Recently in The Anatomy of Home: A mini-series Category

...call it what you like, but spirit of place is a great reality.

     D. H. Lawrence
     Studies in Classic American Literature

Four years ago, I walked some fourteen hundred miles through most of southern England with a pack on my back. Sometimes I stayed at inns or bed and breakfasts, sometimes I pitched a tent. On days I camped, I noticed something curious: I would sometimes walk hours longer than I'd planned, despite fatigue and advancing darkness, until I found a spot that was "right." Was I being picky? I don't think so. And I wasn't looking for a spot that was scenic, or even one that felt particularly safe (one of my favorites was a narrow rock ledge a hundred feet above the Atlantic): I was looking for the place where I belonged, even if just for a night--a place I liked, but that also liked me, a marriage of person and place.

Each of us has stumbled upon places that possessed an almost magical sense of rightness--a condition that we are hard-pressed to describe solely by means of the material elements of which they are composed. There is a phrase in Latin which captures this condition: genius loci. In Classical times, the word "genius" was synonymous with "spirit": it was understood that distinct spirits or demi-gods inhabited special places--gods one was at pains to please and with whom it was unwise to trifle. Indigenous peoples, like Native Americans, have a similar belief system.

We, however--by which I mean Americans of European descent--do not. We are products of the Age of Reason. When René Descartes wrote, "I think, therefore I am" in 1637, he ushered in an era that worshipped the intellect and mistrusted the senses. America's Founders were men of their Age; they had a passion for rational discourse and a devotion to individual freedom. When they declared our independence they proclaimed the revolutionary notion that "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: were our "inalienable rights." But wait--in the first draft, the phrase was "life, liberty, and property." I suspect Jefferson changed it to "happiness" to make it more palatable. Nonetheless, over time, the pursuit of happiness/property in America has not just ignored genius loci but, sadly, has gradually eroded our sense of community--not just community with others, but communion with the inherent value, or spirit, of the natural world we inhabit. If today we mourn the loss of places that have special meaning, then we must acknowledge that both the loss and the alienation that comes from it are self-inflicted.

This is the seventh and last in a series of columns I'm calling, "The Anatomy of Home." In earlier columns we've looked at Place, Shape, Beauty, Comfort, Delight, and Dwelling as components of "home." This column explores the notion of Spirit.

Man must forever learn to dwell
Martin Heidegger

 Martin Heidegger, the brilliant, if often impenetrable and historically controversial twentieth-century German philosopher (he was equivocal about Nazism) was a man possessed by the question of what it means to be in a place, to truly dwell in it.

What's that got to do with home? Almost everything. Bear with me for a moment.

Words have histories that are often revealing. The words "being" and "dwelling," for example, have the same Germanic linguistic root: the word buan. So to say in German, "Ich bin," or, "I am" also means, "I dwell." What's more, the Old Saxon word wuon, which is related to buan, adds a very important, if subtle additional meaning: that of "sparing" or "preserving"--that is, being in an actively caretaking relationship with the place where you live.

When we use the word "home" in casual conversation, as in, "I'm going home," we're generally talking about the house or apartment we live in, our dwelling. But "dwelling" is both and noun and verb, a thing and an action. When we say we feel "at home" someplace, we don't just mean the four walls of the structure to which we return at night. No, there's more to it than that. The place where we feel "at home," is a place to which we attach a certain affection and for which we have a feeling of protectiveness. It not only protects us, as a refuge, but brings out the protectiveness in us, a sense of caretaking. It's a place we care about and take care of. This, of course, is why God made vacuum cleaners: so we could take care of our homes.

But seriously: a house is inert; a home is alive with, well...living.

This is the sixth in a series of columns I'm calling, "The Anatomy of Home." In earlier columns we've looked at Place, Shape, Beauty, Comfort, and Delight as components of "home." This column explores the notion of Dwelling.

    Rarely, rarely comest thou.
    Spirit of Delight

    Percy Bysshe Shelley

I made my first visit to Port Orchard, Washington the other day. I rather wish I hadn't. Port Orchard, on the mainland not far from the island where I live, is, in a sense, the quintessential American small town: its approaches are lined with shopping strips, fast food joints, and big box superstores, but its core is dying. You know a community is struggling when second hand shops pretending to be antiques stores outnumber the kind of retailers that residents actually need: a pharmacy, a grocery store, a dry cleaners, a variety shop.

I don't think I'm alone when I say that I find such places depressing. But why do I feel that way? What makes some places dispiriting and others simply delightful?

This is the fifth in a series of columns I'm calling, "The Anatomy of Home." In earlier columns we've looked at Place, Shape, Beauty, and Comfort as components of "home." Today we explore Delight.

    Rarely, rarely comest thou.
    Spirit of Delight

    Percy Bysshe Shelley

I made my first visit to Port Orchard, Washington the other day. I rather wish I hadn't. Port Orchard, on the mainland not far from the island where I live, is, in a sense, the quintessential American small town: its approaches are lined with shopping strips, fast food joints, and big box superstores, but its core is dying. You know a community is struggling when second hand shops pretending to be antiques stores outnumber the kind of retailers that residents actually need: a pharmacy, a grocery store, a dry cleaners, a variety shop.

I don't think I'm alone when I say that I find such places depressing. But why do I feel that way? What makes some places dispiriting and others simply delightful?

This is the fifth in a series of columns I'm calling, "The Anatomy of Home." In earlier columns we've looked at Place, Shape, Beauty, and Comfort as components of "home." Today we explore Delight.

"I can't talk about it with dry eyes."

Some years ago, I'd been interviewing Grant Hildebrand, emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Washington and a renowned expert on what creates pleasure in the built landscape around us. We'd just discovered we were both in love with a very small town in England, called Burford. It's a nearly linear village of largely medieval limestone dwellings and shops running cheek-by-jowl down both sides of a steep street that ends at a one-lane, hump-backed stone bridge over the pretty little river Windrush. I doubt anyone can stand at the top of that village, looking down this ancient street, and not be moved by its nearly heartbreaking charm, peace, and comfort. You want to move in immediately. I didn't find Hildebrand's emotional response the least bit theatrical, because I have the very same reaction every time I visit Burford.

Why is that? Why do some places grab us by the throat, the way a good detective mystery does right from the first paragraph, so we can't let go? What is it about them that makes us feel so comfortable?

This is the fourth in a series of columns I'm calling, "The Anatomy of Home." In earlier columns we've looked at Place, Shape, and Beauty. Today we explore Comfort.

Lord Kenneth Clark, one of the twentieth century's greatest art historians and critics, once wrote: "There is perhaps nothing else by which people of all kinds are united than by their pleasure in a good view." It's a sweet notion, but it's actually a lot of hooey, to put it politely.
 If this were even remotely the case, why would people describe themselves, variously and often passionately, as "mountain people," or "desert people," or "ocean people," or "island people?" The plain fact is that places speak to us differently, as if each of us was, in some mysterious way, pre-programmed to understand their particular language--and not understand others.

For example, I grew up in a neighborhood near the Bronx that no one could call "beautiful." It was deteriorating at a speed and with an inevitability that were more like terminal cancer than dry rot. But from our little apartment I had a panoramic view of the majestic Hudson River and, on the opposite shore, the forested basaltic cliffs of the Palisades. And ever since then, my sense of natural beauty has required expanses of water and greenery. In the same way, other people need--the same urgent way they need food or water or oxygen--the big sky of the Northern Plains, or the astringent, juniper-perfumed air of the Southwest desert, or the insistent verticality of the Rockies. So--the unquestionable erudition of Lord Clark notwithstanding--the only really certain thing we can say about the beauty of places is that it is, indeed, "in the eye of the beholder."

This is the third in a series I'm calling "The Anatomy of Home." The first two columns explored "Place" and "Shape." This one examines "Beauty."

The great English landscape painter, John Constable, once said, "We see nothing until we truly understand it."  That's a pretty surprising thing for an artist to say; you'd think he'd be focused on the visual. What Constable meant was that unless you understand the story behind the landscape, you don't really know what you're seeing--even in a place that seems as easy to "see" as the place you call home. Looks deceive.

This is the second in a series of columns exploring what seem to me to be the component parts of what we might call, "The Anatomy of Home." Today, we consider Shape--the way the landscape influences our experience of home.

One of the things that has always fascinated me is that what feels like home to one person can seem like hell to someone else--which is to say that we each respond differently, intellectually and emotionally, to a given place. Some of us are lucky enough to discover a place that feels like home; others  are forever in search of it. I was one of the former before I found the island in Puget Sound where I now live.

When you ask someone what it means to feel at home someplace, they'll say something vague like, "It's where you feel comfortable." That's not good enough for me. I want to know what the bits and pieces of experience are which, when taken together, give us a sense of belonging to one particular place and not another.