Coming into White Country

Abstract

We are all “home-seekers.” It is the great human enterprise, greater if less grand than the desire to discover and conquer new worlds, and the subject of so much of our most revered literature in the West. Getting (back) home is the great theme, of course, of one of the first poems, Homer’s Odyssey, the story of a twenty-plus-year ordeal. “Home is where one starts from,” writes T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets, which becomes the story of returning there, because, paradoxically, “The end is where we start from,” and so “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”¹ A rather homely form, the essay trains its capacious sights on the ordinary life and everyday experience in hopes of learning how to make the best use of time—and to live well at home. E. B. White described his mentor Henry David Thoreau as a home-seeker; Thoreau walked four hours a day (at least by his own account), considered himself “sans terre” (which he defined as “saunterer”),² and built his famous though temporary home at Walden Pond, two miles from town. White himself is all about getting home, being at home, and not at all about finding home, for he knows very well where home is.

… the kindly erasures of the snow …

—E. B. White, “Home-Coming”