Where would you go if you knew you only had a few weeks to live? This intriguing question was posed by Roger Cohen in a recent article in the NYT. Cohen in turn was prompted by an essay in The London Review of Books written by James Wood in which the writer Christopher Hitchens was quoted as saying that he would return to the Dartmoor of his childhood. "It was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years".
Cohen himself would go back to the South Africa where he grew up. And I? Where would I go? Would I choose to spend my last days in the Suffolk countryside of my early years? I don't know. Although Suffolk is indelibly stamped on my soul and though our house in Ringshall is the only place I have ever considered as "home", I am not sure that the question of "where?" is as crucial as "who with?". I would want to spend my last days surrounded by those nearest and dearest to me, wherever I or they happened to be.
Nevertheless, the question of what we mean by "home" is a very interesting one. Is home where we grew up or is it where our children grew up? Is it where we lived for a long time or is it a place where we were particularly happy, if only for a short time? Is it synonymous with a beautiful house or beautiful surroundings? I myself had lived in seven different houses by the time I was fourteen. Since I came to France, I have moved a further nine times. If length of stay is the criterion, then home for me is where I am living now (twenty-five years), yet in the deepest sense I have never considered our house in Aubigny as "home".
Why is this? James Wood, an Englishman who has lived in the United States for 18 years describes this feeling of rootlessness, not to be confused with exile, very well: he describes life on his street in Boston, “the heavy maple trees, the unkempt willow down at the end, an old white Cadillac with the bumper sticker ‘Ted Kennedy has killed more people than my gun,’ and I feel ... nothing: some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection
, no past, despite all the years I have lived there — just a tugging distance from it all. A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: How did I get here?”
In this respect, the little town of Saint Jean de Losne just down the road from me is a particularly acute illustration of what Woods is getting at. Saint Jean may roughly be divided into three sections: the "locals", a vibrant Turkish community and a sizeable number of mostly English-speaking boating people. If we may perhaps unfairly look upon the Turks as "exiles" and the locals as the "home" element, the boating community epitomises rootlessness in its most extreme form!
For them, there is, as James Wood says, "some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection...."
But does any of this really matter? If you are happy, the rest is immaterial. And if you are not happy, "going home" probably won't make you so.
Why is this? James Wood, an Englishman who has lived in the United States for 18 years describes this feeling of rootlessness, not to be confused with exile, very well: he describes life on his street in Boston, “the heavy maple trees, the unkempt willow down at the end, an old white Cadillac with the bumper sticker ‘Ted Kennedy has killed more people than my gun,’ and I feel ... nothing: some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection
, no past, despite all the years I have lived there — just a tugging distance from it all. A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: How did I get here?”In this respect, the little town of Saint Jean de Losne just down the road from me is a particularly acute illustration of what Woods is getting at. Saint Jean may roughly be divided into three sections: the "locals", a vibrant Turkish community and a sizeable number of mostly English-speaking boating people. If we may perhaps unfairly look upon the Turks as "exiles" and the locals as the "home" element, the boating community epitomises rootlessness in its most extreme form!
For them, there is, as James Wood says, "some recognition, but no comprehension, no real connection...."
But does any of this really matter? If you are happy, the rest is immaterial. And if you are not happy, "going home" probably won't make you so.
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