From Word To Word

Elexander van Elsas wrote a post several weeks ago on having a home on the web, and I have been reflecting ever since on the idea of what it means to have a home or to be at home on the internet. I may return to some of the directions this thinking has taken me, but I realized last night that there may be a more fundamental problem with thinking about home on the web that must be confronted before we I can even begin to address the kinds of issues that van Elsas is raising: that is, the internet is not actually a virtual space at all.

Let me explain my logic here.  The temptation to think of locality on the web in terms of home is a direct result of understanding the internet as a whole in terms of locality and spacialization in the first place, complete with metaphors of domains, homepages, navigation, and hosting. The web, however, is not a space that I can inhabit, not even virtually, because the web is is a physical space, not a virtual one. It consists of physical networks that relay physical patterns of energy between physical machines. The web as virtual space does not actually exist apart from this physical infrastructure, not until the point where a machine uses the information it has received over this network to create the illusion of a space on a monitor. This virtual space that the machine creates can exist only on the monitor. It exists nowhere else except the monitor. Even seemingly interactive spaces like social media sites and massively multiplayer gaming environments do not exist as virtual spaces on the web, but only in the physical space of the web and in the virtual space of the monitor. The web’s existence as a virtual space is always and only a product of the monitor.

What this means is that the current language of the internet, which relies heavily on metaphors of space and territory, is in fact highly misleading. It implies that the web is a virtual space that I enter and explore, concealing the fact that the web is actually a physical space that I cannot enter but that I use as a tool to create a virtual space at the point of the monitor. I cannot inhabit the web, even and especially in a virtual sense, because it does not exist as a virtual space except as I construct it for myself as such.  Rather than entering the web in any way, I always remain essentially external to it, requesting information from it, creating virtuality with it.

To speak of a home on the web is, therefore, strictly speaking, impossible.  I can only speak of a provisional and temporary home that I create for myself at the point of the monitor so that I may make use of the physical infrastructure of the internet, but this home will always remain entirely distinct from the web, however much it may depend on the web to construct itself.  Understood in this way, the primary change that the web enables in regard to home is not the ability to maintain a personal space within a larger virtual sphere, but the ability to replicate, to recreate, my virtual home wherever I have access to the necessary technology.  My home on the web, recreated for me each time I sit down at my monitor, is now capable of appearing in my physical home, in my workplace, or, as at this particular moment, at a public library in rural Ontario.  Far from creating a stable though virtual home that I can access from anywhere I go, the web forces me to recreate my virtual home everywhere I go, which is perhaps another reason why van Elsas should feel like a refugee.

There is something ideal about the pace of the simmering pot, the tomato sauce, the soup stock, the reduction, the jam, that rests on the back of the stove, hovering on the edge of my attention as I attend to my other tasks.  Simmering gives a kind of unity to the day or even to the hour, something to which I keep returning, to stir briefly, to taste and smell, or to add some missing ingredient.  It is the setting or the scenery that provides the mood and the rhthym for the narrative of my other activities. It is like music on the stereo or weather through the window. My life is played out over what is simmering in the pot.

I am continually relearning how to share my kitchen.

I had my first lesson the second year that my wife and I were married. We had baked Christmas goodies together every year since Grade 11, when I used to make her skip class to come and cook with me. The tradition was important to me, and I thought to her also, so I was surprised two years into our marriage when she told me that she would rather not do Christmas baking that year. When I asked her why, she pointed out, quite rightly, that we did not really bake together. I baked. She came along for the ride. I chose the recipes, bought the ingredients, set the schedule, and, mostly, took the credit. Her contribution was almost entirely restricted to helping me mix this thing or peel the other one. I had assumed that I was sharing my kitchen because we were occupying it at the same time, but I had not really learned to let anyone else cook in it, so I had not really learned how to share it at all.

That year, and every year since, we have each chosen recipes, alternating in the kitchen between the baker and the assistant from moment to moment. It was a difficult transition for me, but the tradition of our baking together has grown richer because of it, and we are looking forward this year to having our eldest son take a more active role himself, letting him choose a favourite treat to make and to share with the family.

I have had similar lessons repeatedly over the years. When a family came to stay with us several years ago, I had to adjust to having two others in the kitchen with me on a daily basis, putting things in different places, cooking in different rhythms, even decorating the space in different ways. Yet, when we get together with these friends now, I look forward to being in the kitchen with them again, to share the kitchen again in the ways that we learned to share it before.

A Congolese woman and her two sons were living with us until very recently. The differences in our kitchen practices could only be described as extreme. Even her basic ideas about when meals should be served and how they should be eaten were culturally very different. She made dishes with ingredients that I had never seen before. Even so, only a few months since she has found her own apartment, I find myself wishing for some of the dishes that she used to make, and my own cooking has been expanded by what I learned from her.

I am experiencing much the same thing again, as my mother-in-law has come to live with us. I am relearning that sharing a kitchen means, as sharing anything means, being able to relinquish control of it. It means accepting how other people work in the kitchen, and accepting that working alongside them will involve adapting my own rhythms to theirs. This is not always easy for me. I am fairly obsessive about the things that are important to me, and the kitchen is among the most important.

All of which brings me to the experience of having to share the kitchen with my eldest son this morning. We often cook together, but I have been finding lately that he wants to assert himself in that space in ways that are, in themselves, perfectly acceptable, but perhaps different than I would prefer. I am finding myself asking more often the question of how to let him safely and usefully share in the kitchen rather than just help in it.

This morning we were making cookies. The picture of the hickory nut cookies caught his eye, and he would be satisfied by nothing else. He was entirely uninterested in my explanation that these cookies are usually made for Christmas. Well, I thought, should he not be able to choose the recipe himself, and why should his choice be limited by some convention about what cookies should be made when. So, under his direction, the hickory nut cookies were made. They had slightly more salt than the recipe indicated and that the heart and Stroke Foundation would recommend. They had green food dye in them, quite apart from anything I could find in the recipe at all. I was unaware that he even knew where the food dye was. They were partly his and partly mine, the product of sharing the kitchen.

We were not sharing the kitchen in the way that I share it with my wife or with a friend, of course, but we were certainly finding places in it that could be shared, even if the results were sometimes chaotic. The first batch of dough actually ended on the floor, which was my youngest son’s fault. Several of the cookies tumbled into the oven, which was by own fault. Many more were mashed to bits as they were being dredged in icing sugar, which was my eldest son’s fault, again and again. None of this, however, detracted from what we were able to make and share together.

As we finished, I found myself reflecting on how this kind of sharing differs from what happens in the ideal kitchens that are portrayed on most cooking shows. On television, kitchens are not shared. There is always someone in charge, either explaining cooking simplistically and hygienically in a kitchen that is too immaculate to be a kitchen at all, or screaming at some poor cooking contestants in a kitchen that is too industrial to be a kitchen that I recognize. There is no space in those kitchens for spouses or friends or mothers-in-law or children.

I think this is why so many people are afraid of cooking and of the kitchen. The ideals that have been presented to them do not reflect a functional family kitchen. They may be functional studio spaces, or they may be functional restaurant spaces, but they do not show people how to cook and share in the kinds of kitchens that they know. They do not show how cooking happens in the family and the community and the home. This kind of cooking can only be shared by inviting people into our kitchens and by sharing our kitchens with them.

I appreciate TC’s comments on Walking Suburbia and On Being at Home. I hope to address some of these comments more generally in later posts, but I thought that I would at least do TC the immediate courtesy of responding to the question of what exactly I mean by a social holocaust.

The phrase does not only serve my penchant for rhetorical excess, though it certainly does this too. It names accurately, at least in my opinion, what is happening to social relations in the cultures I inhabit; that is, it describes the systematic and systemic elimination of relational encounter in favour of technical connectivity. The symptoms of this displacement are everywhere. They can be seen in the replacement of cooking and eating together with the consumption of fastfood and preprocessed dinners, often in isolation; the replacement of walkable neighbourhoods with suburbs that can only be driven, usually in isolation; the replacement of mixed housing with mass produced developments that reinforce class distinction, sometimes gated for protection, and for isolation. This list could be made almost endless, and it would include everything from how we are employed, educated, entertained, medicated, and buried.

The impetus for this annihilation of encounter with the other is a fear of the other as such, a fear of anything that I cannot reduce to my self, a suspicion of anything that is not in my own image. It is not the logic of a genocide, which would eliminate only others of a particular race or culture. It is not the logic of a crusade, which would eliminate only others of a particular religion. It is not the logic of a political pogrom, which would eliminate only others of a particular politics. It is the logic of a holocaust, which eliminates anyone who is other to my idealized self, on whatever basis whatsoever.

The Nazi atrocities were a holocaust for precisely this reason. The final solution was not just a genocide directed at the Jews. It was several genocides, directed at Jews, and Slavs, and Gypsies. It was also a moral pogrom, directed at the mentally disabled, the physically disabled, homosexuals, and others deemed socially unacceptable. It was also a religious crusade, directed at Judaism and Islam. It was, in short, the means by which Nazi Germany defined and eliminated what was other to its ideal self: a final solution: a holocaust. This is precisely the logic of our culture’s elimination of relational encounter, only we have taken it much nearer to its limits, where anyone who is other, for any reason, is to be feared, where the other as such is to be feared, and where encounter with the other is always to be avoided.

Our holocaust is social rather than physical, obviously. We understand ourselves to be too civilized for the physical extinction of others. We are, in fact, quite proud of the tolerance that we show to others in the ideal, regardless of their race or gender or sexuality or whatever. What we fail to realize, however, is that our increasing tolerance for others in the abstract is being accompanied by a decreasing openness to encounter with the particular persons around us. We refuse to discriminate on the basis of age or religion, but we also refuse to actually know anyone, whatever their age and religion. The fabric of social relation, and therefore of ethics also, which is based upon encounter with the other, is annihilated. We kill no one, but treat everyone as if they are dead. This is our holocaust. This is our final solution.

Now, it could be objected that I go too far here, that we do still encounter others, sharing our homes with family, our cubicles with coworkers, our pubs with friends. This is undoubtedly true. It is never possible entirely to eliminate encounter with others, not on this side of death and sanity. Even so, long work hours, full schedules, job turnover, cubicle farms, technical gadgetry, frequent moves, all produce estrangement among families, coworkers, and friends, all permit us to be among each other without really encountering each other. This is partly why, in an era where connectivity is easier than ever before, counsellors and psychologists are treating ever growing numbers of patients who describe themselves as lonely, depressed, and disconnected. They have become isolated by a fear of encountering the other, by a refusal to be open to the possibility of encountering the other, by a rejection of the intimacy that is only possible through encounter with the other. This is our social holocaust.

The reasons for this fear of the other in our culture are complex, and I do not have the space here to discuss them adequately. I would suggest, however, that they have to do with a certain political expediency and with a certain economic efficiency, not to mention the various individualisms, religious, political, philosophical, economic, and otherwise, that have characterized modernism and those of us who are its heirs. There is much that could be said in this direction, but it must wait for another occasion.

We arrived in Durham, North Carolina early yesterday morning, after fourteen odd hours of driving through the night, and spent the rest of the day napping or otherwise recuperating. At some point in the afternoon, we took the kids and went for a short walk to the local shopping centre, a matter of five or ten minutes each way. The neighbourhood looked like an average suburban neighbourhood, very like some of the neighbourhoods in my own town, immaculately manicured and perhaps more than normally treed. Despite the familiar landscape, however, I felt oddly uneasy, as if there was something unnatural about the whole scene.

We reached the shopping centre, picking up the few things that we needed, and the feeling of strangeness passed, but it returned the moment that we began to walk back to the place where we were staying. I found myself watching a group of four maintanence workers trimming and edging the lawns, blowing the cuttings from the sidewalks and the roads, when I suddenly realized the source of my unease: except for those workers, we were the only people actually occupying the landscape. We had seen not a single pedestrian during the ten minutes to the store and only paid workers during the ten minutes back.

I actually shivered. The very things that I had been talking about in more abstract terms a few days earlier had suddenly become enacted for me, and the effect was unnerving. There was literally no neighbourhood, no welcome, no hospitality, no encounter. It was not that the people were unfriendly or unwelcoming. In fact, my experience of North Carolina is quite the opposite, that the people are most often very hospitable. It was just that there was no opportunity for hospitality, because there was no opportunity for encounter.
We were literally alone in the landscape, removed from the hundreds of people around us by the walls of houses and cars and social roles.

The rest of the day proceeded in much the same way. I spent several hours reading a book on the front step, from which I could see forty or fifty townhomes, and saw only three other people, all leaving their houses just long enough to enter their cars. I spent part of the evening talking with my family in the backyard, which is open to all the other backyards in the same row, and saw not another soul. I felt, for the first time in reality, the same feeling of emptiness that I have often felt in artistic expressions of emptiness as diverse as Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog and Stephen King’s The Stand.

Perhaps it seems extreme to compare the emptiness of a suburban neighbourhood to an emptiness that is the result of a holocaust or an apocalypse, whether real or imagined, but to me the comparison is not entirely unjustified. There was a sense in that depopulated suburban landscape, at least to me, that something catastrophic and unnatural had occurred, that an unprecedented disaster had overtaken the relations that should form a community. What was must disturbing, however, was the realization that this disaster is not localized, that it has overtaken communal relations on so general a scale that it now appears as the normal social mode to many people. In my mind this is in fact a communal apocalypse. It is a social holocaust.

I am going on vacation very shortly, a matter of hours actually, and I was reflecting on the fact that this will probably not be much of a vacation for anyone. It will involve me driving with two small children and two other adults in a minivan from Guelph, Ontario to Savannah, Georgia, stopping to celebrate a family reunion with people I mostly do not know, then driving back to Guelph. I figure to spend roughly the same amount of time in the car as out of it, to eat vast amounts of bad restaurant food, and to sleep only as much as my children will sleep in unfamiliar surroundings. Suffice it to say that this may be my last post for a few days.

This got me thinking about what the word ‘vacation’ means. Because it involves the vacating of one space in order to occupy another, hopefully nicer place, it necessarily implies travel and distance, even if this distance is only small, and it implies that the space being left is somehow worse than the one being approached. The assumption is that the home and its worries need to be escaped in favour of some ideal place of relaxation and rejuvenation.

For me, however, the idea of vacation, even a more ideal vacation, is not attractive, both because it involves travel, which I generally do not like, and also because it involves vacating the space that I have painstakingly constructed to make me feel at home. I have to leave behind my library, my kitchen, my garden, and my neighbourhood, not to mention the friends who occupy those spaces with me. To vacate my home, therefore, is to remove myself from precisely the things I most enjoy, and all for the purpose of travelling uncomfortably, eating terribly, sleeping poorly, and conversing frivolously with people I hardly know.

I do not want vacations. I want holidays. I want holy-days, days that are set apart from the kinds of activities that consume my time and my energy, days that are devoted to the family, to the home, to reflection, to relaxation. I want, not to leave my home, but to inhabit my home more fully, to be more fully at home. Where a vacation tries to escape the things that trouble the personal and familial spheres, the holy-day consecrates these spheres anew, sets them apart once again, by purifying them for a time of the things that trouble them. I need fewer vacations and more holidays.

In the fifth chapter of Echographies of Television, a section entitled, “The ‘Cultural Exception’:The States of the State, the Exception”, Jacques Derrida talks about the desire to be “at-home” in ways that are intriguing to me because of my own preoccupations with what it means to be at home.

Derrida argues that the desire to be at-home is being intensified by the increase of teletechnologies. These technologies increasingly open us to images and discourses from beyond the boundaries of our nation and city and neighbourhood and family and home, and the effect is that our sense of “anchordness, rootedness, and the at-home becomes radically contested.” Because these technologies open us to a sense of dislocation and dissociation, our reaction becomes, “I want to be at home; I want finally to be at home, close to my friends and family.”

This desire for the at-home, according to Derrida, is not confined to the literal houses in which we live, but is extended more broadly to the various places where we feel a sense of identity. The desire to be at home is therefore also the desire to be part of a nation, of a neighbourhood, of a religion, of a party, or of a society. The problem for Derrida is that the desire for the at-home, contrary to the ways that I have been constructing it, can “project an image of closedness, of selfish and impoverishing and even lethal isolation.” Being at-home in this sense involves closing the borders to foreigners, gating the community to outsiders, restricting the membership in the party or the society or even the family to eliminate those who are not like us. It is the desire to make myself at home by eliminating from the home all those who might introduce something that is unlike myself.

Even though it bears this danger, Derrida affirms the desire to be at-home, saying that there would be no possibility of hospitality without out it. This desire, in his own words, “is the condition of openness, of hospitality, and of the door,” because it will always be impossible to welcome an other, to offer hospitality to an other, without a place in which to offer the other welcome and hospitality, even if this place be only a park bench. In order for me to host the other, I must first make myself at-home somewhere.

The desire to be at-home, therefore, is one that must be continually both affirmed for its openness and distrusted for its closedness. I must always be both finding ways to make myself at-home and ensuring that these ways do not exclude the other from the home. In a formulation that Derrida does not use but that I hope he would not reject, I must find ways to be at-home that also make others at-home, or, perhaps better, I must find ways to be at home precisely through making others at-home, whether as a member of a nation, a church, or profession, a neighbourhood, or a family.

Those who have read Ivan Illich, or who have at least read my recent post on Ivan Illich, will perhaps recognize that the title of this post plays with the title of one of Illich’s books, Energy and Equity (London: Marion Boyars Publishing, 1976). The central thesis of this book is that “High quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu,” or, in plainer language, dependence on tools that require energy not only destroys the physical environment but also the social environment. For this reason, Illich argues that any increase in energy usage, even environmentally responsible energy, will still result in increased “inequality, inefficiency, and personal impotence,” and that “Only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity.”

In the section of the book that is dedicated particularly to transportation, Illich focuses this argument still more, making the startling assertion that people in an equitable society should not travel any faster than the speed of a bicycle or a horse. “Free people,” he says, “must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle,” because the capacity to increase speed always comes at a broader social cost, both economically, in terms of the infrastructure that is becoming an increasing problem for governments of developed nations, but also relationally, in terms of how transportation prevents the formation of communities.

Illich suggests that what the transportation system actually accomplishes is the production of a new sort of person: the passenger. He describes the passenger in detail, and I will quote this description at length, because I think it is still true of most of us today: “The habitual passenger’s inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal space have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role. Addicted to being carried along, he has lost control over the physical, social, and psychic powers that lie in man’s feet. The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed. He has become impotent to establish his domain, mark it with his imprint, and assert his sovereignty over it. He has lost his power to admit others into his presence and to share space consciously with them.”

I mention all of this because I am most often a pedestrian, both by choice and by necessity, because our family owns one car, which is mostly used to convey my wife to work. Our intention is to have her transfer her job to Guelph when she can and to have the family go without a car entirely, but I am usually carless even now. This choice is mostly an economic and environmental one. Cars cost me and the environment in ways that I find increasingly unacceptable. Even so, I have lately been experiencing a heightened sense of the social cost that cars impose as a mode of transportation.

This past Thursday I set out with my two sons to meet some other parents in a park across town, a walk that takes us through the neighbourhood where we lived until this past fall. The walk would normally have taken about half an hour, only I had not gone even a block before I encountered some of my neighbours working on a new flagstone path. My eldest son was intrigued by this operation, so we stopped and talked for several minutes, during which time I realized how disconnected they were from their neighbourhood. Not only were they unaware that we had moved in just a few doors from them, but they had never met the woman who had lived in the house before us, not in the eight or ten years that they had driven past each other’s homes on a more than daily basis.

When we finally reached our old neighbourhood, I had a similar experience. There, a street or two from our old house, I encountered the mother of a friend of ours who was working in her garden. We stopped to talk again for several minutes, catching up on each others lives. This woman and I am only acquaintances. She has never visited my home, though I have visited hers occasionally. We have very little obviously in common. She is not a person that I would ever encounter if I did not walk through her neighbourhood. If I had driven to the park, the possibility of my encountering her, or someone else, would never have been opened.

This, to me, is the social cost of the car. It is the cost of letting ourselves become passengers who see the houses next to ours as so much untouchable landscape and who lack the confidence even to share space with their inhabitants. If we only drive through our neighbourhoods, it will never be possible to encounter our neighbours in the way that we can if we are on foot. In fact, in many ways, driving though our neighbourhoods essentially erases our neighbourhoods altogether, because it prevents those neighbourhoods from ever forming.

This is not to say that we cannot drive, of course, though I think that this is a more viable alternative than many people believe. It is to say that we cannot only drive, that we cannot primarily drive, not if we want to encounter those around us in ways that create neighbourhood, that foster hospitality, that enable ethical responsibility. The choice to walk is the choice to be open to encountering others, to share consciously with them the space in which we both live. It is a choice that implies an ethics far beyond economic and environmental concerns, because it implies an ethics of the neighbour.

The kitchen and the table are the condition for a certain philosophy, not the condition for all philosophy, of course, for there is much philosophy conducted elsewhere; and not the condition even for a particular aspect of philosophy, for the philosophy of the kitchen is not restricted in this way; but the condition for a philosophy that proceeds at a certain pace and with a certain rhythm. The philosophy that occurs in this way, between those who are cooking and eating together, takes on the rhythms of the meal. It gives to each subject it encounters the time and the pace that it requires, whether it be the periodic rising and kneading of a bread, or the continual simmering of a reduction, or the focused heat of a grill, and it allows all of these things to happen simultaneously, one layered upon the other, informing each other like the mingling scents of different dishes. Philosophy conducted in this way is held by the teeth, savoured on the tongue, inhaled by the nostrils.

This philosophy of the table does not, however, occur of its own accord. Like a good meal, a space and time has to be made for it, not only in the banal sense of holding a place open in my schedule or making sure there is a space available, but in the much more profound sense that I need to create, to fashion, to shape the space and the time to do a meal justice, to do a conversation justice. It is not a matter of saying, “I can squeeze you in for an hour between this previous thing and this later thing,” because this way of making time always assumes that the meal and the conversation will be made to fit the time that I allot for it. Rather, it is a matter of saying, “I will make myself available for however long that this meal and this conversation requires, and I will do what is required to do it justice,” because this way of making time is willing to take its time, to pass its time, to be of its time.

For example, I spent this past Saturday evening at Dave Humphrey’s house. His wife and daughters were vacationing. My wife and sons had released me for the night. True to our practice, we had little in the way of recipes. We had decided on some ingredients in advance: We had steaks from locally raised, hormone free, field grazed beef, t-bones, with beautiful large sirloins. I prepared a wet, garlic rub for them. Dave began a reduction to accompany them on the plate. We had thick, slab-like bacon, also locally raised and hormone free. We fried and cut it for the vegetables and potatoes. We added some simple spices to the drippings and poured them over hasselbacked potatoes. We had shrimp. We sauted them in the remaining bacon drippings and mixed them with the vegetables. We had a beautiful olive bread. We ate until we could not even stomach the thought of the grilled mango cheesecake that Dave had prepared for dessert, to my lasting regret.

I dwell on this because we also dwelt on it. We began cooking at 3:30 in the afternoon, and we finished eating sometime late in the evening. We opened our first bottle of wine shortly after I arrived, and we finished the last one when it was late enough that we had long since stopped looking at the clock. Among those in between was a particularly nice Bordeaux that we could not make linger nearly long enough. It flowed through the meal like the theme of a poem or a song. We followed where it meandered.

In this time and space that we had prepared, our conversation, the philosophy of the kitchen, also meandered according to its own theme and its own gait. It began by circling around ideas of media and spectrality, because this is what I have been reading lately and because this relates to Dave’s occupation. It brushed often against questions of pedagogy. It wove its way through the practice of reading and writing in various media. It was punctuated repeatedly by the matters of the home, and the table, and the garden, and the meal. In short, it took its time. It allowed its thinking and its speaking the time necessary to do themselves justice. This is the philosophy of the kitchen, not merely a philosophy about how and what the kitchen is, but a philosophy that finds it proper habitation in the rhythms of the home and the meal and the conversation.

The events of this past weekend have reinforced a kind of personal principle that is becoming increasingly important to me, the principle of the open home. Bill and Sharon, friends of ours who have moved to Collingwood, came on Friday evening and stayed the night. The next morning they joined our whole extended family, my wife, my two kids, my mother-in-law, and myself, for our ritual Saturday walk to the Guelph Farmers Market. When we returned home, we had breakfast together and chatted over coffee for several hours. For the latter part of this time we were joined by Steve and Christine, other friends of ours who have moved to Rockwood. We had met them by chance at the market earlier in the morning and invited them over to introduce their sixth child and to meet our second. They knew Bill and Sharon a little and stayed to chat with them for a while also. Then, just as everyone was leaving, Laura, a friend who has moved to Toronto, came by unexpectedly for a few minutes to have some tea and to catch us up with her life. There were a few hours of lull after Laura left, but that evening we hosted several couples and their children for a monthly meal that we have together, each couple taking turns to bring some element of the meal or to host the gathering. The food was good, and the conversation was good also. All of these things together, these comings and goings, sometimes planned and sometimes spontaneous, sometimes overnight and sometimes only for a few minutes, sometimes for a meal and sometimes just for tea but always for food, these passings to and from our house, fulfill the ideal of what I call the open home.

The open home is different from the open house for me in that it is not a specified range of time during which others can come to our place, but a way of living that is always open to having others come, and eat, and talk, and stay, and go. It is an invitation to share our home with us, not necessarily a house that is cleaned and prepared for company, but a home that at any moment may be filled with children’s toys or renovations or jam making. It is an invitation to eat with us, not necessarily a meal that has been specially planned and prepared, but whatever we happen to be eating at the time, whether it be the tea my wife is constantly making or the stew that has been simmering all day or the misshapen cookies that my three year old son has just made. It is an invitation to join with us, not necessarily to sit and be entertained, but to be a part of whatever we happen to be doing, whether going to the market or digging in the garden or cooking a meal.

The open home is one that understands others to be welcome always, not as visitors to be entertained and impressed, though sometimes this is fun also, but to be included in the activities and the rhythms of the home, as the Athelnys include Philip Carey in theirs (Somerset Maugham Of Human Bondage London: Pan Books, 1975) or as rat includes mole in his (Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows Sydney: Rigby Publishers, 1983). It says, “Come and join us. You are always welcome here, just as you are and just as we are. Have a glass of what there is to drink and a bite of what there is to eat. Talk with me as I do what needs to be done today. Oh, and there is a bed for you if you want to stay the night. You are more than welcome to it.”

The open home is not, of course, always able to welcome everyone at every time. It is not possible to be always at home, and there are some matters of the home in which others can not or should not be included, but the open home is a way of living that welcomes the coming of others and asks that others come again, even if they cannot enter now, at this moment, for one reason or another. It is a way of living that always welcomes the arrival of others, even if this arrival cannot be received in this instant. It says, “I am so glad that you came. I am disappointed that we cannot receive you now. Please, come again, whenever you can.”

To live like this is to resist the understanding that a house is primarily a possession, a castle, a sanctuary, something to be held and defended as primarily my own. It is to resist the assumption that others need to be welcome only on my own terms, when I am at my best, when I have had the time to cook and clean and make myself presentable. It is to resist the idea that welcoming others is primarily a matter of entertaining them. It is to affirm that my house is primarily a place where people can be at home.

This does not always look the same from person to person and from moment to moment. Some people have stayed with us for several months, some just for a night. Some have shared a meal with us, some just a cup of tea. Some have joined us in kneading the bread dough, others have just watched from a safe distance. In every case, however, it has been good, not merely with the goodness of pleasure but with the goodness of what is good. Beyond any attempt at a theological or philosophical defence, I feel and know a rightness about a home that is open in this way. When I encounter it, I know it to be true in a way that very little else can be.