home--the+centre

Detective Story

For who is ever quite without his landscape, The straggling village street, the house in trees, All near the church, or else the gloomy town house, The one with the Corinthian pillars, or The tiny workmanlike flat: in any case A home, the centre where the three or four things That happen to a man do happen? Yes, Who cannot draw the map of his life, shade in The little station where he meets his loves And says good-bye continually, and mark the spot Where the body of his happiness was first discovered?

An unknown tramp? A rich man? An enigma always And with a buried pastbut when the truth, The truth about our happiness comes out How much it owed to blackmail and philandering.

The rest's traditional. All goes to plan: The feud between the local common sense And that exasperating brilliant intuition That's always on the spot by chance before us; All goes to plan, both lying and confession, Down to the thrilling final chase, the kill.

Yet on the last page just a lingering doubt: That verdict, was it just? The judge's nerves, That clue, that protestation from the gallows, And our own smile. . . why yes. . . But time is always killed. Someone must pay for Our loss of happiness, our happiness itself.

(Auden, 1936)

“I think I have trouble getting my head round this idea of home because I can’t refine down the number of things that have happened to me to “three or four”—or not yet I can’t anyway. Auden might turn out to be right, but for the moment, there are a lot of things that have happened, and they’ve happened in lots of different places. “Home,” by contrast, is the place where least has happened. For the last dozen or so years, in fact, the idea of “home” has felt peripheral and, as a consequence, more than a little blurred. Or maybe, like Steinbeck, “I have homes everywhere,” many of which “I have not seen yet. That is perhaps why I am restless. I haven’t seen all my homes.” “Auden’s poem begins with the question “Who is ever quite without his landscape…?” Halfway through the first stanza he asks, “Who cannot draw the map of his life…?” I can’t (or can’t yet).” (Geoff Dyer 2003)