Home

"When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it. He must always be a stranger to the place he loves, and its people."
-William Morris

Today I heard Salman Rushdie, Don Delillo, Steve Martin, and others speak at the PEN World Voices literary festival. They read passages from their works, which spoke about home, or the “idea of home.” What is home, why do we leave, why do we long to return? How do we create a home and what happens when we lose it? In more ways than one it was poetic semblance, for I am currently wavering on my placement. I don’t know if I should go or stay. Go “home,” back to MD, working in DC, living at home with my parents. Or stay in New York, my new home, lavishing in gems of city life, living my life relatively independent of emotional strain. Is there a right or wrong decision? I don’t know, but I do know I need to decide in 4 days. I have been swollen with arduous thought and yet there is still so much to think about.

Tonight, as I listened to Rushdie recite words from “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” I felt a slight tug coming from within. Gentle at first, then nearly insolent, the tug was unrelenting. Rushdie continued with his eloquent and quirky dissertation on societal ideas of belonging. After all, he speculated, why do we desire to watch films and read books starring the wandering hero, the rebel, the seductress, the adventurer, the orphan, the robber, the drifter? Why do we constantly reinvent these people, these characters, if not because we want to live a little bit of their lives. He proposed what if kinship, citizenship, family, name, culture, religion, all of those things that make us feel we belong, what if all of that was a big scam? What if all we had was ourselves? I pondered the question and for a moment I thought it a revelation. But only for a moment, and then I found myself vehemently disagreeing with Salman The Great. There’s no scam in belonging or even returning. We return not because we are scared or because society has suckered us into some con that we are nothing without a group. No, that’s not it at all. We return merely because we’re in love. And still, we will find the courage to leave love because we know it’s there, always.

I’ve been afraid because I felt returning to Maryland meant I was going back to the same status I was at when I left. As if I were digressing, and everything I built in New York, everything I learned and found here would be useless. But that’s not the case; in fact it’s impossible. I simply need to be with those that I love and if I decide I need to return to where they are I’ll be OK with that. Sir Rushdie The Exiled has lived his life migrating from one place to another, banished from his country and like many of us can only hold onto the notion of home. But really home is just that, an idea. An evolving idea of what made us and who we are becoming. Which is something we can't quite escape, can we? Because ultimately it seems "home" resides in us.

Check out the readings and discussions all weekend:
www.pen.org/festival