home and away

Once you are compelled, for personal or professional reasons, to spend the rest of your life abroad, from place to place, land to land, you cannot help wondering. How many people are there who make you feel at home in the absence of any semblance of home?

So very few, especially here, especially now, when time-honoured forms of communicating with the other and creating community have been replaced by standardised, shallow forms of self-fashioning and ego gyms for narcissists.


Sic transit gloria mundi...

*       *       *

The home base is a pole of repose and departure. The zone of the intimate is a pole of warmth and tranquility that we keep sight of as we advance into the stretches of the alien and that our nomadic wanderings gravitate back to.

--Alphonso Lingis, 'The Intimate and the Alien' in The Imperative.

But in most cases, we have to appeal to others to make ourselves at home. We appeal to the others to help us be at home in the desert, in the rain forest, in the tropics, in the tundra, and in the ocean. And in childhood, and in the strange nocturnal regions of the erotic, and in the shadow of death that advances.

--Alphonso Lingis, 'The Elemental that Faces' in The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common.