Rainer Maria Rilke once excused himself for not writing to a friend, saying, “I haven’t had that feeling of home in which to write.”

It has been a while since I have written here. I lacked that feeling of home. Except… what is a feeling of home? How does it affect my writing?

Do Rilke and I mean the same thing?

A deep human need to “feel at home” exists across languages and epochs.   More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman Senator and Stoic Seneca wrote that the feeling of home existed in our ability to withdraw from rushing about and ambitious means:  
 
“You rush hither and thither with the idea of dislodged a firmly seated weight when the very dashing about just adds to the trouble it causes you. […] Once you have rid yourself of the affliction there, though, every change of scene will become a pleasure. You may have banished to the ends of the earth, and yet in whatever outlandish corner of the world you may find yourself stationed, you will find that place, whatever it may be ink, a hospital home.”  
 
From Seneca’s Letters From a Stoic
 
It is the same sense of home in which Peter Mayle writes about his beloved, adopted Provence in both A Year in Provence and Encore Provence.

“To be rooted,” French philosopher Simone Weil wrote in 1942, “is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Weil avoided the word “home” (she was never so pedantic) but advocated for a metaphysical shelter for our soul.

A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well-nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.
From Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots

Three decades later, fellow French philosopher Gaston Bachelard added that our need for “home” is for inhabited space, including space we realize through imagination.

[A]ll inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home. […] the imagination functions in this direction whenever the human being has found the slightest shelter: we shall see the imagination build ‘walls’ of impalpable shadows, comfort itself with the illusion of protection — or, just the contrary, tremble behind thick walls, mistrust the staunchest ramparts. In short, in the most interminable of dialectics, the sheltered being gives perceptible limits to his shelter. He experiences the house in its reality and in its virtuality, by means of thought and dreams.
From Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space

In 1845, American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau walked out of urban society to a distant wood where he constructed a four-walled building with a bed, chair, and fireplace. Thoreau’s physical and imaginative attachment to the space turned it from shelter to home.

I lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house. Indeed, I worked so deliberately that though I commenced at the ground in the morning, a course of bricks […] served as my pillow at night; […] When I began to have a fire at evening, before I plastered my house, the chimney carried smoke particularly well, because of the numerous chinks between the boards. Yet I passed some cheerful evenings in that cool and airy apartment, surrounded by rough brown boards full of knots, and rafters with the bark on high overhead.

My house never pleased my eye so much after it was plastered, though I was obligated to confess that it was more comfortable. […] I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter.
From Henry David Thoreau’s Walden

It is indicative that Thoreau focused on the fireplace not simply for heat but for hearth.

The hearth symbolizes calm, consistency, a knowable order, and a nurturing warmth. “My preferred working state is thermal,” notices legendary dance choreographer Twyla Tharp, “I need heat… it calls up the warmth of the hearth and home… which is all about feeling safe and secure.”   American poet Richard Hugo wrote about the need to home our creative impulse. Read more from Hugo on the psychogenic nature of poetry and the need to “home” our creative impulse.

“In our less communal age of central heating and separate rooms for each family member,” muses Stephen Fry in his witty and rascally retelling of Greek myths, “we did not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did.”

Of all the gods, Hestia […] is probably the least well known to us, perhaps because the realm that Zeus, in his wisdom appropriated to her was the hearth. In our less communal age of central heating and separate rooms for each family member, we did not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did […]. Yet, even for us, the word stands for something more than just a fireplace.

We speak of ‘hearth and home’. The word ‘hearth’ shares its ancestry with ‘heart,’ just as the modern Greek for ‘hearth’ is kardia, which also means ‘heart.’ In ancient Greece the wider concept of hearth and home was expressed by oikos, which lives on for us today in words like ‘economics’ and ‘ecology’. The Latin for hearth is focus — which speaks for itself. It is a strange and wonderful thing that out of the words for fireplace we have spun ‘cardiologist’, ‘deep focus’ and ‘eco-warrior.’ The essential meaning of centrality that connects them also reveals the significance of the hearth to the Greeks and the Romans, and consequently the importance of Hestia, its presiding deity.
From Stephen Fry’s Mythos

The necessity of a hearth as an aspect of the “feeling of home” becomes clear when we ask: What happens to a home without a hearth?

Unease and unrest, according to Robert Lowell’s mid-century writing.   I have an emotional connection to Lowell. He was a monumentally influential American poet who pioneered the inward-looking, outward exposing poetry (now, what everyone seems to be doing.) Here was this Harvard-educated man, a member of Boston’s highest social class, spilling his guts to the world on all the disquiet at home.  
 
Lowell also suffered, like I do, from manic-depressive disorder and was hospitalized several times at McLean outside Boston. So was I. He remembered blue. I remembered orange.

During the weekends I was at home much of the time. All day I used to look forward to the nights when my bedroom walls would once again vibrate, when I would awake with rapture to the rhythm of my parents arguing, arguing one another to exhaustion. Sometimes, without bathrobe or slippers, I would wriggle out into the cold hall on my belly and ambuscade myself behind the banister. I could often hear actual words. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Father would mumble. He was ‘back-sliding’ and ‘living in a fool’s paradise of habitual retarding and retarded do-nothing inertia.’ […] She was hysterical even in her calm. One night she said with murderous coolness, ‘Bobby and I are leaving for Papa’s.’ This was an ultimatum to force Father to sign a deed placing the Revere Street house in Mother’s name.
From Robert Lowell’s Life Studies

Lowell suffered complete alienation from the hearth of his childhood home; he is cold, dark, and surrounded by violence and chaos. That watchful child was toppled by depression, even psychosis as an adult — both acute mental and emotional rootlessness.

Or consider the rootlessness of jazz singer Billie Holiday. Born when her mom was thirteen, Holiday lived with her mother at her mother’s job, then in a strict Catholic girls’ school, then a brothel, and in hotels while touring with the band (hotels that barred her entering through the front, although she was the star singer), and, repeatedly, she “lived” in jail.

In each of these “homes,” Holiday is slapped with prejudice, trauma, and a complete lack of love and security. She is constantly reminded of her undesirable, unwanted, and misunderstood status as a poor, Black female.

You’re always under pressure. You can fight it but you can’t kick it. The only time I was free from this kind of pressure was when I was a call girl as a kid and I had white men as my customers. Nobody gave us any trouble. People can forgive people any damn thing if they did it for money.
From Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues

Comedian John Cleese called home “the place you do not have to strive.” Holiday and the many millions who are rootless, disenfranchised, and alienated never had a place to stop striving.

“You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles,” warned Holiday, “but you can still be working on a plantation.”

Colen Campbell’s engraving of Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. Blenheim is the seat of the Duke of Marlborough and the birth and burial place of Winston Churchill. The Palace and its gardens, designed by Capability Jones, are still inhabited by the Spencer-Churchills. Print from Isaac & Ede Collection.

Holiday’s writings remind us that home is not and cannot be a physical space for many people.

We see this with singers Patti Smith and artist Robert Mapplethorpe. When they were both young, poor, and mercurial, they created a home in the company of each other. In a nurturing embrace, their loneliness met. Smith writes: “In this space between us, home.”

Is there anyone in whose company you feel a feeling of home?

During the war and throughout life, Roald Dahl put himself in a “feeling of home” by writing to his mother. His light lines (“There is nothing very wrong with me. I’ve merely had a severe concussion”) and dancing prose (“All these things and many more I shall derive the greatest pleasure from doing”) seemed to say, “The war might be raging out there, and there is a woefully inadequate plane waiting to take me skyward, but for this moment I’m with my mother. I’m next to the hearth.”

Dahl wrote to his mother each day he was on active duty.

Lockdown has expanded what “home” means.

When I rethink “I wasn’t in the feeling of home,” what I meant — and likely Rilke as well — was “I haven’t been myself.” I haven’t been home within myself.

I think of “home” as less of a space and more of a feeling. In that way, I inhabit myself. That is a lovely thought. Let’s sit next to it. Soothe yourself, hug yourself. You are, quite literally, home.