Commonplace: Home

We're not at home in America. And how could we be? How could we make a home here when what is called home is always framed "? by convictions of agency and autonomy "? in terms of other places or, increasingly, of non- places? Where no locale is immune from the certainty that the alternative "? something more adequate to the demands of desire "? lies just beyond the next bend in the road? (Which should not be confused with "Manifest Destiny" or the "frontier spirit.")We're not at home in America, and not because of historical necessity or libidinal adolescence. (A full account of the acquisition of any American place is yet to be made.) We're not at home, and being footloose is a symptom of American unease with the idea of home. We're housed, surely. We're at our desks. We've taken cover. We're interned. But we're not at home. A gift America has given the world is homelessness.

Relieved to be carrying nothing but what a laptop will hold, the modular pioneers of the world's cubicles come untethered from situations that enforce (or embrace) the sense of communitarian solidarity which arises, in part, from the endurance of the ordinary. In essayist and critic Anneli Rufus' libertarian reformulation of John Donne, every "hobohemian" is able to be an island, even at the level of generational continuity. "We no longer need to be social animals in order to survive as a species," Rufus writes in Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto.

Your participation, it seems, is now optional. This terminal neutrality "? the situation of the phantom motel guest waiting alone in his room without inheritance or legacy "? stands in opposition to the "pale" vista of the commonplace (the place where we necessarily find love and hope).

The weak (as I am) call it home, because of its wounds, because it has wounded them.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user Waldo Jaquith. It was used under a Creative Commons license.