THE LONGING FOR HOME A Review

of Anthony Esolen’s Nostalgia

By Matthew Bianco

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”

—Simone Weil

modern society, and perhaps especially modern American society, is highly transient. Many Americans do not have a place they have called home their entire lives, especially not multi-generationally. This increased transience has drawn attention to a larger and older conversation about home. As Anthony Esolen puts it in his new book, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, we are “homeless in a homeless world.” Nostalgia is Anthony Esolen’s contribution to this conversation.

Homelessness is a distinctively human characteristic, Esolen argues: “In all the world, only the man is lost, only the man is not well.” On the one hand, we are homeless because of our transience (among other external factors). We do not have a place or a time that informs who we are, that gives us, as Esolen reminds us, what Mao Tse-tung decreed destroyed: the gifts of “old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture.” On the other hand, we are homeless because we are created to be pilgrims, struggling toward another, truer home. The pilgrim alone knows that his good and humble home perched on a hillside is an allegory of heaven, and not so by the arbitrary choice of the allegorist, but by its essence and our essence, as made by the God who speaks to us through those essences. The human longing for home is caused first by time, insofar as time is an enemy to belonging. Time is constantly introducing flux. “You cannot go home,” Esolen says. To whatever home you try to return, it will be a home that is different than the one you left. Time not only introduces flux, though, it also introduces death, decay, and destruction. Esolen proposes that the most obvious way “to defeat the fell purposes of Time [is] to have children.”

This, however, makes time a tool for the enemies of our longing for home, whom Esolen identifies as secular progressives. These enemies do not believe we are pilgrims intended for another home. Nor do they believe that we can do much more than struggle for survival. Without hope for that brighter world and without respect for the old ideas, customs, habits, and culture, these enemies fight against the having of children, and ultimately, what that necessitates: “That they should make [the Law] known to their children” (Ps. 78:5). Esolen describes this as “the bequeathing of a heritage. . . . It is a grasping of time past, time present, and the time to come.” The past is to be rejected, except maybe for its quaint and entertaining features. We can love the past, but only as Kalypso loved Odysseus, says Esolen; as “a goddess who loves him as you love a pet.”

Esolen also asserts that the human longing for home is a longing caused (and partially satisfied) by place, which, in a mystical and beautiful way, helps to heal the ravaging effects of time. Place is “the heart of the village that makes the past present again and beckons toward eternity.” It stirs up memories—good, sad, happy, and bad—that connect past to present and that draw our thoughts and intentions toward the celestial home. It does this precisely because “home is an allegory of heaven.” Place, however, is not something we love out of sappy sentimentalism. A person loves a place, Esolen says, “because it is in him, and he is in it.” If he has not experienced it this way, then he is rootless, a modern-day gypsy. In this way, though, modern man suffers even more because, as Esolen puts it, he is “a tourist but not a pilgrim.” Such a man can only turn to one solution: progress, which Esolen describes as “the destruction of place.” Our towns, our villages, our buildings, our parks, all of those places that have been the generational storehouses of memories, are being destroyed, he argues, replaced by technological and isolating monstrosities that can be built everywhere but represent nowhere–which lack memories. The march for progress by those without a home is akin to Sam and Frodo marching toward Mordor without a Shire.

The march toward progress ultimately fails because it is dependent on an inherent goodness in man, an innocence which has been lost. To follow after progress for its own sake is to act “as if some mechanical rearrangement of social conditions could manufacture the paradise for which men long.” That lost innocence, however, has constantly proven a barrier to the endeavors of various communities to rebuild societies with the perfect rearrangement of social conditions. The loss of innocence is rejected as an impossibility, on the grounds that innocence never really existed (or, rather, that innocence exists only in some higher, more secularly enlightened sense). To prove it, the innocence of children is attacked. Whereas Christ calls us to be like children, modern gypsies take away childlikeness so that there is no child to be like.

Again, Esolen warns of the problems this worship of progress brings: Progress continues, passing us, our children, and our ability to keep time with it, as it pays homage to the god Change, which “destroys the identity of the subject and . . . diverts us from the final—the consummating—change to be brought about by God.” It is not life-giving change but life-destroying change. And the very act of being a pilgrim on the journey to our home with God is to become an enemy of progress, a blasphemer of Change. “The last thing a man who has given up on the journey wants to see is another man energetically on the way.”

In fact, the man who has given up would ar- gue that the man “energetically on his way” has obviously made an idol out of the past. He must necessarily approve of the oppression of minorities, women, the poor, and other groups. He must want to live in a world with slaves, no running water, a high infant mortality rate, and barefoot and pregnant wives who do not leave the kitchen. Yet, as Esolen argues, “the families of our grandparents are to be admired not because they were perfect but because they were very much alive and, potentially, on the way.” The man on the way is not making an idol of the past but admiring a generation that was alive and on the same path. In fact, this is true progress: “I want to return to something that was alive and thriving, because only a living thing can properly be said to progress.” For, he says, “the pilgrim understands the vow of stability; the restless wanderer hardly attains a place but he then wants to leave it.”

Esolen’s book contributes to a conversation which modern man desperately needs. He wrestles through questions we all ought to ask, but he does so by weaving in the voices of those who built the home in which we live: Homer, Socrates, Virgil, Cicero, Dante, Shake speare, Burke, Spenser, Chesterton, Tolkien, and others. He doesn’t tell their answers; he shows them. In calling us to respect the time and place that has shaped each of us, Esolen embodies the very virtue he is commending in Nostalgia

To satisfy the longing that is nostalgia, we must be pilgrims moving toward our heavenly home, yet all the while we must honor the earthly home that is its analogue. This is the path to progress, according to Esolen: “No pilgrim, I say, no progress.” Until we can abandon change for change’s sake and recognize the home we are ultimately longing for, we will continue to be homeless in a homeless world. That most important of the human soul’s needs, rootedness, can only be satisfied then. Then can we have a home; then can we be pilgrims; then can we make true progress.

Dr. Matthew Bianco is the COO for the CiRCE Institute, where he also serves as a head mentor in the CiRCE apprenticeship program. He has a PhD in humanities from Faulkner University’s Great Books Honors College and is the author of Letters to My Sons: A Humane Vision for Human Relationships.

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