![]() Homesick children know how sharp the boundary between home and not-home can be because they suffer from the difference, as if it were a psychological thermocline. In America, we don’t know quite what to say about those people. And, of course, some people never leave the one home they’ve always known. ![]() Some people never find another after once leaving home. Some people, as they move through their lives, rediscover home again and again. Feeling at home on the Tiwi Islands or in Bangalore or Vancouver (if you are not native) is simply a way of saying that the not-home-ness of those places has diminished since you first arrived. But there’s a big psychological difference between feeling at home and being home. Not that you can’t feel “at home” in other places. Home is home, and everything else is not-home. But whatever else home is-and however it entered our consciousness-it’s a way of organizing space in our minds. ![]() When did “home” become embedded in human consciousness? Is our sense of home instinctive? Are we denning animals or nest builders, or are we, at root, nomadic? For much of the earliest history of our species, home may have been nothing more than a small fire and the light it cast on a few familiar faces, surrounded perhaps by the ancient city-mounds of termites. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |