When one sits in the library during the small hours of the night, reviewing four decades of theorizing about the impact of global interconnectedness on political institutions, one may be forgiven some philosophical digressions. And when this happens the day before one moves house an ocean away, one may be forgiven if the profundities of these digressions house a hint of sentimentalism.
Home is almost always a singular noun. Even if someone has multiple houses we usually speak of a "second home" or "third/fourth/etc. home." Almost never homes. People may flit hither and thither, but they seem to belong either here or there.
One of the great things about the Chinese language is that it dispenses with the singular/plural distinction and renders every noun a collective thing like "water" or "air." So just as we say "a cup of water" they say "a tail of dog" or "a handle of spoon," using so-called measure words to make the general specific.
This seems, to me, a more attractive way to think about home, a collective composite that can be measured out into different units. Places are obviously one important unit in which home comes, people another. I would add tastes, activities, and feelings as well. Home can be many things jumbled together.
Thought about in this way, home loses some connection to geography. Or rather, it gains other connections alongside. It becomes possible, at least theoretically, to put all of your things in suitcases, board a jet-propelled metal flying tube, travel thousands of miles from where you began, and end up home again.
For all of us, there is a bit of home here, a bit there, and a bit more somewhere else. I have a big dollop of home in New York that spills out over the surrounding provinces. I imagine I always will. I also have some home in London, measured mostly in people, and in one particular unit of people.
So I find myself in the rather paradoxical position of having to leave home to get home. This is quite a different thing than just leaving home, something I do a fair amount of. It's more ambivalent.
But I think I can live with that.
As usual, a rag-tag troupe of hippy/gypsy musicians says it best:
