Sunday, February 04, 2007
Storge
In the following entry, I am recording my own experiences, along with what I assume are the experiences of others. Obviously, since you and I are not neighbors, I cannot speak directly to your life experience. However, I hope this entry resonates with you. If it does not, simply replace "we" with me.
(Draft 3)
Modern social commentators often speak of a great longing for that which has come and gone, or that which once was but is no longer. We hear of nostalgia for the good old days, before corruption, before modern conveniences, and before the spread of "secular" ideas throughout our society. We long for something more, something deeper than the surface pleasures of our supremely mechanical society.
We occasionally catch glimpses of that something in modern cinema. We, even the men, absorb "chick flicks" and shows about family togetherness with a fond remembrance for something better. These become our favorite movies, to watch again and again.
Holiday traditions, whether they be watching A Christmas Carol on an old VHS or actually singing Christmas carols with one's neighborhood, evoke the same sensation. It floods our bodies when we return home after a long trip, smelling the familliar old house-smell, walking up to the familiar old porch, or feeling the warm greetings of the familiar old pets. It is the feeling of home.
The home-feeling often comes as a childlike comfort, the comfort of a toddler clinging to his mother's familiar sleeve. The feeling compels us to continue doing and saying the same things with the same people year after year, when dozens of alternatives have become available in the meantime. It drives us to reunite after twenty years with former fellow soldiers, former co-workers, and former high school classmates. When are we more aware of the absence of a dear friend or family member than during these ritual reenactments of an era of our lives long gone?
And then, one day, quite suddenly, often while we are still quite unaware of the feeling itself, it vanishes. We're left with a gaping wound that we desperately try to fill with success, with new pets and new things, with new friends, and with new camaraderie. But these new things never quite mend the gash left when the old home-feeling is ripped from our souls like a scab from an old scrape. Oh yes, sometimes we think we feel it for a while, when beginning a new relationship journey, when meeting a new friend, or when moving to a new house. We want to believe that if we set up our things just so, or arrange our lives just so, that the feeling will remain with us. But it only remains as long as the acquisitions remain new and wonderous. When the new-wonder fades, so, too, does the home-feeling.
By now, you've probably noticed my deliberate spattering of the adjective old throughout the preceding paragraphs. Indeed, many of the things associated with the home-feeling can be described using the adjective old. Others may require the childish adverb always. A family friend or a neighbor who had always been there, as long as we can remember, often evokes the home-feeling.
In his scholarly treatise The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis describes a type of love that the ancient Greeks called storge and that he calls natural affection. It is a need we share with the rest of the animal kingdom. Affection, Lewis says, is the feeling one associates with old shirts, old jokes, old memories, and old traditions. It is the shared bond between people who exist together, not by choice, but by circumstance. It causes us to accept abuse from a dear friend but reject the help of a friendly stranger. It does not require attraction, similarity, or even sympathy. Often, too, it is humbled by its associations. How many of us are fond of the crazy old friend or family member that we would not want to meet our new girlfriends or boyfriends? How nervous are we the first time a dear friend from university meets our family? How many dogs would admit to curling up with a cat each night?
I believe that storge and what I've called the home-feeling are one and the same. Feeling it evokes the sensation of the always-been-such and the old-so-and-so. Furthermore, I argue that modern society seems dedicated to eradicating it through just about every one of our so-called conveniences. The home-feeling, writes Lewis, is threatened by change, particularly personal change. A person who has always-been-such is now some other way, perhaps by education, by a new hobby, by a move, or by a religious conversion. The Christian family thus alienates or shuns the atheist son who has been stolen by some other group. He must have been deceived, they say. He wouldn't reject us!
Modern society, on the other hand, is based almost entirely on that kind of fluidity. "Dynamic content!" is the battle cry of the technology sector. The Internet disconnects us from our friends and families, providing them with ever-changing names and faces. JaneGirl83's name is familiar only as long as she decides not to change it. Instant messages allow us to keep track of our friends on a daily basis, but we often choose to talk about nothing but ourselves. After all, no situation, no bond, is keeping us together now. Most of us, after all, know more things about Hollywood, New York, and Washington than we know about our own cities and regions.
Quick: When was the last mayoral election in the nearest city? Who won? What have they done since then?
The automobile industry, assisted by government roads, has focused for a century on enabling us to drive farther while spending less money. When our children are grown, we fully expect them to move some three hundred miles away to attend a college we've visited only twice, and from which we know they may never return. Each of their childhood friends makes a similar decision, and a friendship born of the bonds of nearness and convenience is torn apart by distance and long distance charges. Childhood hobbies, dreams, and interests are replaced by their grown-up versions, which naturally differ enormously.
We develop psychological conditions to explain our emotions. We are depressed, we say, or perhaps we simply have some condition that renders us unable to interact properly with other people. We're too shy, too rude, too demanding. Our attention spans are too short, or too long, leaving us looking flighty or creepy. In short, only something wrong with us can explain the distance and the separation we're feeling. If nothing was wrong, we'd still feel the same way, right?
Next, we assume that maybe change is good, and that we don't feel right because things don't change enough! So we buy things. We accumulate antiques and strange family heirlooms as our beloved relatives pass away. We buy DVR systems and Nintendo consoles. We become a generation of 20- and 30-somethings playing with the same toys as middle school children. We take expensive vacations to the seashore, to the desert, to the mountains. We travel to other nations, and then feel good because we claim to comprehend their cultures. Even if we aren't quite satisfied, at least we're not as closed-minded as that other guy, right?
After a while, we reject consumerism altogether, citing its damaging effects on our psyche. The post-modern backlash against the consumerism of our parents' generation is one that has reverberated through every distant outpost of tradition, from church to family to television commericals. Modern products, as advertised, claim to put the power to make decisions about our taxes, our insurance, our children, our time, and our ideologies back into our hands - the hands of the consumer. Damn the producer who tries to entertain us on his schedule! Everything from Saturday night church services to TiVo are formulated to fulfill our supreme desire. We watch movies like Fight Club and nod our heads knowingly when Tyler Durden sarcastically comments about Swedish furniture.
We come to believe that if we can just hike the Appalachian Trail, manage our own television schedules, or backpack through the European countryside, everything will be okay. We will control our own destinies, going where the wind takes us! We will see fantastic sights which with awe like a child. Naturally, in such a desirable situation, the home-feeling we remember so fondly from childhood will return. Right?
But it doesn't.
Throughout all of this, we boldly march on, developing new relationships, new jokes, and new traditions. Often, we adopt the traditions and relationships of our significant others, but they are not quite the same. Sometimes, we encounter something old, something always in somebody else's life, and the familiar feeling floods back into us. We feel at ease around it, comfortable, at home. But then the bond breaks, the old-and-always goes away, and we are tossed back into the empty space between loneliness and longing.
When does it end? Will marriage solve the problem? Having a child? Buying a dog? I cannot answer that yet. I can only hope that because not everybody seems to feel this way, there is resolution for those of us who feel like we're clinging to a collection of driftwood, the only remnants of a beautiful ship that no longer exists, floating alone in the deep and unfamiliar water.
Maybe the answer is that everything new becomes old with time.
Maybe I need only to be patient.
Maybe I just need to let go.
But I like my driftwood.
It's always been there.
(Draft 3)
Modern social commentators often speak of a great longing for that which has come and gone, or that which once was but is no longer. We hear of nostalgia for the good old days, before corruption, before modern conveniences, and before the spread of "secular" ideas throughout our society. We long for something more, something deeper than the surface pleasures of our supremely mechanical society.
We occasionally catch glimpses of that something in modern cinema. We, even the men, absorb "chick flicks" and shows about family togetherness with a fond remembrance for something better. These become our favorite movies, to watch again and again.
Holiday traditions, whether they be watching A Christmas Carol on an old VHS or actually singing Christmas carols with one's neighborhood, evoke the same sensation. It floods our bodies when we return home after a long trip, smelling the familliar old house-smell, walking up to the familiar old porch, or feeling the warm greetings of the familiar old pets. It is the feeling of home.
The home-feeling often comes as a childlike comfort, the comfort of a toddler clinging to his mother's familiar sleeve. The feeling compels us to continue doing and saying the same things with the same people year after year, when dozens of alternatives have become available in the meantime. It drives us to reunite after twenty years with former fellow soldiers, former co-workers, and former high school classmates. When are we more aware of the absence of a dear friend or family member than during these ritual reenactments of an era of our lives long gone?
And then, one day, quite suddenly, often while we are still quite unaware of the feeling itself, it vanishes. We're left with a gaping wound that we desperately try to fill with success, with new pets and new things, with new friends, and with new camaraderie. But these new things never quite mend the gash left when the old home-feeling is ripped from our souls like a scab from an old scrape. Oh yes, sometimes we think we feel it for a while, when beginning a new relationship journey, when meeting a new friend, or when moving to a new house. We want to believe that if we set up our things just so, or arrange our lives just so, that the feeling will remain with us. But it only remains as long as the acquisitions remain new and wonderous. When the new-wonder fades, so, too, does the home-feeling.
By now, you've probably noticed my deliberate spattering of the adjective old throughout the preceding paragraphs. Indeed, many of the things associated with the home-feeling can be described using the adjective old. Others may require the childish adverb always. A family friend or a neighbor who had always been there, as long as we can remember, often evokes the home-feeling.
In his scholarly treatise The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis describes a type of love that the ancient Greeks called storge and that he calls natural affection. It is a need we share with the rest of the animal kingdom. Affection, Lewis says, is the feeling one associates with old shirts, old jokes, old memories, and old traditions. It is the shared bond between people who exist together, not by choice, but by circumstance. It causes us to accept abuse from a dear friend but reject the help of a friendly stranger. It does not require attraction, similarity, or even sympathy. Often, too, it is humbled by its associations. How many of us are fond of the crazy old friend or family member that we would not want to meet our new girlfriends or boyfriends? How nervous are we the first time a dear friend from university meets our family? How many dogs would admit to curling up with a cat each night?
I believe that storge and what I've called the home-feeling are one and the same. Feeling it evokes the sensation of the always-been-such and the old-so-and-so. Furthermore, I argue that modern society seems dedicated to eradicating it through just about every one of our so-called conveniences. The home-feeling, writes Lewis, is threatened by change, particularly personal change. A person who has always-been-such is now some other way, perhaps by education, by a new hobby, by a move, or by a religious conversion. The Christian family thus alienates or shuns the atheist son who has been stolen by some other group. He must have been deceived, they say. He wouldn't reject us!
Modern society, on the other hand, is based almost entirely on that kind of fluidity. "Dynamic content!" is the battle cry of the technology sector. The Internet disconnects us from our friends and families, providing them with ever-changing names and faces. JaneGirl83's name is familiar only as long as she decides not to change it. Instant messages allow us to keep track of our friends on a daily basis, but we often choose to talk about nothing but ourselves. After all, no situation, no bond, is keeping us together now. Most of us, after all, know more things about Hollywood, New York, and Washington than we know about our own cities and regions.
Quick: When was the last mayoral election in the nearest city? Who won? What have they done since then?
The automobile industry, assisted by government roads, has focused for a century on enabling us to drive farther while spending less money. When our children are grown, we fully expect them to move some three hundred miles away to attend a college we've visited only twice, and from which we know they may never return. Each of their childhood friends makes a similar decision, and a friendship born of the bonds of nearness and convenience is torn apart by distance and long distance charges. Childhood hobbies, dreams, and interests are replaced by their grown-up versions, which naturally differ enormously.
We develop psychological conditions to explain our emotions. We are depressed, we say, or perhaps we simply have some condition that renders us unable to interact properly with other people. We're too shy, too rude, too demanding. Our attention spans are too short, or too long, leaving us looking flighty or creepy. In short, only something wrong with us can explain the distance and the separation we're feeling. If nothing was wrong, we'd still feel the same way, right?
Next, we assume that maybe change is good, and that we don't feel right because things don't change enough! So we buy things. We accumulate antiques and strange family heirlooms as our beloved relatives pass away. We buy DVR systems and Nintendo consoles. We become a generation of 20- and 30-somethings playing with the same toys as middle school children. We take expensive vacations to the seashore, to the desert, to the mountains. We travel to other nations, and then feel good because we claim to comprehend their cultures. Even if we aren't quite satisfied, at least we're not as closed-minded as that other guy, right?
After a while, we reject consumerism altogether, citing its damaging effects on our psyche. The post-modern backlash against the consumerism of our parents' generation is one that has reverberated through every distant outpost of tradition, from church to family to television commericals. Modern products, as advertised, claim to put the power to make decisions about our taxes, our insurance, our children, our time, and our ideologies back into our hands - the hands of the consumer. Damn the producer who tries to entertain us on his schedule! Everything from Saturday night church services to TiVo are formulated to fulfill our supreme desire. We watch movies like Fight Club and nod our heads knowingly when Tyler Durden sarcastically comments about Swedish furniture.
We come to believe that if we can just hike the Appalachian Trail, manage our own television schedules, or backpack through the European countryside, everything will be okay. We will control our own destinies, going where the wind takes us! We will see fantastic sights which with awe like a child. Naturally, in such a desirable situation, the home-feeling we remember so fondly from childhood will return. Right?
But it doesn't.
Throughout all of this, we boldly march on, developing new relationships, new jokes, and new traditions. Often, we adopt the traditions and relationships of our significant others, but they are not quite the same. Sometimes, we encounter something old, something always in somebody else's life, and the familiar feeling floods back into us. We feel at ease around it, comfortable, at home. But then the bond breaks, the old-and-always goes away, and we are tossed back into the empty space between loneliness and longing.
When does it end? Will marriage solve the problem? Having a child? Buying a dog? I cannot answer that yet. I can only hope that because not everybody seems to feel this way, there is resolution for those of us who feel like we're clinging to a collection of driftwood, the only remnants of a beautiful ship that no longer exists, floating alone in the deep and unfamiliar water.
Maybe the answer is that everything new becomes old with time.
Maybe I need only to be patient.
Maybe I just need to let go.
But I like my driftwood.
It's always been there.
# posted by Dev @ 3:11 PM 
