A Romantic, says Nietzsche, is someone who always wants to be elsewhere. If that’s so, then the children of the Internet are Romantics, for they perpetually wish to be someplace else, and the laptop reliably helps take them there — if only in imagination. The e-mailer, the instant messenger, the Web browser are all dispersing their energies and interests outward, away from the present, the here and now. The Internet user is constantly connecting with people and institutions far away, creating surrogate communities that displace the potential community at hand … dissolve(ing) the present away.
—Mark Edmundson, from “Dwelling in Possibilities” in the Chronicle Review
What you have made me see,” answered the Lady, “is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one’s mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given. But this I had never noticed before—that at the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you had not found is still, for a moment, before you. And if you wished—if it were possible to wish—you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other…the world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths—but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.
—C.S. Lewis, from Perelandra
In Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, she tells the story of a visit to Oakland, California, where she had spent much of her childhood. After living in Paris for several decades a lecture tour brought her back home, but she records that once there, she could not find her house—her school and park were no longer there and her childhood synagogue was gone.
“There is no there there”, she famously wrote.
She came back to where she started but found nothing that resembled Home as she remembered it—this home had faded into something unfamiliar.
***
I have an idea that stretches my mind every so often, maybe more than any other idea that weaves in and out of my thoughts. It is sometimes a thread in my happiest thoughts, though most often it comes as a piercing sense of loss or of great longing. It is an idea—or maybe a set of ideas—about “home”. I will do my best to tie them together.
