Scruton on nostalgia, the search for home

This week First Things published a fascinating long-form essay on the late Sir Roger Scruton’s youth and education. I’ve been reading it in batches and am not quite finished with it, but I’ve already returned to this passage—from a review of a Milan Kundera novel quoted about halfway through the essay—several times:

“What place is there, in the modern world, for the old experience of homecoming—the nostos evoked by Homer in the story of Odysseus? . . . Nostalgia, [Kundera] reminds us, is intrinsic to the human condition and afflicts us in many ways. But it is never more painful than when the home that is yearned for has vanished for ever and when that home was in any case rejected.”

“The central theme of Scruton’s work,” the author of the essay notes, “is the search for home.” Late in life one of his primary concerns was the self-loathing of the Western intelligentsia and political establishment, which he termed “oikophobia”—oikos being the Greek word for household or home. He warned of the impoverishment wrought by losing one’s home and, as the passage above indicates, knew well what that impoverishment would mean, especially for people who haven’t simply lost a home but deliberately rejected it.

And of course the nod to Homer and Odysseus is perfect. Perhaps an upshot of the imperfect Nolan Odyssey will be an awareness—or at least a gut feeling—among the public of what they’ve lost or are in danger of losing. One hopes.

The First Things essay does a good job showing how complicated “home” was for Scruton, and therefore, given how much he overcame in order to appreciate it, how necessary. The review is presumably this one of Kundera’s Ignorance, from November 2002. It’s paywalled but I’m going to keep trying to find the whole thing.