Falling Out of the World—and the Longing for Home

The center does not hold. The ground gives way, and we are lost and falling. The ancients knew about the sudden overturning of the order of things: “Catastrophe” derives from the Greek, from “down” and “turn over.” We lose the world we took for granted, and the familiar turns strange. “Familiar”—a word derived from family.

At the dawn of Western literature, Homer sang of Odysseus longing to get back to family, to home, to Penelope. For twenty years that clever warrior weeps on strange shores. The Bible, too, begins with the loss of Eden, that perfect garden-home of innocence, before awareness, before knowledge. Home, then, is not merely something to be found in space: home is a state of being; a longing steeped in our earliest fantasies, of touch and bodily presence and love. And of course, because this longing is saturated in fantasies, there may never have been such a home, but rather a memory of a fantasy. Perhaps this fantasy is a primal illusion born in our earliest pre-aware moments on being thrust out into a world we did not choose. Home is a longing for something deep and ineffable. As Bob Dylan puts it, in Scorsese's PBS documentary No Direction Home, “I was born very far from where I am supposed to be, and so I'm on my way home.” Home is a longing for the world to be set right. Today this is our collective longing; yet we all long in our own way.