you know how it is. once you get an idea, a thought, a song, a word in your head, you notice it everywhere. home. home. home... i've been meditating on the concept of home lately. having recently finished "Swann's way", i am now, part owner, by proxy, of this redolent, glittering concept of home which has seeped, indirectly and acutely into our nostalgia. into our romantic idioms about 'home'.
'home' is not the place where one lives now, but, rather an elusive non-place that
represents moments of comfort and innocence which were lived without perspective, and have gathered sentimental value with their distance in time....
that non-place that one can only reach by a sight from the corner of the eye; nearly missed, a scent, a coincidental combination of sensory elements, experienced in just the moment that you were not looking....
pearls and lockets, with their storied perfumes that tell your secrets about sneaking into grandma's jewelry box as a child...wet grass that holds your first kiss forever in the blushing tenderness and confusion of a spot of dappled sun light, a taste that, in the instant it submits to the tongue, reveals the emotional tenor of your childhood....
i'm reading Lolita now. again. is it possible that there is a note, no..not a note, an imperative, a burning, glowing need for home in every story?
i am reading it for the third time. second in a row just now. in my home-centric frame of mind, it seems that H.H is deeply, intrinsically driven by a search for an elusive feeling of home. Nabakov cursorily notes H.H.'s loss of home and family as a young child as a prelude of sorts, to his mad, obscene, dear love for this child. they travel, homeless... through the innocent, provincial small towns by way of escape and respite, both. i admit to crying, both times, as i read in the last pages, the scorching moment when H.H. realizes that 'what was missing was not Lolita's presence by (his) side, but, the sound of her voice among the rising voices of the children at play' ( not quoted...just kind of clumsily remembered....please read or re-read this book..)
i sometimes wonder about what i do...i wonder at the self indulgence of art. and then i am reminded by these beautifully crafted odes to longing....that i do what i do, because doing it is home to me. and in a perfect world, something that i add to the collective pile of stuff in the world might exist in a brief second as a talisman or a catalyst to a memory of home for someone else.
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This is a perfect post. I would add to it, as a contrast, the scene in Motorcycle Diaries where the boys are out on the road and they run into some itinerant farmers who pull them up on this idea of "travel". I always go back to that scene when I'm doing something that's not directly related to bringing food to the table.
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