for the joy they accompany. We know instinctively that we were created to live forever, but we have to be content for a few brief moments to exist in our present dying state. The purposeful humbling suffering and loss prepares us for something. We dare not hurry past the lesson of living in these moments to flirt with a similacra of demigod’s power. Something even better is coming. But not yet. And in the meantime, we gently rest our packs in the sand and stop wandering. Pitch the tent, dig the well, here only and not anywhere. Take care.
For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. ~ 2 Corinthians 5:1
This sort of reminds me of something I heard once time, "homelessness is the affliction of both the global poor and the global rich." From a material perspective, that statement is absurd. Cute, but absurd. But from a spiritual perspective, there is something to be said about the homelessness of Davos Man as an actual infliction that does them, and the rest of us, harm.
This was thoughtful meditation on the irreplaceable and imperfect vs. the replicable and impersonal.