'The road we know is always shorter...'

Verlyn Klinkenborg's "Editiorial Notebook" feature in yesterday's New York Times is among his greatest hits, an instant classic; it follows.

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The Familiar Place

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the geography of familiarity. By that I mean something like a map of my habitat, the paths I travel most often, the places I feel most comfortable, the routines embedded in the rural and urban landscapes I know best. Most days, familiarity seems inherent in the world right around me, but every now and then I remember that it’s really an artifact of consciousness, a form of perception that can be lost, say, in someone with Alzheimer’s. It’s disorienting to grasp that the world itself is neutral and that all the familiarity and unfamiliarity I feel is being carried around in my head.

A few weeks ago, I went to dinner at a restaurant in a part of northern Dutchess County that was utterly unknown to me. Afterward, I asked my GPS to guide me home. It did so, as always, with an eerie sang-froid, an unflappable inability to distinguish familiar from unfamiliar. I wound northward over the hills with no idea where I really was. And as I drove, I admired not only the beauty of the night but also the pleasurable sense of being comfortably lost. At last I came to an unfamiliar intersection and made a right. The moment I did so, I knew exactly where I was, and I could feel my sense of being displaced in the night slip away. It was like looking into an unknown sky and seeing the stars suddenly whirl about until they formed the age-old, long-familiar constellations of my childhood.

The surprise wasn’t just being reoriented so abruptly. It was also discovering that an unfamiliar world lay a few dozen yards off a road I drive all the time. In a way, the unfamiliarity of that world has been eroded now by driving through it once.

The more I think about that seam between the familiar and the unfamiliar — and how it feels to pass from one to the other — the clearer it becomes that humans instinctively generate a sense of familiarity. You can sense it for yourself the next time you drive someplace you’ve never been before. Somehow, it always feels as though it takes longer to get there than it does to get back home again. It’s as if there’s a principle of relativity, a bending of time, in the very concept of familiarity. The road we know is always shorter than the road we don’t know — even if the distances are the same.

How these matters feel to other species, I can’t even begin to guess. But what they mean for us is that home is ultimately a portable concept, something we’ve nearly all discovered for ourselves in our mobile lives. The trick, of course — and it is a hard one to master — is to think of home not as a place we go to or come from, not as something inherent in the world itself, but as a place we carry inside ourselves, a place where we welcome the unfamiliar because we know that as time passes it will become the very bedrock of our being.