Home for the Holidays
Also: A history of hooch, the world’s best ruined places, and more.
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My wife and I are headed to Switzerland today for Christmas. Our son is coming with us, and two of our daughters, who are both in Germany, will take the train to join us at the end of this week. We prefer to visit Switzerland in the summer. We’re not big skiers, it’s sunnier, and it’s easier to schedule the trip during my summer break. And so, we haven’t visited my wife’s family for Christmas since we moved to the States 17 years ago.
The feeling of returning home—or what used to be home—is a particular one. It’s almost uncanny. It is a feeling (if you are lucky) of belonging, of being among your people, and one of displacement at the same time since this is no longer your home. Everything is familiar and foreign, especially if you have been away for some time. You wish both that you could stay longer (to extend your escape from everyday life) and leave earlier (to end your exile) at various points during the trip. There truly is no place like home for the holidays.
There are many scenes in literature of leaving and returning home. I thought about writing a literary history of home at one point, and I still might, but home is so central to literature that it would likely become a history of literature tout court. It would be hard to decide which works to exclude.
The Old English ham, from which we get home, refers not to a single structure but to a collection of buildings and fields that house both people and animals. In Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Latin villa is translated as ham, which in modern English is rendered as hamlet or village. For my wife, cows and mountains always remind her of home.
But home is also a sense of belonging. In Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, Susan Burling Ward, who has left her home in New York to go West with her husband, lives in various houses over the years but never inhabits a place and is keenly aware of her loss. Towards the end of the novel, she is outside in the Idaho night not far from a canal where her daughter will soon drown, her house as “dark and empty as herself”: “Utterly cut off, sunk into the West, cut off behind arid hills, she lay thinking backward to another piazza and the smell of other roses. It was hard to believe that they no longer existed, not for her . . . No home there any longer, parents dead, Bessie wronged and ruined, herself adrift in the hopeless West.”
A sense of belonging is what Eugene Gant is looking for in Thomas Wolff’s Look Homeward, Angel. His home seems like a good one. It is somewhat ordered. The children work. They eat huge meals together and the father always makes an enormous fire in the evening. But it is spoiled by the parents’ hatred for each other. One night, in a moment of crisis before Eugene leaves home, he speaks to his dead brother in a dream. Imagining that he has traveled the world, Eugene speaks:
I am not there among the cities. I have sought down a million streets, until the goat cry died within my throat, and I have found no city where I was, no door where I had entered, no place where I had stood . . .
Fool, said Ben, what do you want to find?
Myself, and an end to hunger, and the happy land, he answered. For I believe in harbors at the end. O Ben, brother, and ghost, and stranger, you who could never speak, give me an answer now!
Then, as he thought, Ben said: There is no happy land. There is no end to hunger.
Home for Eugene, like for Susan Ward, home should be a place of belonging and love. It is a place where one is not “dark and empty” but alive, where one is at peace with oneself and others. But is there such a “happy land”?
In John Williams’s novel Stoner, there isn’t. William Stoner’s family home in rural Missouri is a place marked by want and silence:
Though his parents were young at the time of his birth—his father twenty-five, his mother barely twenty—Stoner thought of them, even when he was a boy, as old. At thirty his father looked fifty; stooped by labor, he gazed without hope at the arid patch of land that sustained the family from one year to the next. His mother regarded her life patiently, as if it were a long moment that she had to endure. Her eyes were pale and blurred, and the tiny wrinkles around them were enhanced by thin graying hair worn straight over her head and caught in a bun at the back.
From the earliest time he could remember, William Stoner had his duties. At the age of six he milked the bony cows, slopped the pigs in the sty a few yards from the house, and gathered small eggs from a flock of spindly chickens . . . It was a lonely household, of which he was an only child, and it was bound together by the necessity of its toil. In the evenings the three of them sat in the small kitchen lighted by a single kerosene lamp, staring into the yellow flame; often during the hour or so between supper and bed, the only sound that could be heard was the weary movement of a body in a straight chair and soft creak of timber giving a little beneath the age of the house.
The dinner table is often presented as the epitome of home. In Stoner, as we see above, dinner is taken “in a small kitchen lighted by a single kerosene lamp.” The food isn’t mentioned because it is not worth mentioning. The family members don’t speak. They stare “into the yellow flame.”
In Don Delillo’s White Noise, we have a family with plenty of food but no shared life except shared consumption. At the end of the novel, after the airborne event, the family goes to get fried chicken takeout:
No one wanted to cook that night. We all got in the car and went out to the commercial strip in the no man’s land beyond the town boundary. The never-ending neon. I pulled in at a place that specialized in chicken parts and brownies. We decided to eat in the car. The car was sufficient for our needs. We wanted to eat, not look around at other people. We wanted to fill our stomachs and get it over with. We didn’t need light and space. We certainly didn’t need to face each other across a table as we ate, building a subtle and complex cross-network of signals and codes. We were content to eat facing in the same direction, looking only inches past our hands. There was a kind of rigor in this. Denise brought the food out to the car and distributed paper napkins. We settled in to eat. We ate fully dressed, in hats and heavy coats, without speaking, ripping into chicken parts with our hands and teeth. There was a mood of intense concentration, minds converging on a single compelling idea. I was surprised to find I was enormously hungry. I chewed and ate, looking only inches past my hands. This is how hunger shrinks the world. This is the edge of the observable universe of food. Steffie tore off the crisp skin of a breast and gave it to Heinrich. She never ate the skin. Babette sucked a bone. Heinrich traded wings with Denise, a large for a small. He thought small wings were tastier. People gave Babette their bones to clean and suck. I fought off an image of Mr. Gray lazing naked on a motel bed, an unresolved picture collapsing at the edges. We sent Denise to get more food, waiting for her in silence. Then we started in again, half stunned by the dimensions of our pleasure.
In other works, the dinner table is a place of lively, loving, and sometimes chaotic or heated debate—in short, a place of life. There’s the Cratchit family, of course, around the table in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the Bennetts in Pride and Prejudice, Bazarov’s parents in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the Athelenys in Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, and on and on we could go.
The Swiss love long meals around the table together. During my first Christmas in Switzerland, while my wife and I were still dating, I sat at the Christmas dinner table for three hours. I spoke very little French at the time, so it was a long three hours. Now when we visit, I love these rambling conversations around the dinner table or on the terrace. The table is always fuller at Christmas, which makes it all the more enjoyable.
Speaking of home, Peter Mommsen writes about our longing for roots in the latest issue of Plough: “Even with the easy availability of information online, many are astonishingly ignorant of even their most recent forebears. One 2022 study found that only 47 percent of Americans could name all their grandparents, while only 4 percent could name all their great-grandparents. This might seem surprising, since the past two decades have seen a rise in the popularity of new family history services that combine traditional genealogy with DNA testing (sometimes offering genetic health reports as well). Two in ten Americans say they’ve taken a DNA ancestry test, while over a quarter say that a close relative has. It’s a lucrative industry: the pioneering firm 23andMe went public in 2021 with a valuation of $3.5 billion, while the current market leader Ancestry, founded by two Brigham Young graduates, sold in 2020 for $4.7 billion and reports continued growth. Yet the success of family history services is less a sign of a robust connection to past generations than of its absence.”
Jason Guriel writes in praise of shopping at physical stores: “Online holiday shopping . . . dispenses with the hustle and bustle of real-world browsing—but all the pleasure too. It boils the full-bodied practice of perusing material reality in person down to thumb and screen. It relegates the shopper to their browser and reduces browsing to scrolling. It’s a poisoned chalice, packaged in bubble wrap.”
Oliver Smith has written about the world’s best ruined places. John Gimlette reviews: “In his Atlas of Abandoned Places, he offers us fifry wrecks and ruins, all exquisitely photographed and mapped. Ciudad Perdida (Columbia) is the odd one out, having lain empty since the sixteenth century. The rest were victims of more recent misfortune, be it war, weather, lava, radiation or just plain human folly. One place, Fukushima (Japan), was only evacuated in 2011, and its supermarket shelves are still laden with special offers and shampoo. Although subtitled ‘A Journey Through the World’s Forgotten Wonders,’ we learn that this is our journey, not the author’s.”
You’ll likely share a few drinks with friends and family this Christmas season. What not share a few historical and biological facts about alcohol, too? Here’s Michael P. Foley reviewing a new history of hooch in First Things: “Distilled begins with eight chapters on the history of distilling, the process and ingredients that go into it, and the intersection of distillation, history, and culture. I was grateful for how the authors bring the hay down to the goats for the less scientifically-minded. Their explanation of how the human body reacts to alcohol was one of the most lucid that I have read, and there was much that I learned. Did you know that alcohol dehydrogenases (ADHs), which detoxify alcohol, are found not just in the liver, but in the tongue and esophagus as well? And their chapter on spirits and bodily sensation was fascinating. ‘As sensory beings we are middling creatures,’ the authors explain, ‘with neither the sharpest eyesight nor the keenest noses found in nature. But our sensory capacities are nonetheless astonishing, and they happen to be servants of a very unusual cognitive system: one that allows us to analyze our sensory inputs in a unique—and uniquely satisfying—way.’”
Also, here’s a history of Canadian prohibition: “According to an apocryphal story, the teetotaller George Brown once verbally attacked his opponent John A. Macdonald, an alcoholic, while at a campaign stop. Following Brown’s speech, the future prime minister raised himself from his seat, turned around, and threw up. Wiping his mouth afterward, he declared, ‘Forgive me, but I always do that when I hear George Brown speak.’ Dan Malleck’s Liquor and the Liberal State is replete with similar accounts of activists and politicians hurling insults at one another throughout nineteenth-century Ontario. At the heart of their debates, Malleck argues, was the question of how to run a liberal state — that is, a state that protects an individual’s right to vote, to worship as one pleases, to own property, and to speak freely. As a ‘rational actor,’ a citizen could and should “engage in the sort of debate that shaped the structure” of their governments. But could the people be trusted with liberty if they were intoxicated?”
Charles Schulz at 100: “Schulz was the greatest of all American newspaper cartoonists. Sure, you can make the case that Peanuts never quite reached the comedic heights of Gary Larson’s The Far Side or Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, or the historic impact of political cartoons such as those of Thomas Nast. But even aside from his humor and his massive commercial success, no other cartoonist can match Schulz’s combination of artistry, longevity, sustained quality, emotional resonance, and influence on the form.”
Will ChatGPT and future AI text generators mark the end of the high school English paper? Daniel Herman thinks so.
Bookforum closes: “The New York-based magazine’s most recent issue, which was released this month, will be its last.”
Veronica Ryan wins the Turner Prize. At 66, she is the oldest winner ever.
The Christianity Today Book Awards have been announced, and I am happy to report that this book won in the Culture and the Arts category. There are some other very good books on the list, including Jessica Hooten Wilson’s The Scandal of Holiness, William Edgar’s A Supreme Love: The Music of Jazz and the Hope of the Gospel, and Peter Leithart’s On Earth as in Heaven: Theopolis Fundamentals.
Congratulations on the award!