With the coronavirus pandemic lingering on interminably, the societal pressure to stay home is turning into an expectation to go back — back to school, work, restaurants, travel. Back to civilization.
But in our rush to leave our coronavirus cocoons and resume the toing and froing of our previous lives, we might be discovering something only the layabouts and homebodies were properly appreciating. At least for me, among all the troubling things of the last 18 months, perhaps the least troubling was what was first an edict and then a request: to stay at home.
As an arts critic and journalist, I already worked from home, and the concept, hardly novel, had been normalized in my mind after an adolescence spent reading interviews with, and looking at photographs of, great writers: Ray Bradbury wrote in his basement, William F. Buckley in a gussied-up former garage, and so on. I had enjoyed my assorted work-related outings — say, reviewing a jazz concert or an art exhibit — but they were undertaken with the sweet knowledge that, a few hours after I departed for my assignment in the city, I would be back among the shrubs and porch lights of the suburbs. I was not a globe-trotter; I was, at best, a day-tripper.
Have I become a hermit? A recluse? A sufferer of so-called “pandemic reentry anxiety”? To the contrary, I submit that a hankering for home is deep-seated but, before the pandemic, inconsistent with the transience and speed of modern life. We are descended not only from hunter-gatherers but from cave-dwellers, too.
During the pandemic, perhaps looking for a way to process my homeward-bound state of mind, I found myself consuming books, movies, even pieces of music that either commended the virtues of home or lamented its absence. I discovered a substantial body of work that suggested ours had been, until the pandemic, an age wrongly guided by wanderlust.
Sometimes, my searches for variations on the theme led me astray. The beautiful 19th-century hymn “One Sweetly Solemn Thought” — with the lulling lines “I’m nearer my home today / Than I ever have been before” — is one of countless religious works to use the word “home” in the truest and, alas, most definitive sense of the word: “Home” means heaven, not the place you park your car each night.
Closer to my understanding of “home” was the definition given by writer (and Presbyterian minister) Frederick Buechner, who wrote, in his book The Longing for Home, “The word home summons up a place — more specifically a house within that place — which you have rich and complex feelings about, a place where you feel, or did feel once, uniquely at home, which is to say a place where you feel you belong and which in some sense belongs to you, a place where you feel that all is somehow ultimately well even if things aren’t going all that well at any given moment.”
The push-pull of home is at the heart of many of the best meditations on the subject. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is attuned to the allure of the East Coast at the time of the Jazz Age, but its Midwestern narrator Nick Carraway carries with him a profound sense of whence he came. “When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by,” Nick says, recalling journeying home by train from prep school, “a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air.”
Perhaps we have to leave home to see it afresh. In the 1939 Warner Bros. film adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz — a tale that, for all of its imagination, is, at heart, a study of homesickness — Dorothy Gale is full of naive wanderlust as she sings “Over the Rainbow.” Yet, once conveyed by a tornado from monochromatic Kansas to brassy, colorful Oz, Dorothy almost immediately wants to chart her course back home. Anyone who has been away from a place and found a way to return will connect with Dorothy’s relief when, at the end, she opens her eyes and sets sight on her room, her bed, her plainspoken family.
Released two years before the United States entered World War II, The Wizard of Oz was the forerunner of a group of films that played to audiences’ sentiment about the home front: Those who were fighting were eager to get back to it, and those who were left behind were eager to hang on to it. To homebodies in the moviegoing public, the 1940s must have been a glorious period: Nearly half of the films in Mickey Rooney’s beloved Andy Hardy series, which tracked an all-American family whose escapades rarely took them beyond their front door, were released that decade.
During these years, characters were often judged to be good or bad on the basis of their attachment, or lack thereof, to the places they called home. In Mitchell Leisen’s charming Christmas feature Remember the Night (1940), a big-city prosecutor (Fred MacMurray) appears frosty and forbidding — a cold fish when interacting with the otherwise charming defendant in his current case, a down-on-her-heels thief played by Barbara Stanwyck — until he makes a Yuletide trek to his mother’s home, where he helps make popcorn and agrees to take a turn at the piano. A man comfortable in the walls in which he was raised cannot be all bad.
In the great hearth-and-home-promoting film of the era, Vincente Minnelli’s musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), a turn-of-the-century middle-class family grapples with the prospect of relocating from St. Louis to New York City. The move will serve the career interests of patriarch Mr. Smith (Leon Ames), but in the end, professional priorities take a back seat to the family’s attachment to that which they already have: their house, their friends, their little city. The decision is validated by the arrival of the 1904 World’s Fair in good ol’ St. Louis. Observes their eldest daughter: “We don’t have to come here on a train or stay in a hotel. It’s right in our own hometown.”
In fact, all through the Golden Age, Hollywood associated rootlessness with bad things: In Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), a banker, his wife, and their three bright but bored children discover the cost of taking for granted hearth and home with the intrusion of murderous yet magnetic Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten); for Hitchcock, Charlie’s itinerant lifestyle is chief among his suspicious traits. Two decades later, in Elia Kazan’s brilliant Wild River (1960), a Tennessee Valley Authority official (Montgomery Clift) discovers that not even a river sure to flood will persuade a tough old lady to abandon her homestead. (“While my man from Washington had the ‘social’ right on his side, the picture I made was in sympathy with the old woman obstructing progress,” Kazan admitted in his autobiography, providing a lesson in the recalcitrance inherent in the American character for today’s public health officials.)
In the 1980s, Steven Spielberg emerged as the chief cinematic chronicler of the glories of going home. Of course, for E.T. in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), home means a place far, far away: “Phone home,” the creature says again and again. When I watched that film as a youngster, E.T. seemed almost ungrateful in rejecting the comforts of suburbia for his home planet, but I realize now that an ample supply of Reese’s Pieces cannot make Earth a substitute home. There’s the lesson: My home is not yours, but if I can appreciate what mine means to me, I can understand what yours means to you. Spielberg offered a comic variation on the theme in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), in which, after depositing the hero in assorted exotic and frequently hazardous locales, his would-be flame Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) strikes a blow for homebodies everywhere: “I’m going home to Missouri, where they never feed you snakes before ripping your heart out and lowering you into a hot pit!”
To value home and to spurn adventure may seem a form of cowardice, a withdrawal from the necessary risks of life. On the other hand, these works of literature and cinema reveal an attachment to home to be the most profound form of modesty: Just as none of us choose our parents, none of us select where we are from. To be content with the house or the town fate has given us is a kind of grace. This is what I will remember most about the pandemic.
Peter Tonguette is an arts writer in Columbus, Ohio, who contributes to the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the American Conservative.
