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Such is the utterly subjective nature of home that the very word must fetch up a distinct and unique image and sensibility in every person. And indeed home can be many things: a house, a town, a neighborhood, a state, a country, a room. Home can be wherever one feels at home, and even a scrap of a place can mobilize that homey feeling. The old standard Autumn in New York plausibly evokes a person looking down on the metropolis from the 27th floor of a hotel to find that the "glittering crowds and shimmering clouds in canyons of steel—they're making me feel I'm home." Plausible? In London, Thornton Wilder once provoked astonishment by referring to his temporary accommodations as home. How use the hallowed word to refer to a hotel room? Explained Wilder: "A home is not an edifice, but an interior and transportable adjustment." It is surely that, along with all else, as immigrants to the U.S. prove over and again: while they have always embraced their adopted land as home, they have tended to ward off melting into the new place by re-creating elements of the homes left behind. Result: ethnic neighborhoods as well as poignant sentiments like that of the Hungarian immigrant song recorded by Michael Kraus in Immigration, the American Mosaic: "We yearn to return to our little village Where every blade of grass understood Hungarian." Home, it seems, can also be divided, which is probably essential for a species whose fundamental dilemma can be described as simultaneous needs for mobility and a sense of home. For nomadic herdsmen, an endless path becomes—home.
Be it ever so ambiguous, there is no idea like home. Not the least of home's specialness is the fact that it can often be seen most clearly from afar. Thus it was a sojourn in Italy that inspired Robert Browning's famous "Oh, to be in England . . ." By chance, while in Paris early in the 19th century, the American Actor-Author John Howard Payne experienced some of the yearnings for home that found their way into his classic Home, Sweet Home. Together, Payne's song and Browning's poetry suggest that the part of home that is not merely a place exists, so to speak, in the I of the beholder. It is not quite true that you can't go home again. The deeper truth is that you never leave the part of home that becomes the movable feast of the imagination. —By Frank Trippett