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Reason alone can never fully explain the workings of the human sense of home. Down in its mystical essence, the very idea of home resists definition. While a place of nativity usually becomes home, there are those who find a home only by leaving that place for some other where they feel ineffably they belong. The notion of home becomes strangely wedded to the idea of fate. Home may be, as Pliny is supposed to have said, where the heart is, but it can also be where hate is. Human attachments to places, as to persons, are sealed by rage as well as by love. Home is clearly among the greatest values on the human scale. Cain, condemned for murdering Abel to that deprivation of home known as banishment, said: "My punishment is greater than I can bear." The powers of home, in its play on human behavior, are protean, magnetic, chimerical, profound.
The pull of home surpasses logic all the time. It keeps people living in conditions that seem (to an outsider) most improbable. It keeps people living more or less happily in deserts, in igloos, in the shadows of volcanoes and the paths of recurring floods. It has induced generations to take the winters of New Hampshire and the summers of Alabama. More, a sense of home will cause people to endure situations that an outsider, free to flee, would not tolerate for a moment—political turmoil, for example, which a good deal of South America's people suffer continually. The sense of home even makes people want to return to the hateful conditions that cast them out. Author Ariel Dorfman, one of thousands of Chileans banished by the government of General Augusto Pinochet, publicly protested this month about the "intolerable homelessness" he has suffered for nine years and begged the Pinochet government: "Let us come home." "Home," said Robert Frost, "is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in." But that, as the spectacle of modern politics proves, is not invariably so.