Caleb Burdine

“Charles Ryder, the successful dilettante, the antiquarian, the Bohemian poseur, is finally woven into what is a true culture. Brideshead is his home, not because he grew up there (he did not), but because it has placed him, as if he were a stone, in an ancient edifice of meaning. He is in communion with the Crusaders who fought at Acre, now in ruins, and Jerusalem, also in ruins. He is in communion with the friend of his youth, the alcoholic Sebastian, now an exile, a pilgrim, and a man with a home, half in and half out of a community of monks in North Africa, where one morning, as his sister Cordelia foretells, “after one of his drinking bouts, he’ll be picked up at the gate dying, and show by a mere flicker of the eyelid that he is conscious when they give him the last sacraments. It’s not such a bad way of getting through one’s life.”12 It beats secular exhaustion and a shot of morphine. This being home is not a sentiment. It is a felt reality, and from this day on it gives form to Charles’s life. “You’re looking unusually cheerful today,” a soldier tells him in the last line of the book.”
― Anthony Esolen, Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World