Why There Is No Place Like It

By Frank Trippett

There's no place like home for the holidays ..." That certain time of year being at hand, this sentiment from Home for the Holidays will soon be crooning forth repetitiously from all the mellow music stations. More power to it. Only a sorehead would fuss about too much celebration of the idea of home during the festive winter season. For that matter, home deserves a good deal of hymning all the time. There is, as the wonderful old song Home, Sweet Home established once and for all, no place like it--and this no matter what sort of place home turns out to be. What also needs to be remembered is that home, although a special place, is never merely a place.

It is a reality that is routinely forgotten when people try to figure out the best places to live. That game goes on continually. In the 1970s the Midwest Research Institute of Kansas City put Portland, Ore., and Sacramento at the top of the heap, after a "quality of life" survey of 243 U.S. metropolitan areas, and Birmingham and Jersey City at the bottom. This year a book called Places Rated Almanac scored the "livability" of 277 U.S. urban areas; it nominated Atlanta and Washington and its environs as most livable, with two Massachusetts areas--Fitchburg-Leominster and Lawrence-Haverhill--bringing up the rear. More recently, University of Pennsylvania Professor of Social Work Richard Estes turned up with an index to the "quality of life" in 107 nations. Top marks went to Denmark and Norway and booby prizes to Ethiopia and Chad (the U.S. ranked 41st, two notches above the U.S.S.R.). Surveys of this sort usually fuel chauvinistic arguments among civic booster types. But the question is: What do such studies have to do with the way people actually wind up in whatever homes they wind up with?

The answer is: little if anything. The analysts who evaluate and rank places lean entirely on objective criteria that play a relatively small role among the influences that determine where people make their homes. For one thing, the big majority of the world's people are born into the places that remain their homes for life. In the U.S., almost 64% of the people live today in the states in which they were born. It is safe to assume that few of those made a prenatal choice of birthplace on the basis of economic, political, social and cultural factors such as those used in Places Rated Almanac. For another, when people as adults uproot from one home to make another elsewhere, they are most often impelled by an event like a new job, almost never by the sheer allure of some other place. Given such realities, the ranking of cities and countries is bound to seem an entirely academic exercise. For people at home, the exaltation of any Elsewhere, even with hard facts, never quite makes sense. Hard facts, by definition, can never include the one fact that makes a place especially dear: the fact that it is home.

Reason alone can never fully explain the workings of the human sense of home. Down in its mystical essence, the very idea of home resists definition. While a place of nativity usually becomes home, there are those who find a home only by leaving that place for some other where they feel ineffably they belong. The notion of home becomes strangely wedded to the idea of fate. Home may be, as Pliny is supposed to have said, where the heart is, but it can also be where hate is. Human attachments to places, as to persons, are sealed by rage as well as by love. Home is clearly among the greatest values on the human scale. Cain, condemned for murdering Abel to that deprivation of home known as banishment, said: "My punishment is greater than I can bear." The powers of home, in its play on human behavior, are protean, magnetic, chimerical, profound.

The pull of home surpasses logic all the time. It keeps people living in conditions that seem (to an outsider) most improbable. It keeps people living more or less happily in deserts, in igloos, in the shadows of volcanoes and the paths of recurring floods. It has induced generations to take the winters of New Hampshire and the summers of Alabama. More, a sense of home will cause people to endure situations that an outsider, free to flee, would not tolerate for a moment--political turmoil, for example, which a good deal of South America's people suffer continually. The sense of home even makes people want to return to the hateful conditions that cast them out. Author Ariel Dorfman, one of thousands of Chileans banished by the government of General Augusto Pinochet, publicly protested this month about the "intolerable homelessness" he has suffered for nine years and begged the Pinochet government: "Let us come home." "Home," said Robert Frost, "is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in." But that, as the spectacle of modern politics proves, is not invariably so.

Such is the utterly subjective nature of home that the very word must fetch up a distinct and unique image and sensibility in every person. And indeed home can be many things: a house, a town, a neighborhood, a state, a country, a room. Home can be wherever one feels at home, and even a scrap of a place can mobilize that homey feeling. The old standard Autumn in New York plausibly evokes a person looking down on the metropolis from the 27th floor of a hotel to find that the "glittering crowds and shimmering clouds in canyons of steel--they're making me feel I'm home." Plausible? In London, Thornton Wilder once provoked astonishment by referring to his temporary accommodations as home. How use the hallowed word to refer to a hotel room? Explained Wilder: "A home is not an edifice, but an interior and transportable adjustment." It is surely that, along with all else, as immigrants to the U.S. prove over and again: while they have always embraced their adopted land as home, they have tended to ward off melting into the new place by re-creating elements of the homes left behind. Result: ethnic neighborhoods as well as poignant sentiments like that of the Hungarian immigrant song recorded by Michael Kraus in Immigration, the American Mosaic: "We yearn to return to our little village Where every blade of grass understood Hungarian." Home, it seems, can also be divided, which is probably essential for a species whose fundamental dilemma can be described as simultaneous needs for mobility and a sense of home. For nomadic herdsmen, an endless path becomes--home.

Be it ever so ambiguous, there is no idea like home. Not the least of home's specialness is the fact that it can often be seen most clearly from afar. Thus it was a sojourn in Italy that inspired Robert Browning's famous "Oh, to be in England . . ." By chance, while in Paris early in the 19th century, the American Actor-Author John Howard Payne experienced some of the yearnings for home that found their way into his classic Home, Sweet Home. Together, Payne's song and Browning's poetry suggest that the part of home that is not merely a place exists, so to speak, in the I of the beholder. It is not quite true that you can't go home again. The deeper truth is that you never leave the part of home that becomes the movable feast of the imagination. --By Frank Trippett

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