be to bring children up without a culture till theyncame to years of discretion, and then let themnchoose. This would mean bringing children upnwithout a home; without intimacy, which getsnunder the skin, penetrates, shapes and forms thenvery tissue and fiber, muscle and sinew, of ournbeing. But children who are held apart from life, ornrushed from one set of people to another, no fixednabode, modern homelessness as the frenetic racenbetween houses, temporary watering holes, do notnbecome exceptionally capable of choosing. You cannchoose only between given alternatives, and to graspnany alternative you need years of acclimatizationnand practice in choosing from one particular set, innseeing what choices amount to. And to need tonlearn to hold on to something. All this is not anmisfortune. A culture is a way of awakening ournfaculties. People proficient in one culture cannusually make some sense of another. There is nonprison. We can always walk on if we want tonenough. What we cannot do is something which isnno loss — namely, be nobody and nowhere.n[Emphasis hers].nNobody and nowhere. Searching for intimacy, never tonfind it because it requires a home. Our need for a homenshould guide us, should tell us something about ourselves,nabove what happens to us when familiar landscapesndisappear—the disorientation, the shock, the sense that Income from “nowhere” when my home is “gone” give usnfurther knowledge of ourselves as home bodies.nRobbed of memory, dislocated in time, the history of ournreal intimate memories comes to seem abstract. We find itnhard to call them our own. We find it hard to call anythingnour own, to connect with anyone because the spirit has notnbeen, or has not remained, enhoused. Home “makers”nmake possible a certain sort of love and that love is at thenbasis of human culture, the work of Eros, not the destructionnof Thanatos. This is a recognition that Antonio Gramscinseems to have come to toward the end of his life when henwrote,nHow many times have I wondered if it is reallynpossible to forge links with a mass of people whennone has never had strong feelings for anyone, notneven one’s parents; if it is possible to love ancollectivity when one has not been deeply lovednoneself, by individual human creatures. Hasn’t thisnhad some effect on my life as a militant, has it notntended to make me sterile and reduce my quality asna revolutionary by making everything a matter ofnintellect, or mere magical calculation.nWe need to reclaim home as a special social space thatnmakes possible a wider civil life. Without this immediate andnparticular home the human spirit becomes a restless andndangerous creature seeking victims. That destructiveness isnour best clue to the lacuna where home ought to be and thenblack hole in mind and spirit that it is. If we lack the reliablenknowledge of self and other that home, and its intimacy, isncapable of providing, we will never be “at home” in thenlarger world, we will never understand, nor be able ton18/CHRONICLESnnninterpret, the expressions and actions, words and deeds, ofnothers. If nobody in particular has been family, no one cannbe truly familiar. Without knowledge firsthand of whatnhome stands for we would all become flailing and formlessnbeasts rampaging outside the corral rather than grazing,ntogether, within it.nIndividuals need the particular spirit of the Pentates tonbreathe cultural life into them as individuals and send themnon their way — away from home but not into a homelessnworld. For home becomes an inner landscape, and we cannreach out to enclose others within that landscape rather thannto shut them out, shunt them aside, or kill them, ifnnecessary, if they come too near, or seem too alien.nThe first home: where hearth is, and heart too. But thenheart is also at home in that culture with which we are onnintimate terms. This is our own culture, most of the time,nthough there are some who feel alienated from the culturalnhomes their own nations or countries or people provide andnoffer. Alienation, anomie; two markers of the modernncondition. (No doubt markers of every previous epoch asnwell, but alienation and anomie are the flip side of our mass,nreckless, rootless search for intimacy. They describe us;nintimacy defines what we want. But who knows what wenneed?)nThe term my grandmother uses to describe her peoplenand herself is unsere Leute, our people, a people, innher case, without a country but with a distinctive andnauthentic historic identity. She would never see herself asn(could not see herself, could not be on intimate terms with)nsome abstraction like “class”; always her “peoplehood” isnparamount. “Our people’s” way of life was threadednthrough and through by a populist pietism — a deeplynrooted animus against experts (“big shots,” to my Grandma)nand the too powerful (“pride goeth before a fall and some ofnthem guys are gonna fall hard, just you wait”), and the toonrich (“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of anneedle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God”).nThis pietism cautioned against judging things by appearancenonly; stressed responsibility to and for my life as a social lifenlived among others towards whom I had duties and responsibilities;nadvocated going the “extra mile” (the Good Samaritannparable here) and tempering justice with mercy (“thenProdigal Son” comes in at this point).nGrandma is on intimate terms with the culture of unserenLeute. Then she enters another culture, one in whichnmarket images of human beings as calculators of marginalnutility prevails. None of the values of “our people” meshnneatly with the needs of capitalism; indeed, they clash atnnearly every point along the way. This is the clash of trulynintimate cultures — organic communities composed of faceto-facenrelations, both tight and restrictive, solid andnnurturing—with the .dissolving acids of modernity. The tiesnof such communities were seen, by those philosophies thatnspun off (and out of control) from Enlightenment rationalismnand 19th-century historic myths of progress, as preciselynwhat we all needed to be “liberated from.” Such enlightened,nprogressive beings would be “at home” in the widernuniverse; they needed no particular place, no particularnspace: they would be at home in the universal ether, in anderacinated universal consciousness. For my grandmothern