Comments on: Zooming into Home

By: dale

dale — Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:40:46 +0000

You’re a magician, Beth. All those layers of perception settling so gently into place, each one fixed with a vivid glimpsed moment. Wonderful.

By: beth

beth — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 06:38:00 +0000

Thank you all for the lovely, kind, thoughtful comments!

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 19:52:08 +0000

A beautifully well-rounded essay. Like the other commenters, I really liked the roadtrip vignette.

By: patry Francis

patry Francis — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 19:27:34 +0000

Stunning–especially that final sentence.

By: Brenda

Brenda — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 14:38:49 +0000

A beautiful meditation on home, Beth, from a traveler’s perspective… searching the planet via satellite photos to tiny diners visited on road trips. The ‘virtual map tack’ that we each identify as “home” is probably true for most of us, no matter where we happen to be living. xo

By: MB

MB — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 11:39:10 +0000

It’s an interesting question: where does home begin? Your post brought up two memories: wondering apprehensively, the first time I experienced an apartment building, how would one find home?—and the sudden sense of home, while living in Paris, the moment a press on the apartment building buzzer brought a response in English.

By: Anna

Anna — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 11:35:49 +0000

Beth:
I loved the part of the post about the traveller’s perspective and the locals’ perspective. The concept reminded me of my year in the States doing my PhD research when, being a poor student from England whose funding wouldn’t cover air travel, I used to regularly criss cross the USA by Greyhound bus. As I was based in Duke University, North Carolina and the subject of my PhD lived in Arizona, my main journey was Durham to Tucson which took two and a half days (the only time I got off the bus was to change to another bus). North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona: such a vast country. Coming from England, it was just impossible to comprehend entering, say, Texas at 0630 and still be travelling through it at midnight. The vastness and the strangeness and the aching wistfulness I felt, especially at dusk as we hit these little out-of-the-way places… Just one main street and a few ragged buildings. Those people who served us – they lived there. What did they do with their lives? What did they dream of? They’d hear my accent and always we’d exchange a few words. I loved the lonely feeling I got when we stopped in these tiny little towns at night, somewhere at the end of the earth it seemed. I was half asleep, half-starving, with maybe ten dollars in my pocket. But my fellow travellers were my companions and that big bus was my little safe haven.

Thanks!
Anna.

By: leslee

leslee — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 07:15:00 +0000

I should say, significant to them as the details of our lives are significant to us.

By: leslee

leslee — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 07:14:26 +0000

Very thought-provoking, Beth. You captured well the specifics of home and not-home, chosen home and stuck home, tacked with a thud. I’ve looked out airplane windows many times and thought of the lights of each village, each little house home to someone, the details of their lives significant to them as it is to us.

By: Lorianne

Lorianne — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 06:46:30 +0000

I love the the images of the waitress standing in the diner window holding plates and the infant turning his head toward home at the end. Those two images zoom right into “it,” this feeling of rootedness, in both its stifling and soothing senses.

Thank you!