For some time the notion of “home” has been on my mind in many ways.

Maybe it’s because of the horrific pictures of the recent Surfside Champlain Towers collapse in Florida, all those condos crumbled, imploding on each other. The families with their children, asleep, buried there along with their belongings; those who escaped with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

During the pandemic, when many people lost their jobs, there have been moratoriums on home evictions, but also insane competition for overpriced houses as people tried to move away from New York City to more distant, quieter areas of the suburbs. Then there were efforts in various cities to find solutions to the problem of homelessness and the increasingly large number of people living on the streets. In NYC, many were moved into hotels that were empty on the Upper West Side to provide some with a safe and lovely room. But this was followed with concerns by the families living in those neighborhoods, which challenged their liberalism with perceived threats of danger and a sense that their own homes had become less secure.

California, particularly Los Angeles, has faced increased problems with violence by and towards homeless people who have taken over areas by the shore, such as Venice Beach. As Slate reported in April, “Homelessness is the crisis eclipsing just about every other problem in Los Angeles right now” and has spread into every neighborhood. It’s clear the issue of homelessness is enormous and growing.

I also have a personal concern that hits closer to “home” for me, which I’m aware reflects my privilege as someone who has had meaningful work for most of my life, serving as a teacher and mentor of young people. Almost seventeen years ago, I moved from central Illinois to NYC to take up a position at Barnard College after living and teaching in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois for more than thirty years. I was part of a community with plenty of friends and didn’t want to leave them or my home behind. So I kept my house while renting an apartment in the Bronx, just north of Manhattan, where I could easily commute to and from my new job. And each day when I would return and look out at the Hudson River, I’d watch sunsets and clouds over the New Jersey Palisades, the weather moving in from the west, much as I’d watch the storm clouds in Illinois come over the Prairie.

Born under the astrological sign of Cancer, I’m a home body by nature, a nester. So, I made my rental apartment a real home, made it mine with rescued old furniture freshened with colorful pillows and soft rugs. My home in Illinois is my safety-net, which I own, whereas my apartment in a building of 600 units is a rental. And it makes me wonder. Will I always be able to have (or want) two homes? Does that feel right when so many do not even have a home? Do I remain in the rented apartment I love, even if I can never own it, knowing the situation there could change? 

 I want stability, security, permanence.  And I’m not the only one. 

My father was obsessed with having a home and not losing it. Born in Russia, homeless from 13 until he was about 30, he temporarily lived in caves for a few years in Palestine. After that experience, there was nothing he wanted more than a home, a real home, and when he finally had one in Connecticut, he filled it with so many things, including a framed sign he hung on the kitchen wall that read, “This house must not be sold,” as if he could command permanence.

That longing for a home, a safe dwelling, seems built into us all. Many animals have it too.

But when we look at history, we see things beyond our control; forcible changes in which people are driven from their homes and where entire communities have been destroyed. I think of the long history of Jewish diaspora—first written in the Bible, prophesied in Deuteronomy—the northern kingdom of Israel conquered by Assyrians, the southern by Babylonia, then later under Roman rule. I think of African families, transported to the Americas and made the enslaved property of white people; of Native Americans forced on the trail of tears. I think of Nazis taking Jewish men, women and children from their homes, sending them to concentration camps where they were gassed or shot.  Of Palestinians displaced from their homes. I think of war in Syria and Iraq, the destruction of homes.  A world of refugees.

Now we have learned about Indigenous children in Canada taken from their homes to church-run “schools” to de-program them of their native identity only to end up buried in large graveyards.  The minority ethnic Muslim Uyghurs and others have been imprisoned, sent to concentration camps (“re-education center”) by China. I think of the whole world where so many peoples have been displaced, so much migration (some desired, but much forced, like a punishment). Of course there are the natural forces—earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, mud and landslides, the fires in California that destroyed the entire city of (ironically, but aptly named) Paradise.

It’s hard not to go to a dark place as I think of all this. Yet, I think of the recent movie “Nomadland,” about people, some survivors of various traumas, who choose to live on their own in RVs or trucks, travelling around, forming their own communities, feeling free and independent. But still they’ve made their homes portable like the snail or turtle that takes its home with it.

There’s something in us that wants our home to be a symbol of rest, peace and security, however we define it, and yet deep down we know it’s impermanent, vulnerable. The prophets in the Hebrew Bible envisioned the people of Israel, scattered to “the four corners of the earth” brought back by God to their home and its center in Jerusalem. In the New Testament, Paul in Galatians chapter 4, redefines home to be spiritual, “Jerusalem above” (in heaven), not Jerusalem below, the earthly city. And yet, don’t we always long for a place here, while we are alive?

The seventeenth-century poet John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” ends with one of the most moving scenes of departure and exile, as Adam and Eve bid farewell to the only home they’ve known in a forced exile. Milton miraculously manages to show us their longing and immense loss, but also gives hope. Having eaten the fruit from the tree of knowledge, God sends the angel Michael to tell them they must leave the Garden of Eden. Adam worries he will no longer see God or be able to talk with God, but Michael tells him God isn’t confined to a place. In other words, the divine presence will always be there, wherever Adam goes, internally, spiritually and maybe in others who are also created in the image of God. Eve cries at losing her flowers and plants, which are like her children, the things she nurtures. In the last lines of the epic, they leave the Garden, holding hands.

    In either hand the hastning Angel caught

   Our lingring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate

   Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast

   To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer'd.

   They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld

   Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,

   Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate

   With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:

   Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;

   The World was all before them, where to choose

   Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

   They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

   Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

  We can’t help but weep with them, because that is also our story, living in the uncertain present with an even more uncertain future, seeking a home that can only be temporary, as we try not to think about that, as we make our “homes” wherever we are.  For this is the only way to live.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about “productivity” and worrying about it. It is part of the culture in America, though I realize not only here. A growing trend among those lucky enough to be employed is working longer hours than the traditional forty-hour week. Younger workers in certain sectors are expected to work such long hours and some do not take vacations, even paid ones, fearing they might be seen as lazy, not valuable or considered replaceable. Our smartphones, tablets, etc., result in being available 24/7 and we feel the pressure to always be on call, like doctors used to be. The distinction between professional and private life is being eroded, including in my world of academia.

In my profession of teaching, publishing research and engaging in various kinds of service, we are urged to be productive, complimented on our output, and if we are lucky, rewarded for it. Barnard College, where I moved seventeen years ago, feels like a welcome exception. Our Provost at the end of this spring semester, knowing how much extra effort we had put into our students with remote teaching, urged all of us to make time to take care of ourselves this summer.

The pandemic, with the physical and psychic confinement we felt, has made a lot of people rethink their lives and how we live. Recently, I read an article about how younger employees are thinking about what kind of life they want, choosing not just better pay and flexibility, but quality of life with boundaries, which means having a personal life beyond work and measuring it by more than “productivity.”

Maybe my boundaries are too permeable, too undefined, though I view this as a positive, feeling that everything is connected in my life and provides me with a gratifying wholeness. It’s not like there’s pleasure and then there’s work. Work gives me pleasure (well, except for grading papers). I love teaching, but I also love being involved in a research project where I’m discovering new things, figuring stuff out and expanding my mind. Writing is part of that, though it’s the most difficult part, often anxious-making, especially when it comes to deadlines. Moreover, many of my friends are both personal and professional. In fact, one of the great sources of my happiness is that through work I have made close, life-long friendships. Still, I don’t have any hobbies and can’t remember the last time I took a real vacation.

The death of my husband in December 2019, and then the long challenge of Covid-19, physical isolation paradoxically paired with a demand for more work, has made me more contemplative. Why do I work so hard after all these years? Is it simply a personal choice or have I also absorbed the valuing of productivity that’s increasingly characterized our capitalistic culture?

As far back as the 6th grade I’ve been absorbed by doing research, reading books and writing papers. It is natural to me and the way my mind works. Sometimes those activities provided an escape from less pleasant things. If you are really busy and focused, you don’t have to think about your troubles or what makes you anxious. Work is simultaneously both focused attention and distraction.

In my field, that kind of focus is what makes for success since academics are expected to do their research and writing, all while teaching. 

At some point, possibly in the early 1980s, academia became increasingly obsessed with productivity. I remember it well from my time teaching at the University of Illinois, a research university. As institutions became more corporatized, notions of measurable value and productivity came to dominate, affecting not just budgets, but the overall work environment. The more “productivity” was valued, the less teaching was appreciated, as well as the work/life balance that went with it. 

Every year in my department we each filled out our faculty report, a productivity status beginning with “Research.” This included books and articles published, work submitted and forthcoming, work submitted but not yet accepted and work in progress. You could tell what “counted,” and what didn’t. Then came “Teaching” and finally “Service.” A scale of value, which I loathed. 

Once when I was on a university Senate committee that tried addressing such campus culture, we met with the Provost. I still remember him boasting that the more rigorous our requirements for promotion, meaning the more books and articles we produced, the better off we would be. This was his explanation for why the criteria for tenure and promotion had been rising. I asked him, sarcastically, “So you think ideally the criteria should increase indefinitely?” “Yes,” he replied with not a word about the quality of the work; it was all just a matter of the numbers (he was a mathematician after all).

How happy I was when I moved to take my position at Barnard College in 2004 when the Provost and President informed me that I was expected to also have a personal life, that balance was necessary.  I thought I’d gone to heaven. Maybe that’s the difference between a liberal arts college and a research university. When we fill out those personnel forms at the end of the year, “Teaching” came first, then “Research,” which was broadly defined, and various kinds of “Service” to the college. In other words, all these things counted.

And yet, for seventeen years I have continued working as I did before, always concerned with being “productive.” Always taking on more assignments (including reviews of younger faculty) while fretting about deadlines on articles and essays, always the pressure to write another book. Admittedly, I’ve put this pressure on myself. Sometimes I feel like I’m running a race where the goal keeps getting pushed further and further. It’s not competitive; it’s a race with myself!

Academia is no “ivory tower.”

I think of Ben Franklin’s advice to himself to be “industrious” — the mantra of the corporate world, of capitalism. I’m a doer. I like to be busy.

I remember the poet Andrew Marvell, with his famous lines in “To His Coy Mistress:” “But at my back I always hear, Time’s winged chariot hurrying near “— advising us to seize the day, to enjoy its pleasures.

  Those words mean more the older I get.

    Marvell also wrote “The Garden,” a poem about retiring to a place of peace, after we’ve run our race, competing for “the palm, the oak, or bayes” — wreaths recognizing achievement. His speaker lies in the garden as “Ripe apples drop about my head; / The luscious clusters of the vine / Upon my mouth do crush their wine.” Only the bees buzzing around the flowers are “industrious.”

    Well, that kind of life is too passive for me, even if it might seem nice for a couple of hours. I’d be bored.

Can’t there be some nice middle ground?