Recently, I read two quotations about home. The first is from Katherine Mansfield, written in her diary:

“I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing. (Though I may write about cabmen. That’s no matter.) But warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for.”

The second comes from Alain de Botton, in The Architecture of Happiness:

“We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.”

Which reminds me of a third quotation I marked for myself recently — let me go find it. Ah, here it is, in Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, which I stopped reading halfway through. Why? I suppose because he writes so much about traveling and getting lost (in the Sahara!) that it made me feel lost as well, and that’s something I don’t want to feel right now. But I will get back to it soon. Anyway, here is the quotation:

“Ah! the miracle of a house is not that it shelters or warms you, nor that its walls belong to you. But that is has slowly deposited in us all those stored resources of gentle joy. And that deep within the heart it forms the shadowy range of hills in which our dreams like spring waters, are born . . .”

It seems as though all my life I’ve been longing for a house of my own. Not just an apartment, but what Katherine Masefield described: a house with a garden, where there are animals and books and pictures. Perhaps I feel that longing more acutely this semester because I’ve been moving around so much. This summer I went from Boston to London, then London to Budapest, then briefly to Vienna, then back to Budapest to Boston to Budapest and in a week I will be going to London. Then Budapest then Boston and I forget where next. I don’t mind traveling — I actually love traveling and seeing new places, especially when I can stay for a while and experience them more deeply. I even loved being in Vienna with my daughter for a few days this fall, having cake at the Belvedere, seeing the Klimts . . . I feel enormously privileged to be able to travel and see beautiful places at this point in my life. (I remember being a poor student and longing to be able to travel.)

But I do wish I had a house of my own, specifically with a garden, specifically with closets where I could put my clothes and bookshelves where I could put my books — a place that did not feel temporary. I’m longing for a refuge to short up my state of mind, to align me to the desirable version of myself — the creative version, the scholarly version, the one who reads and thinks and writes, and who can get rather lost in the endless corridors of airports. I think the important, evanescent side of me is the one that creates. I’m also longing for a place where I can store not just clothes and books but also time spent — where I can say, oh yes, I did this here a year ago, five years ago. Where I have memories.

The place I am now, the apartment in Budapest, does function in that way. After all, I lived here as a child. I came back when I was sixteen, twenty-three . . . I came back many times before I officially inherited it, so it does belong to me now, and I’m incredibly grateful to have a place that belonged to my grandparents and will one day belong to my daughter. It does form, perhaps not the shadowy range of hills, but the bricks and mortar from which at least some of my dreams are born. There is a part of me that belongs here, and that writes from here.

But there is another part of me that is still looking for home. I know it’s because we moved around so much when I was a child — there was never a childhood home to return to, never even a city I could identify as mine other than Budapest, which I lost for so many years. But it’s also because for me, a home is not just the walls you live inside; it’s also the garden around it, and we lived for so many years in apartments or townhouses where there were no gardens or the garden was a patio in the back. Perhaps I was too influenced, in my childhood, by books like The Secret Garden and The Wind in the Willows, but my idea of home has always been a house surrounded by a natural space. In Boston I have two shelves of gardening books — mostly collections of essays by people who created gardens, like Eleanor Perényi’s Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden. I still have not finished reading her memoir, More Was Lost, about her marriage with her husband, Baron Zsigmond Perényi, and moving to his estate in what was then rural Hungary but is now part of Ukraine, and having to flee to the United States during World War II. Her husband had been conscripted into the Hungarian army, and she was pregnant with their first child. Somehow, they never managed to reunite, and eventually divorced. Green Thoughts is about how she created a garden for herself in Connecticut. While writing this paragraph, I tried to find my copy of More Was Lost, but it does not seem to be in this apartment. Did I bring it to Boston? Is it on one of my bookshelves there? I am constantly having this experience, of realizing that a book or a pair of pants or something-or-other is in another country.

I suppose the reason I haven’t finished reading either Wind, Sand and Stars or More Was Lost is that I know things are going to be lost — neither of those stories have happy endings. Saint-Exupéry’s plane was eventually lost over the Mediterranean, and Perényi lost her home. Yes, she found a new one — she created an new one for herself — but I know her memoir is permeated with loss. Perhaps Green Thoughts is her way of writing her own happy ending. Perhaps all happy endings involve a garden.

Anyway, I am longing for a home, and I don’t yet know how I can find or create one. Meanwhile, I am grateful to be here in Budapest, where I was born, and to have my apartment in Boston, where I teach. I can’t stay there much longer, because I can’t afford the rent increases, so I will have to find another apartment soon. Then, I am sure, I will feel displaced and uprooted and evanescent again, especially because I will have to leave the little garden I created by the side of the building. It was my piece of earth, filled with hostas and astilbes and peonies — anything that can grow in the shade and survive rabbits. And of course, affording anything in Boston, especially on a university lecturer’s salary, is an exercise in insanity.

I don’t know how this story ends, but I’m not Perényi fleeing Hungary in wartime, nor Saint-Exupéry carrying mail over the desert, so I’m sure I will figure it out somehow. Whatever happens, the best way for me to deal with it is to write about it, because writing is how I think things through. As Mansfield write, “And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing.” This being whatever I’m living through at the moment, wherever I am at the time. Which right now is here, at my desk in the Budapest apartment, writing.

(The image is Schloss Kammer on the Attersee IV by Gustav Klimt. I chose this image because it looks a bit like the Hungarian home that Eleanor Perényi left behind.)