Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burned,
As home his footsteps he hath turned,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
—Sir Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto Sixth
When I was a boy, I used often to go for long walks in the woods—four or five square miles wedged in between two county roads and our neighborhood—which were graced with the stubborn works of nature and pocked with the abandoned works of man. The latter included lines of tall telephone poles crossing a ridge from one end of town to the other and a series of poles, rotting and sinking, without any wires on them at all. There were “strippings,” gouges in the earth twenty or thirty feet deep where coal had been taken right off the surface, and “canyons,” mining holes fifty feet deep, filled with bright green water from leached copper compounds, I suppose. There were a bus chassis and a couple of cars left to sink into the ground in the middle of nowhere, a paved mining road that had not been touched in many years, leading nowhere, and a hundred-foot-high escarpment built up out of a hillside and heaps of coal. Here I would pick my way among the slabs like a goat, searching for fossils and stuffing my jacket pockets with the best of them. When I cracked open a slab sideways at an obvious fissure, I found that there was almost always a fossil of some sort within, often colored, too, with the odd rainbow tints that you find when somebody’s car leaks oil on blacktop.
If I were a geologist, I’d be able to tell why the ridge was as it was, with sudden heaps of stone such as granite, barely covered with enough topsoil to grow low-bush blueberries, wintergreen, lichens, and wild juniper; what made the sheer wall that in those days still had a name, Corey Cliff, now most likely forgotten; and what that strange red ash was that the miners left behind in one place the size of a football field, where nothing would grow but scrubby white birches. Possibly it was the residue of a fire, reducing the coal to cinders. One little stream drained a swampy area on its plateau and eventually found its way along the side of my next-door neighbor’s property, to be channeled into the ditch on our street. There were a couple of what we called “ponds,” shallow water atop poorly drained areas, with the little stumps of trees that had somehow managed to take root there but died and rotted after a couple of years. From the top of the ridge, you could see ten miles to the southwest and fifteen to the northeast, but to the southeast, the first streets and settlements of my town snuggled against a mountain side that rose up like a wall.
There was little that was picturesque about it—though we should keep in mind that to call something “picturesque” is to make light of it, to praise it faintly. The downtown was shabby, with more beer gardens than anything else, and a little half-rotting movie house that had been shut for many years, whose sign out front, “The Grand,” I remember fondly, I don’t know why. The parish church was grand and solemn, and to enter it was to wonder how it got to be there, what with the coal mines and their leavings all around. The field where I played many a baseball game didn’t have a grass infield or a fence, so we traced a line in the outfield with chalk, and any ball that went over the line on the ground was a double.
If you take things slowly—if you walk, or ride a bicycle—you might actually see the beauties of your home. I walked all the time, as did everybody else; the bus was only for the handful of boys and girls in my class who lived more than a mile from the school. Behind that rather plain baseball field, there was an abandoned trestle perched high above the river. If you wanted to go to the west end of town, the trestle would save you half an hour, but you had to be careful, because there was nothing between each of the big train-ties and the river far below. My collie did not enjoy crossing it and took her footing slowly, but she would cross it nonetheless. The trestle had a stark beauty about it.
All kinds of things do, if you bother to look, if you bother to care. Think of old lithograph postcards. Yes, sometimes they depict the Grand Canyon or Old Faithful. But there are many thousands of postcards of a little town hall, a school, a factory, a bank, an ordinary riverside, a bridge, a farm, a quarry—all that is human and that people are fond of, because the things are theirs in ways that surpass the power of words.
I think of a lovely folk song, “My Little Welsh Home,” whose singer longs for the small and unimposing homestead he looks upon, and the village, and the heart of the village that makes the past present again and beckons toward eternity:
I can see the quiet churchyard down below,
Where the mountain breezes wander to and fro;
And when God my soul shall keep,
It is there I want to sleep,
With those dear old folks that loved me long ago.
The land of Sir Walter Scott may now be blowing the bagpipes for the tourist shillings, but when he wrote the poem with which I began this chapter, Scotland was near to his heart for a forbidding beauty that only a native could really cherish:
Meet nurse for a poetic child!
Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,
Land of the mountain and the flood,
Land of my sires! what mortal hand
Can e’er untie the filial band,
That knits me to thy rugged strand!
Still, as I view each well-known scene,
Think what is now, and what hath been,
Seems as, to me, of all bereft,
Sole friends thy woods and streams were left;
And thus I love them better still,
Even in extremity of ill.
So I believe the heart of an old Inuit fisherman, his friends and kin having passed away, must beat more warmly when his boat rounds the cape and enters the bleak and treeless and beloved cove where his fathers and his grandfathers caulked their canoes and set out among the waters and the ice.
Let me not suggest, then, that man loves his place because it would make a nice postcard. He loves it because it is in him, and he is in it; it bears the impress of his fingers, and it touches the nerves of his soul. The place that has once been seen and worked and loved by man is no longer a mere intersection of longitude and latitude. The scrawl of my printing remains, forty-five years later, on the plywood walls of our old garage, as do my fingernail scratches in the trim around the bathroom door, where I measured, week after week, how tall I had grown. There are big rocks overgrown with weeds that still bear traces of my cousins’ names, painted on them fifty years ago.
I cannot belong in any place in quite the same way as I belong there. The experience of place transcends ideology. The conservative who understands what it is to conserve feels it no more powerfully than does the liberal who defines his worth not by autonomy but by loyalty, and there are many such liberals, better men than their philosophy might warrant.
I think here of the Italian author Ignazio Silone. He helped to found the Italian Communist Party but broke with what he would call “the god that failed” when he saw that the Stalinist reds were just as fascist as the Fascists he loathed. Silone returned from exile in Switzerland to the forbidding lands of Abruzzo, dry and mountainous, with little good soil available for the poor peasants. That was his land. He wrote about it in a trilogy of novels: Fontamara, Bread and Wine, and The Seed Beneath the Snow. We gather how difficult the life was by this description of a small watercourse outside of the imaginary village of Fontamara, “Bitter Fountain”:
Right where the road comes in to Fontamara there used to be a little spring of water that trickled forth from under some dripping stones. It made a kind of small pool. After a few feet the water then worked itself into the stony soil, dug a hole for itself, disappeared and came out again at the foot of the hill more abundantly, in the form of a stream. Then before starting for [Lake] Fucino the stream-bed made several curves. The farmers of Fontamara used to take water from it to irrigate the few fields they had down on the level land, which were the sole resource of the village. Every summer when the stream water was divided among the farmers there would be stormy quarrels. In years of dearth the quarrels would end up with knives.1
That was the land to which Silone returned, to bring justice for the people among whom he had grown up. Lake Fucino had already been drained, and the exposed land, much of it very fine, had been parceled out among people from the nearby city of Avezzano and not given to Silone’s brother peasants. But his love for them and their place was love, not devotion to an ideology.
We see that love in the defiant foreword he wrote to Fontamara, justifying his occasional use of the Abruzzese dialect instead of standard Italian, the latter of which he and his people learned in school “like Latin, French, or Esperanto.” “Though we may borrow the Italian language,” he says, “the manner of telling the story is our own. It is an art of Fontamara.”2 The words and the very form they take in the local jests and folk tales are “what we learned in boyhood, lying awake long nights beside the loom, following the rhythm of the loom.”3 It is emphatically not the same art that holds sway in the city. For Silone, it was an art like weaving, and it made for stories that were slow, deliberate accretions of small and beautiful details. “First one sees the stem of the rose,” he says, “then the cup of the rose, then the corolla of the rose; but from first to last everyone knows that it is to be a rose. That is why the things we make seem naive and unfinished to city people. But when have we ever tried to sell them to the city? . . . And likewise, have we ever asked city people to tell about themselves in our manner? We have never asked it of them.”4
Silone is not, let us note, fond of emigration from Italy to places that the peasants had never heard of before, though he opposed the Fascist policy of keeping the poor at home against their will. Several of his characters in Fontamara have emigrated and returned, among them the hero of the work, Berardo, who sold what little land he had to go abroad but did not succeed there. He works hard at odd jobs but without, in his mind, any warrant to marry the only woman he has ever loved. Another has found himself in New York City selling ice and soda water. The only word he learns—a word his boss hollers at him constantly—has become his new name: “Sciatap”—Shut Up. A third is called the Impresario, or in some translations, the Promoter. With his ethic of hard work and sharp dealing, he has the whole political apparatus of Avezzano in his pocket, along with most of the land of the former Lake Fucino. He will, with the approval of the government in Rome, divert the water from that lone straggling stream upon which the Fontamaresi have so long relied, to water his own lands, which of course are more productive. He is a money-maker, out of place where he has settled; he turns “place” into a profit-making concern.
The point is not whether people ought to emigrate or not. God commanded Abraham to leave forever his homeland in Ur of the Chaldees and travel with all his household to the land that God would show him, a land flowing with milk and honey. The Anglo-Saxon Seafarer in the poem to which we have appended that name feels strongly the yearning to set sail upon the sea alone, even though he knows it will bring him not milk and honey but heartache:
He has no thought for the harp or the world’s high bliss,
for the ring-giving or the glad joys of women,
or for anything else but the whelming ocean,
setting out on that lake, his longing ever.
The woods take on their blooms and the berries grow lovely,
the fields are adorned, and the world hastens onward;
and they all urge the eager heart
that it is time to go forth, time for the one who longs
to leave and sail far on the floodways.5
This man, unlike Silone, cannot go home, because home no longer survives. The depredations of man, a wolf to man, have destroyed it. So says another sad speaker, the Wanderer of the Anglo-Saxon poem by that name:
He who thus wisely considers this wall, the world,
and into our dark life casts his mind deep,
his heart old and keen, calls back from long ago
that wealth of slaughters, and utters these words:
“Where has the horse gone? Where has the hero? Where are the hall-joys?
Where the giver of gems? Where the gathering for feasts?
Alas, the bright goblet! Alas, the burnished mail!
Alas, the prince’s power! How that time has passed,
now dim under the night-helm, as if it never were!”6
What binds together the Wanderer, the Seafarer, Ignazio Silone returning to his poverty-stricken native land, and even Abraham, who has left behind the fields and the gods of Ur, is the persistent sense of place—the holiness of the place that human beings have made their own. Abraham the sojourner died and “was gathered to his people,” and Isaac and Ishmael his sons buried him beside his wife Sarah “in the field of Ephron” he had purchased east of Mamre, the same place where God in the persons of the three visitors came to him to eat dinner and reveal that Sarah would bear him a son in his old age (Genesis 18 and 25:8–10). But for the Impresario, the lands around Avezzano do not make up a place—only resources to be put to use. He is home-less. And that brings us to one of the great questions of our time. Scripture puts the sad experience of human futility in these words: “neither shall his place know him any more” (Job 7:10). But what happens to man himself when he no longer knows a place that is and has been his own?
What happens is that he is a modern man, rootless, a tourist but not a pilgrim, apt to leap over fences to find that the grass on the other side is yellow too.
When one of the scribes said to Jesus that he would follow him wherever he went, Jesus warned him about what it would mean: the foxes have their dens and the birds their nests, but the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head (Matthew 8:20). When the disciples went about Jerusalem with him, happily showing him the magnificent walls and buildings, he warned them that “there shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down” (Mark 13:2). When he looked out from the Mount of Olives upon the city below, he himself cried out, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” (Matthew 23:37) His sorrow was like that of Jeremiah, whose experience of persecution by the city he loved and whose witness of its destruction have long been used by the Church in its prayers on Good Friday: “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become like a widow! she that was great among the nations” (Lamentations 1:1).
Jesus had nowhere to lay his head, but he did not recommend to us that same nowhere as the aim of our hearts. He goes before us, he says, to prepare a place (John 14:2). Jeremiah did not rejoice at the gutting of his enemy, his beloved Jerusalem. Abraham was by his own description a stranger in a strange land, and his grandson Jacob, who ended his days in Egypt, would say of his own life, his pilgrimage as he called it, “Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been” (Genesis 47:9). Yet the greatest son of Jacob, the same Joseph who was raised to an authority in Egypt only nominally less than that of the Pharaoh himself, begged his sons that when they should leave Egypt to return to Canaan, they should take his bones with them and bury them there, as he had himself traveled from Egypt to bury in Canaan the bones of his father (Genesis 50:25). We have no abiding place upon earth. But that does not mean that we are to love no place at all.
But just such indifference to place seems to characterize the modern man. The ancient Greek felt the numinous in every stream. It was as if a sacred being, a nymph, were glancing upon him from behind the tree whose branches hung low above the trickling water. So Socrates rested one afternoon with the young Phaedrus under the plane tree on the road from Athens, along the stream Ilisus, and spoke of the transports of love. And though Christians were to clear away the mists of error from this holy reverence of the natural, it was, at its wisest, an appreciation of the will and the wisdom of God in all of creation, so that every place, rather than no place at all, could be the threshold to the divine. For without the divine, man loses the human also, reduced to mere stuff, a usable resource like iron or tin. Nor does it matter if he himself is the user.
A natural and therefore supra-natural reverence for place is at the heart of Flannery O’Connor’s story “A View of the Woods.” The scene is a plot of land in rural Georgia. A dirt road leads up to it. There is a ramshackle house on it, with a long stretch of grassy flat in front, then a lake, and beyond the lake, the woods. An old man owns the land, some six hundred acres. He lives in the house with his daughter, his son-in-law, whom he despises, and his grandchildren. The only one of those children with whom he has anything to do is the youngest, a ten-year-old girl who he believes takes after him. She is chubby, as he is, and self-willed, as he is, and rapacious, as he is—although he would call it shrewd self-interest, not rapacity. He insisted that she be named after him: she is called Mary Fortune. He believes that he and she agree in all things.
To humiliate his son-in-law and to show him who is the real boss on the property, the old man has been selling off parcels to be “improved” because he is all for “progress,” unlike the dirt-poor relations he has to live with. He takes a spectator’s enjoyment in that progress taking place before his eyes in the form of a ravenous backhoe seeking land to devour. So, for a time, does his favored granddaughter: “He sat on the bumper and Mary Fortune straddled the hood and they watched, sometimes for hours, while the machine systematically ate a square red hole in what had once been a cow pasture.” But why should a cow pasture matter? “Any fool,” says old Mr. Fortune, aptly and sardonically named, “that would let a cow pasture interfere with progress is not on my books.”7 Progress here is not the destruction of beauty. There is no great beauty. It is the destruction of a place.
All goes well for Mr. Fortune, if we can call “well” his alienation from family, place, and the poor scrub-beauty of the land he owns, until he decides, as an act of ultimate vengeance, to obliterate the plot of land dearest to the family he hates. He tells Mary Fortune his plan, believing that she will be happy to hear it:
“I’m going to sell the lot right in front of the house for a gas station,” he said. “Then we won’t have to go down the road to get the car filled up, just step out the front door.” The Fortune house was set back about two hundred feet from the road and it was this two hundred feet that he intended to sell. It was the part that his daughter airily called “the lawn,” thought it was nothing but a field of weeds.8
But the girl gets her back up. The place means something to her. She too calls it “the lawn.” She says it is where she and the other children play. She says it is where her daddy—a sullen man who takes out his anger against his father-in-law by whipping the back of Mary Fortune’s legs and ankles with his belt—grazes his calves. And if a gas station were built on it, she says, “we won’t be able to see the woods from the porch.” O’Connor lets us know what kind of gas station it will be. Old Mr. Fortune wants to sell it to a man named Tilman, who is looking to set up another establishment like the one he runs already, “a combination country store, filling station, scrap-metal dump, used-car lot and dance hall,” a “one-room wooden structure onto which he had added, behind, a long tin hall equipped for dancing,” which hall is “divided into two sections, Colored and White each with its private nickelodeon.”9 There’s progress for you.
The story will not end well for Mr. Fortune. But he merely represents a tacky and grubby version of the same contempt of place that characterizes our time. What Mr. Fortune wants to do to a field full of weeds—“the lawn” that is the long vestibule to the sacred woods beyond—modern architects, city planners, consolidators of schools, and international businesses have done to other once human buildings and places. Brutalist architecture, boasting of its great flat boxes without decoration, looking as if machines had learned to copulate and engender other machines, numbs the very sense of place. The mode became “international,” which meant that a building in Sydney, Australia, would look pretty much like another building in Chicago or Berlin or Novosibirsk, without relation to the history and the culture of the actual people who lived in its vicinity. It is as if a dead thing were to lodge itself in the midst of a breathing body, slowly spreading its death to everything contiguous.
I am looking at the modern city of Brasilia. It is a no-place. Its cathedral looks like a gigantic sea-anemone in stone, its great curving flanges and spikes quite naked of any relation to the human body or to human history or to Jesus Christ. It is a thing, not a place. It does not belong. I am looking at an aerial view of the city. I see one great hulking glass and steel rectangle after another, again without any relation to the nature roundabout, or to the people and their history. It is noise in stone, constant drumming noise.
We need not pick on Brazil. I am now looking at a photograph of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in Saint Louis. Whole neighborhoods were razed to put the complex up. They were razed for reasons that Mr. Fortune would understand. The old neighborhoods were like “the lawn”—a big stretch of weeds, yet human beings loved that lawn. The old neighborhoods were unsanitary, the buildings in need of repair; yet instead of cleaning them and repairing them, the architects and planners in Saint Louis did the easy and “progressive” thing. They destroyed them and put in their place an enormous stretch of concrete prisms, indistinguishable from one another, faceless and characterless and ugly as only an ideology can be. Such architecture, like bad air, makes men sick. Some thirty or so years later, Pruitt-Igoe was razed in turn, unfit for human habitation.
The well-known author and raconteur Father George Rutler lives in the rectory of Saint Michael’s Church on West Thirty-Fourth Street in Manhattan. It is the only human habitation remaining on that long thoroughfare, he says. All others have been torn down and replaced with gigantic glass-faced things. Saint Michael’s is graced within and without by the works of human hands: paintings, stained glass, plaster moldings, finials, balusters, arches, newels, hand-hewn and finished pews, the marble altar, the beautiful and quiet side chapel where I have seen local Hispanic women, not making the great salaries conferred upon the ants under glass, praying in silence before going to work in the morning. Naturally the archdiocese wants to sell the property, so I am not sure it will still exist by the time you finish this sentence.
All these criticisms have been made before. I claim no originality here. Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that modern planning does not reflect how people live their daily lives, and it is fascinating that a woman with no academic credentials in the field but with a great fund of reading and human observation could bravely and confidently stand alone against the massed “wisdom” of the architectural professionals and academics. She predicted what destructively modernizing plans would do to such cities as Detroit, but no one listened. Perhaps it took a woman to notice that it is children above all that bind a neighborhood together and turn a cartographical coordinate into a human place: children walking home from school, visiting the small grocer, the barber, the druggist, and the short-order cook at the diner, turning a vacant lot into a ball field and giving the grownups something to watch while providing them with a free security system. For children see everything.
In The Golden City, Henry Hope Read shows that modernist architects ruined place after place, motivated by their hatred of the classical style, which was sufficiently versatile to be adapted to a culture’s needs and to the building materials available. He places side by side, for our instruction and dismay, pictures of what used to be and what now is. There is the old Penn Station in New York City, for example, destroyed in 1963, alongside the structure that took its place. In the old interior, great shafts of light stream in through semicircular windows high above the hall. It looks like a basilica in honor of transportation: its exterior echoes the Parthenon, with graceful Greek columns and pediments, and a grand but human approach. What we have now looks like a roll of steel wool perched atop a prism. If you are so unfortunate as to look upward from the interior, you see girders pitched at odd angles, like the wings of predatory birds in descent, or a flat and low ceiling, as you make your insect way from terminal to terminal. Big, not grand; flashy, not warm with light.
“Where are you going?” I ask our progressive fellows, and never hear an answer. You do not ask a whirlwind about its destination.
We might ask Hilaire Belloc the same question. Belloc was a bulldog of a man, built like a fighter, powerful in shoulders and jaw, possessed of immense stamina and determination and relish for the earthy, ordinary things of life. He was a man of the conservative left, a phrase that now means nothing; he wanted to lead England and Europe forward to the mirth and faith of the Middle Ages. (His female counterpart is that stout battle-ax of Norway, Sigrid Undset, who likewise saw Europe’s only hope in what she called a Return to the Future.) Belloc once walked from Calais to Rome, jabbering in dialect with the natives, eating heartily what he could get at farms and public houses, sketching what he saw and writing down the conversations. He walked from New York to San Francisco to propose marriage to the woman who would be his wife. Note that he did not ride a train from one place to another, skipping all the places in between.
Such a man, an inveterate traveler, was also an ever-youthful lover of his home and the homes of others. He was not a tourist. “There is a valley in South England remote from ambition and from fear,” he writes in “The Mowing of a Field,” and to this valley he returned as a man to see again the fields and the downs of his youth. It did not disappoint:
The many things that I recovered as I came up the countryside were not less charming than when a distant memory has enshrined them, but much more. Whatever veil is thrown by a longing recollection had not intensified nor even made more mysterious the beauty of that happy ground; not in my very dreams of morning had I, in exile, seen it more beloved or more rare. Much also that I had forgotten now returned to me as I approached—a group of elms, a little turn of the parson’s wall, a small paddock beyond the graveyard close, cherished by one man, with a low wall of very old stone guarding it all round. And all these things fulfilled and amplified my delight, till even the good vision of the place, which I had kept so many years, left me and was replaced by its better reality. “Here,” I said to myself, “is a symbol of what some say is reserved for the soul: pleasure of a kind which cannot be imagined save in a moment when at last it is attained.”10
Belloc did not come there to enjoy an aesthetic experience. He came to mow a field, so he launches into a discussion of when it’s best to make hay and how best to sharpen and swing the scythe. He remembers what his father taught him, his arms and his legs recover the art of it, and he sweeps forward, “cutting lane after lane through the grass, and bringing out its most secret essences.” He is not “the bad or young or untaught mower without tradition, the mower Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past,” who leaves heaps of grass uncut, gets his blade stuck in the ground, and twists the scythe and loosens the handle till the tool is dull or broken. It is with mowing, he says, as with “playing the fiddle,” and “dozens of other things, but of nothing more than of believing.”11
The progressive believes that things grow old and outworn, to be discarded. Hence the strangely tubercular wheeze of “youth movements” detached from the old. Pert seedlings without deep roots, they soon wither. “It’s 2018,” tweeted a female reporter in response to a college football player who expressed dismay that she was in the locker room while he was disrobing. She might as well have declared that it was Monday, or a minute before midnight. What difference? But if yesterday’s news is yesterday’s news, to line a bird cage or wrap fish withal, then my own youth is yesterday also, leaving me with nothing to bind my old self and my young self together. I am temporal detritus.
But when Belloc thinks from afar about the place where he grew up in his poem “The South Country,” past and present and future are real to him still:
I will gather and carefully make my friends
Of the men of the Sussex Weald,
They watch the stars from the silent folds,
They stiffly plough the field.
By them and the God of the South Country
My poor soul shall be healed.
If I ever become a rich man,
Or if ever I grow to be old,
I will build a house with a deep thatch
To shelter me from the cold,
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex told.
I will hold my house in the high wood
Within a walk of the sea,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Shall sit and drink with me.
Secular man may want a home because he is human, and he may do fine work in his local Historical Society preserving old homes for their beauty. People are rarely as bad as their worst ideas, and the rich can afford to insulate themselves from the effects of their bad ideas. But a mere belief in “the future” is a pallid and frail mimic of that longing for an eternal home. It does not lay the foundation. It does not build the spire. Looking upon an exhausted Europe, Belloc describes in “A Remaining Christmas” how the Christmas season is observed and celebrated in his own beloved house, where the faith has taken root. “Man has a body as well as a soul,” he writes, thinking of the things we do and where we do them, “and the whole of man, soul and body, is nourished sanely by a multiplicity of observed traditional things,” especially in the face of death and the lesser features of mortality, such as weariness, forgetfulness, sickness, and disappointment. In that house where the birth of the Lord was kept with festivity and a hundred beloved habits great and small, wayfaring man can find the home that prepares him for home:
[I]ts Christmas binds it to its own past and promises its future, making the house an undying thing of which those subject to mortality within it are members, sharing in its continuous survival.
It is not wonderful that verses should be written of such a house. Many verses have been so written, commemorating and praising this house. The last verse written of it I may quote here by way of ending:
Stand thou for ever among human Houses,
House of the Resurrection, House of Birth;
House of the rooted hearts and long carouses,
Stand, and be famous over all the earth.
Belloc understood that man would lose his sense of place along with his cultural memory itself. We are not disembodied spirits. Those things seem to stand and fall together. To that dreadful oblivion, with closer attention, we now turn.