Earlier in this book I presented a frightening image—the widening gyre in Yeats’ poem, a dizzying spiral out of control (p. 31). I end here with a spiral that has all the comforts of home: This poet imagines an animal—a mollusk—growing in its “ship of pearl” and finding itself at home in each larger chamber that it builds. The image is startling because it is absurd: Animals do not really have homes, and what we mean by “home” is tied to the way human beings live. We tend to be frightened of homeless people, out of an ancient fear that without homes people may behave like animals. As adults, we are amused by children’s stories that give homes to animals, along with most of the fixings of human life, but we know better. A solitary beast like a mollusk cannot do the sorts of things we do to make a shelter into a home.
Countless small acts of ceremony make a shelter into a home—ceremony at mealtime, at day’s end or beginning, at games or entertainments, often shared silently among those for whom the place is home. You do not make a home by yourself. If you live alone, and are at home, you are linked to ancestors or to absent children by things you do or by relics that you honor. Home holds reminders of the rise and fall of families—a picture, an old toy, great-grandmother’s table—but whatever it contains a home is the center for a web of respect across generations. The ceremony that makes a home is an expression of reverence; ceremony that does this cannot be an empty routine, and, for reasons we will see shortly, it cannot be rigid and unchanging.
A shellfish hangs no pictures on its walls, and we cannot imagine a mollusk standing in reverent awe of the wholeness that families seek when they make a home. Still, the image of the nautilus is powerful. The chambers grow smoothly, each out of the smaller one that is left behind, and the whole history of the animal is carried in the shining spiral of its home. The things we do to make a home out of a shelter may form a linked succession as we outgrow our old quarters and stretch into new ones. In this image, there is nothing confining about home; it is not a prison or a cage. The poet says nothing to imply that a home could hold back its resident until his last line, when the animal has left its “outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea” and moved beyond the physical plane altogether. Home is a place to expand, or to expand in, and to expand smoothly, not in the violent manner of more common images, such as repotting a plant.
Think what happens to plants that are root-bound. They will break through barriers in the ground unless they are clipped and trimmed—or else plucked up and transplanted to a larger space or a wider flowerpot. This more brutal image is the one we use in daily speech—we say we are uprooted (“deracinated”) when we move on in the hope of finding space in which to expand. The image of uprooting is painful. We are not plants, and we do not need roots.
We need reverence, and indeed we know reverence first hand wherever we are truly at home—but the knowledge is rarely conscious. Reverence at home is so familiar to us that we are hardly aware that this is what it is, and we may have to visit homes of a different culture before we recognize that the places where family pictures hang, or where grandmother’s unused teacups gather dust, are shrines.
To enlarge a shelter you push back walls or add rooms, but this is not what it is to expand a home. We have no trouble spreading our accumulated junk or the contents of our shrines into larger quarters, and we can easily conduct old ceremonies in new places. The challenge to a home comes when someone leaves, when someone new arrives, or when someone returns—especially when someone returns from a transforming experience. A baby is born; children grow up and leave; a soldier comes home shattered from war; children drift back from college with new tastes and ideas; one spouse is transformed by a moment of epiphany—whatever it is, the change throws the home off balance. The women of Gologorsky’s book (The Things We Do To Make It Home) never succeed in making homes for their men who have come home from war, morally devastated by what they have seen and done.
At such times we speak of the need to reestablish routines, but mere routine is hollow. The repetition of routines by itself does not bring home out of chaos. It reminds us, instead, of what we have lost. If routine is all there is at the place that used to be home, that place has come to be a trap for those who are lodging there—a trap that is either as vacuous as a prison cell or tortured with bad memories. We turn our backs on it and on the people who are there. Home breaks.
The house of empty rituals is not a home. It is not a home because it is a house that has lost reverence. When ceremony becomes rigid, when it declines into routine, it has lost its power to express reverence. Home is the clearest illustration of my thesis that reverence cannot be a conservative virtue. Making a place home, through all the changes that strike a family, is a dynamic process: adjusting ceremonies and creating them, breathing reverence into them, finding new ways to show respect as old ways lose meaning or become less appropriate. If you wish to be at home with your father, you will change toward each other as you age. When you are grown up, you are not at home in a place where you must address your father in exactly the terms you used as a child.
Reverence gives us the power to make changes toward each other, changes in attitude and ceremony that allow us to go on being at home with new or changing people, or in the absence of loved ones. Reverence allows us to escape from dying rituals without losing direction—smoothly, continuously, as the nautilus blends chamber against chamber in brilliant mother of pearl.
The author lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, their two daughters, two dogs, and two cats.
—Possible book-jacket blurb
A blurb about the author’s address is supposed to reassure a casual shopper: This writer is all right, he is one of us, a domesticated man with all the virtues that support the settled life. Woe to the homeless, the unsettled, the wanderer, or the one whose sexual preferences are not welcome in the suburbs. Such writers are dangerous, and their lives are best omitted from the jackets of books for the general market. Domesticity is a sign of virtue, particularly of reverence, which tells you to know your place as a human being. And where is the place of a human being, if not at home? Home is the place to look toward, to dream of. Home is the place to be sick for. It is the focus of return and of all the connections we must remember in order to be fully human—to remember who our parents are, our children, our wives or husbands.
Home is not always comforting. It is the place where failures of reverence are most devastating. Secret things happen at home, things cloaked in reverent silence if they are good—like lovemaking—or in fearful silence if they are bad. True, we admire domesticity, but we also applaud anyone with the courage to leave a home that has become a trap. We are of two minds about home, whether it is good or bad. Must we be ambivalent about reverence as well? We know that reverence, like any virtue, can be abused and exploited, as when a tyrannical parent takes advantage of respectful children. Long after childhood, dreams of home may be uneasy. Home may have been dreary and stultifying. It may even have been a locked-in world of violence against powerless women and children.
The cruelty of bad homes does not make reverence any less a virtue. The bad home is not a reverent one. I would argue that it is not a home at all, just as a bad leader is not really a leader. Both “leader” and “home” are normative words when we reserve them for good cases, as we often do. True homes are reverent, and their reverence restrains the exercise of power. In ancient Greece, the people who have the most power and the most freedom to leave home are men. But reverence keeps powerful men mindful of their homes, of the respect they owe to others in the home, and of gaps in their own good judgment. Reverence holds men back from enjoying the liberty of wild animals. But reverence is easy to forget. Leaving home enables men to forget their humanity. Homer pictures the Greeks at Troy living casually on the beach with stolen women. At best, they are camping there like people on holiday, but in battle they are like animals, a point Homer makes in metaphor after metaphor. But he shows the Trojans in warmer images, frequently in the embrace of family.
So much for men. What does reverence require of women in regard to home? Reverence gives to those who are oppressed the promise that there are powers greater than human ones, and that there are limits that no one should be permitted to overstep, no matter how big or strong or deep-voiced the oppressor may be. Reverence cannot always look to a home address. No virtue could be so simple as to ask you always to respect your home. Courage sometimes calls troops to advance, at other times to retreat, and still other times not to enlist at all. What is courageous is not always the same thing. So it is with reverence; what you call home may or may not call for respect. The ancient Greeks held that home is where a woman should stay—for the most part. But even the earliest poets recognize the pain of being homebound, and later poets give it full voice. Euripides’ Chorus in the Bacchae celebrates the release of women from the home, when they revel in the mountains in honor of Dionysus, each visualizing herself as a fawn that has escaped the hunt:
To dance the long night!
Shall I ever set my white foot
So, to worship Bacchus?
Toss my neck to the dewy skies
As a young fawn frisks
In green delight of pasture?
She has run away now from a fearful
Hunt, away from watchful eyes,
Above tight-woven nets—
While the dogleader cheers
The running of his hounds.
She strains, she races, whirls and prances
On meadows by rivers, delighting
In absence of men
And under shadow-tresses
The tender shoots of the wildwood.
(863–77)
Away from home, in the mountains, there is freedom, joy, and the presence of Dionysus. Here is a paradox: If reverence calls us to know our places, then how can reverence for Dionysus call women out of their homes? The answer is obvious: Home is not—or at least not always—the place to be, and reverence does not simply bow to a traditional assignment of roles. The call to adventure away from home is not necessarily a call to abandon reverence. There need be no contest between reverence and adventure.
There is a contest, however, between adventure and reverence in romantic poetry and romantic fiction, but it is a strange contest, not really between equals, and even the strongest partisans of adventure cannot manage to support it wholeheartedly. The most famous spokesman for adventure in modern literature is Tennyson’s Ulysses, and the ancient paragon of reverence is the hero of Homer’s Odyssey—two versions of the same hero, representing opposite ideas about the place of reverence in a well-lived human life. Each hero has a foil. Ulysses’ foil is his son Telemachus; Odysseus’ foil is the high king, Agamemnon.
In “Ulysses,” Tennyson’s hero turns away from the virtues of home life. After becoming a name “for always roaming with a hungry heart,” Ulysses has come through his many adventures to Ithaca; he is home again with his wife, his grown son, and his job as king. But he is not happy. He “cannot rest from travel”; he will soon be off to sea again, leaving the management of Ithaca to his son, Telemachus:
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
Telemachus is domesticated, and Ulysses has no use for the boy’s virtues in his own life. He recognizes their value for the life his son is living, but he cannot wait to put broad waters between him and those virtues forever. Readers are charmed by Ulysses’ restless energy; they buy posters with quotations from the heroic verses Tennyson writes for his home-hating Ulysses, and they hang them—where else?—in their homes.
If Tennyson’s picture is right, there are two kinds of virtue—one for daredevil Ulysses, and one for his stay-at-home son. Ulysses is pulled away from home by his restless virtues, “beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars”; Telemachus is governed by his quieter virtues, mainly reverence, to keep up a humdrum life at home. If there really are these two kinds of virtue, and if reverence belongs to the class of virtues that lead only homeward, then Ulysses is right, and heroes should shake the dust of their homes from their heels. In doing so, they must put reverence behind them. And then reverence would not be a virtue for all seasons, but only for cycles of return to the home.
Tennyson has actually turned the old story backwards. In ancient myth it is Achilles who chooses the glory of battle over a safe homecoming, and it is Ulysses (Odysseus) who prizes home above all, while his son dares a long journey to find his lost father. Above all, Tennyson’s Ulysses belongs to a different moral universe from Homer’s. Unlike Homer’s characters, this Ulysses makes a stark choice between two systems of value. “He works his work, I mine,” says Tennyson’s Ulysses. Different work, he must suppose, calls for different virtues—so different, it seems, as to be incommensurable.
Tennyson’s picture must be wrong. If there are any cardinal virtues, they are not seasonal or relative to a job at hand. Cardinal virtues are needed for human life itself, no matter what conditions obtain. Courage? No doubt Ulysses will need courage on his voyage, but so will Telemachus on the home front when times are hard and he is tempted to cut and run from trouble or to shirk from standing up for what is right. Why should reverence be any more dispensable than courage? Won’t Ulysses need reverence on his voyage? Doesn’t every leader need reverence? Telemachus and Ulysses will need each other’s strengths. It is a pity that they must separate.
The picture is very wrong. Only a great poet could have made it as attractive as it is in this gripping poem. True, battle-scarred veterans never do find their homes to be as they left them, but only the mentally ill push off afterwards with no destination. The dog dies, the children move away, but a veteran rekindles a hearth fire somewhere, renewing marriage or making a new one. Home itself is no more static than the fire that is its symbol. Tennyson is right about the anger and alienation of the soldier who comes home from the war, but he is wrong about where that anger leads. War cures old soldiers quickly of hunger for adventure.
In any case, Ulysses does not simply choose to follow adventure in this poem. At one level beneath the surface of the verse, we see that Ulysses is flirting with death and casting it in his mind as adventure. This is a very young man’s poem, one of many that Tennyson wrote in mourning soon after the death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam, and it reflects a young man’s semi-conscious dream of standing on the shore between life and death. His Ulysses has nowhere to go. Life has lost meaning for him. Why else would he talk of setting out at day’s end, as Tennyson has him?
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans around with many voices.
Ancient sailors rarely put to sea when the long day waned; they preferred to sail in sight of the coast. But when they ventured into the open sea they preferred to sail at night because they depended on stars for navigation. In this poem, however, navigation is not at issue: The long day is over for Ulysses; he has nothing to do and no reason to set course for any particular destination. From here on he will not need courage or reverence or any other virtue. Virtues are for the living, for living well. But there is only dying ahead of Ulysses.
Among poets writing in English, Tennyson is our greatest witness to depression, but Homer knows more about war and the love of home that lingers in a warrior’s mind. Homer understands that in wartime reverence pulls two ways, both homeward and away. War is painful. War does not allow its human playthings to make their own choices between glorious death and happy homecomings. A warrior’s path is split by war into a tragic tension for which there is no healing. Not even death will bring peace to the warrior’s soul; not even victory can promise him the homecoming that is his cherished dream. A sword, flaming in the warrior’s own mind, stands between him and the home he left when he went to war. He will never be the same, and neither will his home. The poet can give him everlasting fame, but his sweet home, had he never left it, could have given him a human life.
In “Ulysses” Tennyson writes a paean to adventure at the expense of reverence, but the paean is set against a counterpoint of grief expressed in a great weight of imagery and funereal stateliness of rhythm—so much so that the prevailing sentiment of the poem emerges as an unquiet acceptance of death. Tennyson’s enthusiasm for adventure is equivocal. We find no such complexity, however, in the poet from whom Tennyson took his character. Homer would never side with adventure against home, and he would never side with anything against reverence.
Agamemnon is the worst case of irreverence in Homer’s poems and in the myths that came down through other sources about the war. This is not surprising, because Agamemnon is the supreme commander of the Greek forces at Troy. Irreverence is most likely to occur among people who have authority, for reasons we have seen, and among those to whom it does the most damage and is therefore easiest to identify. Agamemnon’s irreverence is due to his love of honor (philotimia), which leads him into one violation of reverence after another. He is so eager to leave his home and begin the war that he is willing to summon his own daughter to be sacrificed for a fair wind to Troy. During the war he continues to be driven into irreverence by his passion for honor.
Most of Homer’s men love their homes, but some love honor more. Love of honor pulls hard against reverence, but love of honor is not a virtue. Sometimes, love of honor works like a virtue to keep a hero on the path to glory, fighting bravely and avoiding shameful retreat. But sometimes love of honor leads to useless sacrifice, as in the death of Hector, who was ashamed to take cover behind the walls of Troy. And sometimes love of honor works like a vice. It can be destructive of community, of leadership, and of life itself.
Later Greek poets saw the point clearly. Here is a mother, Jocasta, speaking to her son:
Why do you follow the worst of deities my son—
Love of honor? Don’t do it; she is an unjust god.
Many happy homes and cities have had her in—
And out—to the destruction of those who pursue her.
(Euripides, Phoenician Women, 531–34)
The young man will not give up honor; he will follow it where it leads, to civil war, which is a calamity for his people, and literally to killing, and being killed by, his own brother. That is irreverence. Like the poets, Thucydides sees the love of honor as a cause of civil war, and of this the chief moral symptom is a loss of reverence. The poet and the historian are writing during the great age of the sophists, when many thinkers have been questioning the heroic values of their ancestors. At one point in my study of these themes, I believed that Euripides and Thucydides are revolutionaries in rejecting the love of honor. But, no, Homer has been there before them. Reverence overrides all other values for Greek writers before Plato—starting with Homer.
Agamemnon, as leader of the Greek army, ought to be reverent. He ought to exercise the virtues of leadership, but he is the man who angers Apollo by holding prisoner the daughter of his priest, and he is the one who is so jealous of his honor that when he gives the young woman back to her father, he takes another from Achilles, driving a bolt of anger through the forces under his command. We know that Agamemnon cannot win the war without Achilles’ help, but Agamemnon is confident:
Go ahead and desert, if that’s what you want!
I’m not going to beg you to stay. There are plenty of others
Who will honor me, not least of all Zeus the Counselor.
(Iliad 1.173–75 [Lombardo 1.183–85])
And so confident is he of his special relationship with the god (a sure sign of irreverence) that he is willing to use his power in the most brutal way:
I’m coming to your hut and taking Briseis,
Your own beautiful prize, so that you will see just how much
Stronger I am than you, and the next person will wince
At the thought of opposing me as an equal.
(1.184–87 [Lombardo 1.194–97])
This is not leadership. Because of his own love of honor, Agamemnon has failed to honor the best Greek of them all. Now we see how the love of honor vitiates reverence: Reverent leaders respect those who serve under them, but they cannot do that if they are too jealous of their own honor.
Achilles, too, is jealous of his honor, and readers both ancient and modern have found him to be the principal foil for Odysseus. But this is misleading. Give both men a choice between honor and a homecoming, and both (as Homer represents them) would choose to go home. True, love of honor holds Achilles out of the battle after Agamemnon insults him; but honor is not Achilles’ ruling passion. Friendship alone moves Achilles when the generals try to persuade him to arm again. And Achilles really wants to be safe, he wants his beloved friend to be safe, and he wants to go home. In the end, it is grief for the one he loves most, Patroclus, that shatters his dream of homecoming. He tells his mother:
My friend is dead,
Patroclus, my dearest friend of all. I loved him,
And I killed him …
You will never again
Welcome me home, since I no longer have the will
To remain alive among men, not unless Hector
Loses his life on the point of my spear
And pays for despoiling Menoetius’ son.
(18.80–82, 89–93 [Lombardo 83–85, 94–98])
Achilles has lost the desire to live, no matter what happens with Hector. He now believes he is certain to die at Troy, and he accepts this fate (19.329–32). He has not had the luxury of choice, he has never chosen battle over homecoming, and he has never shown contempt for reverence. He will lose all human reverence in the grief-stricken rampage that follows, but it is a brief loss, and we know he will recover. Tennyson picked the wrong hero for his poem. Achilles, not Odysseus, is the man who loses all taste for life when his beloved friend dies. Hallam is to Tennyson as Patroclus is to Achilles. There is no Calypso for Achilles or Tennyson, no captivating island goddess as there is for Odysseus—only the memory of lost glory and grief for a lost love.
Odysseus too has his flashes of irreverence in the Iliad. The safe path he follows leads him to kill a prisoner, for example, and sometimes to treat his friends with disrespect. In the Odyssey, off the battlefield, he is as crafty as in the Iliad, but his craft is now bent wholeheartedly on his return. The epic begins with Odysseus as a love-slave to the divine nymph Calypso, who has offered him ageless immortality, but he spends his days weeping on a headland, where Calypso finds him when she goes to tell him Zeus has ordered her to let him go:
Calypso composed herself and went to Odysseus,
Zeus’ message still ringing in her ears.
She found him sitting where the breakers rolled in.
His eyes were perpetually wet with tears now,
His life draining away in homesickness.
The nymph had long since ceased to please.
(5.149–54 [Lombardo 148–53])
The last line is our only hint that he had ever been satisfied with Calypso. What could have made him change his mind? She is beautiful, she is immortal, and the scene of life in the cavern is so lovely that even a god is enraptured by it, spellbound (5.74). She has been kind to Odysseus, there is nothing wrong with their sex life together, and she offers him the endless life and youth of a god. But Odysseus longs for home, even though he has no hope or plan of leaving. Evidently he sees his fling with the goddess as an interruption of his human life.
To be reverent is to take care never to play the part of god or beast. Odysseus knows he has no business playing at immortality with Calypso, and with Hermes’ help he is able to resist the charm of Circe that turns men into pigs. He is human, and his place is home. This knowledge is one of the many signs of his reverence. To it we should add the care and respect he shows to his men, his refusal to eat the cattle of the Sun, and his understanding of human weakness—shown, for example, when he recognizes that he cannot resist the sirens’ song unaided.
Odysseus has spent his life either at home or looking homeward. When he arrives on Ithaca with his treasure he does not recognize the place, and no one recognizes him—no one but the dog. This, the poet tells us, is a contrivance of the goddess Athena, but how could it be otherwise after so long an absence? Any veteran knows. The young soldier is now grizzled and scarred, his tiny son is now a young man, his dog can barely rise to its feet. And a riot of hostile men is taking possession of his house, with the hope of marrying one of them to his presumed widow, Penelope. Still, Odysseus does not flinch from making the place his home again. He is cunning, violent, and deceptive in his homecoming, but he does come home.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
—Mary Oliver (Reprinted by permission of
The Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency Inc.)