Finding permanence in the ephemeral
“Home” is an emotionally charged word. It is not just the walls, roof, furniture and windows of the house in which we grew up, or the exact geographic coordinates of that house. Those of us who’ve moved around a lot or who come from different countries know that the concept of “home” is at times more abstract and emotional, rather than anything strictly concrete.
A home is not just a place where we structure our daily and physical lives—it’s also where we structure our emotional and psychological lives. It’s where we feel the most comfortable and relaxed. It’s where we’re told that no, we can’t go to McDonald’s because there are leftovers in the fridge. It’s where we can feel the happiest or the saddest and be our weirdest and truest selves, away from the judgment of the world. It’s where the Wi-Fi automatically connects. The experience of being away from home—the feeling of homesickness—carries its own set of emotional resonances and spaces.
I recently noticed that the past twelve months of my life had been haunted by a recurring motif of homesickness. Unconsciously or not, I had surrounded myself with things that induced the anxiety of being away from home.
This motif of home first appeared for me last summer when I worked as an executive for Vic’s 2017 Orientation Week. Early on, our team decided that the theme would be “Home is Victoria.” We wanted to build an image of Vic as a new home for incoming students—not just as a place where they ate and slept and went to classes, but a place where they could also create meaningful inner lives.
This was easier said than done—not all incoming students are able to easily adjust into the rhythms of university life. Most students are away from home for the first time, and the intense energy of orientation week can make the transition harder rather than easier. When I put together the commuter orientation this year with one of my co-execs Melinda, I used my own emotions about Vic as a home as a guide for the experience that I wanted to create. After two years of miserable commuting, I’d finally managed to make Vic feel like some sort of home by getting more involved. I sought to channel this feeling of belonging as best I could, and I feel like I succeeded to a good degree—my work on the commuter orientation created a strong group of friends that I still see, every day, hanging out in the atrium. My effort to channel the positive emotions of home that I felt at this school resulted in something that I am very proud of.
At the same time, over the summer I was participating in a small group one of my professors put together where we read portions of Homer’s Odyssey in Greek. In the section that we read, Odysseus says there’s nothing better than when everybody gathers to share a meal and listen to music. Vic, if anything, felt like this banquet—a hospitable party where strangers became friends, partaking in and enjoying all the riches it had to offer, until it was at last time to leave. But however much the banquet felt like home, Odysseus still longed for his sunny Ithaca: “I know no sweeter sight on earth.” I realized that however happy I was at Vic and proud of my work, my feeling of it as a home could only really be temporary. It provided a space for me to organize my daily life, but I felt the anchor of my psychological and emotional life was elsewhere.
As soon as orientation week ended, I moved out of my family home. I felt nervous moving to Toronto from Newmarket—it’s not very far, only an hour-long bus ride away—but it would be the first time I’d be on my own and away from my family. They were my most reliable and comforting structure of support, but I still needed to pursue my own need for independence. I felt pretty homesick the first few weeks—I missed my mom’s cooking, talking to my sister, the car rides home from the train station with my dad. But at least in Toronto I was free to do whatever I wanted—free to come and go at any time, decorate my apartment however, or eat whatever. As I continued to make my Toronto apartment more into a home where I felt an inner, individual sense of ease, I was also reminded of the significance that family contributes to my idea of home. Home is not just a space where my emotions and psyche are structured, but also the people that make it possible for that structure to crystallize. In order to attain the feeling of freedom and confidence that living by myself would bring, I also had to be prepared for some of the isolation and loneliness that came with it. Six months later, I’m much more comfortable living by myself and I’m not as emotionally reliant on my family. But visiting family still gives me an ease of mind that I can’t find anywhere else. The longer I live in Toronto, the more I realize that it’s not necessary to attach an exclusive significance of home to just one place—home is both my family and being by myself in Toronto, and as I get comfortable with one, homesickness always arises for the other.
School began right after I moved in, and for a seminar I read a book called Mimesis by Erich Auerbach. It’s a five-hundred-page book of literary theory, but somehow it reads more like a novel. The writing at times becomes so personal that it seems like Auerbach was writing an autobiography. And in a way, he was—Auerbach was a Jewish professor who was forced into exile in Istanbul by the Nazi regime, and Mimesis, which charts the development of realism in literature, became his way of of preserving the spirit of his European home. It’s not hard to see a type of homesickness in his book that runs so deep and intense that it appears more like a desperate cry for help. As he witnesses his heritage being destroyed, he still clings to the hope that he might see his home, friends, and family once again: “I hope that my study will reach its readers—both my friends of former years, if they are still alive, and well as all the others for whom it was intended.” Auerbach eventually moved to the US, but his book remains a homesick elegy for Europe—it captures the emotion that comes with belonging to a culture or heritage larger than oneself.
For my final project in that seminar, I decided to write an essay on Chronicle of a Death Foretold by the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. Although I’ve never been in a situation as dire as Auerbach’s, I was inspired by his method of writing about one’s own literary homeland, however distant it might be. My family moved from Colombia to Canada sixteen years ago, and although I’ve only been back once since then, I still feel a sense of homesickness for Colombia. I was raised with its culture and traditions, but in a different country. Being away from Colombia meant being away from a history that is also mine—at least I get to hear certain stories, such as my dad’s story about a guy who had a hit placed on him by a wizard, or my uncle’s account of how the windows of the bus he was riding in shattered when Pablo Escobar’s truck bomb blew up a government building a few blocks away, or how my great-grandfather built up a fortune mining gold that he wasted on gambling. Not having grown up in Colombia, I had to experience it vicariously.
Through writing my final paper on a book about Colombia, I can’t help but feel like I’m trying to bridge a gap that I can’t quite reach across. In this case it feels like what is called saudade in Portuguese—a memory and desire of something that may not come back. Homesickness became for me not so much about missing a place or family, but about missing a larger culture that I was born into, but cut off from, and may not be able to fully return to. But as insurmountable as this feeling about home may feel, I remember that home (and missing it) is made up of so many other feelings—happiness and pride, anxiety and fear, loneliness and freedom—that it’s only one colour in the emotional palette that “home” contains. How “home” feels varies on how and when we think about it, inviting different emotions depending on our points of view. “Home” may as well contain a whole spectrum of emotions that can be complex and dynamic, yet completely known, intimate and familiar.
