Hat tip to Nancy Bopp, whose thoughtful Facebook note "I'm coming to your house today" prompted this entry.

I, too, have been pondering House and Home and what exactly I have been doing/not doing to make it a proper sort of dwelling. These thoughts are mostly the fault of E. Michael Jones' book Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology. Here are a couple excerpts from Chapter 1:

"The building was a meditation on the idea of home as seen through the lens of a French culture that had been permeated by centuries of Christianity. The building was an enculturation of the values that France held dear. It provided, as buildings like this were supposed to do, shelter from the elements, privacy, a place to rest, and, now, a place to recover from a war."

(Aren't we also beleaguered by this interminable war? By the people every day slaughtered, the land and livelihoods marred, and the supposed side of "right" wondering more and more if they made a "mistake" in starting the thing? Yet I've never thought of my home as a place of healing, the welcoming spot to recover from these atrocities. Unfortunately, too often, my house IS the atrocity, the enemy, the war, and all. And when I turn on the radio to hear of all the world-wide mayhem, there is a relief inside of me that I'm no longer trapped inside the house, but can still participate in the great exchange of ideas, hear of news, be it bad or good, and respond to that news.)

"The cultural heritage of the West was one of the first casualties of the Great War. The house was the locus of the home; it was the primary building, sheltering the primary cell of society, the family, which was the nurturing ground of the values men held most dear. It was there that man first learned about God. It was there that he learned his native language, which the Germans refer to as the Muttersprache, the 'mother language.' It was there that he learned that his language aligned him with a particular race and state. All of the more important human activities, which gave man his identity, took place in one sort of building or another, and those of most significance took place in the building known as the house."

(If you're a local yokel, and you're interested in a copy of the book, I strongly urge you to contact Joffre Swait of The Silver Chair Bookstore--he may have just bought the last new copies in existence. At the very least, he cleaned out the Ignatius Press warehouse. And he's local.)