A Home in the World

Recently, I read an article on the life of Walter Benjamin, a German intellectual who fled Germany for France and was interned in a concentration camp for “boches,” along with Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann and others. They were subsequently released and many fled Europe. But Benjamin refused to consider that he would never return to Paris, his beloved adopted city. In 1940 Hitler’s army entered Paris and the Franco-German Armistice was signed. One of the articles required the French government to “surrender on demand” anyone the Third Reich wanted extradited to Germany.  Benjamin and others attempted to flee France towards Spain by crossing the Pyrenees. The elder Benjamin, often out of breath and tiring, made it to the Spanish border with other exiles only to be told that their transit visas which would have taken them from Spain to neutral Portugal, had been canceled. They would be escorted back to France, which would mean certain extradition to Germany. Rather than live in a world where there was no hope for him to return to Paris, where he would experience further humiliation and loss, he swallowed some of the morphine tablets he brought with him and died the following morning. Had he and the other refugees attempted to cross the border one day earlier or one day later- the embargo on transit visas lasted only one day- they would have crossed safely.

 

As I read the article, I came across this paragraph:

 

“…the intellectual advantage of not being at home in the world [were] offset by the subterfuge and pretence to which the pariah must have recourse…for behind the compliant and optimistic façade of the grateful migrant is a constant struggle with despair of themselves- since deep down they do not believe that their misfortune is a result of political events outside their control, but the result of some mysterious shortcoming in themselves, a defect in their personalities, an inability to maintain the social appearances to which they have so long been accustomed...[I] have never accepted the idea that the present is simply a site of eternal return for all that has gone before, or that the possibility of renewal lies [only] in meditating on a dismembered past.”  Michael D. Jackson

 

I suppose this paragraph was stunning to me because of the image it created “of not being at home in the world.” All of us have experienced this at one time or another; those moments when our personalities or our perceptions seem so unique that we can find no place for them to “fit.” We walk around in the world as if separated from our very selves.  Our actions and thoughts seem so unlike all else we see about us that even we feel as if we watch them apart; moments in which we experience ourselves as so misunderstood that we want to shout with Bob Dylan’s Thin Man, “Oh my God, am I here all alone?”

 

I have been known to defy others’ expectations of me and know the somewhat perverse pleasure it brings; the response it evokes. "Yeah, I study religion, but not for the reason you think!"  Sometimes I drink, sometimes I cuss. I am not bound by society’s repressive rules regarding sexuality. I dress like a freak in my basement clothes and cowboy boots and people stare. I got my first tattoo at an age when most women are beginning to settle cozily into the ordinary. I am irreverent and gleefully boisterous and laugh (and sing) out loud in public. I shock in the classroom just to get a response, to shake up, to stir something in young minds often already numbed by powerful cultural shaping. And sometimes because of that, they come to me in their moments of “not being at home in the world.” Perhaps they recognize in me the pariah in themselves. Or perhaps simply a place where they know they will be embraced in the midst of their defiant difference.

 

There are both poignant and painful moments when alienation seems to characterize our existence and yet, the longing is to belong, not by conforming to societal expectations but despite our nonconformity; and perhaps even because of it. The longing to belong is not of the type that insists that everyone “likes me,” nor is it even a need for a particular kind of acceptance or (heaven forbid), approval. It is rather, and simply, the human need for recognition of self and of our expression of that self. For many the challenge and the task is to walk the tension wire that exists between a life lived as one of the defiantly different and/or the life of the pariah. Most often what is sought is not an entire “home,” but simply a place in the heart of another person where it is safe simply to be.

 

The heart of my best friend has provided that place and has been in my life, the single most important balancing pole on the wire that exists between accepting myself as a unique character and despairing of myself as the pariah. She is always the sanctuary to which I go where I know I will not be alone; where I always belong. There is no one on this planet who knows me as well, or loves me as well as she. She knows my secrets and my outrageous acts. She knows me better than I know myself. She knows my goodness and my cruelty; my vice and my virtue; my sins and my acts of heroism. And she loves me both in spite of them and because of them. She has been my champion and the one who will not allow me to get away with excuses or denials or self-destruction. She has never accepted for me “the idea that the present is simply a site of eternal return for all that has gone before, or that the possibility of renewal lies [only] in meditating on a dismembered past.”  We have walked with each other and held each other’s hand through the most painful moments of our lives, and the most joyous. We have feared for each other and rejoiced for each other. We have laughed and cried until the tears come no more. We have crossed the ocean and the Seine together; we have crossed the passages of womanhood together. And we have created for each other a place in the heart of another person that is as a home; a place where it is safe simply to be.