Everyone loves Facebook. What better place to chronicle party after party with pictures of the same people doing the exact same things? But oh my gosh look at that dress....
People love YouTube as well, where the basic philosophy is that you're an idiot and so is everyone else. Here's a video of some MIT students singing "Don't Stop Believing." No one knows what we're believing in but hell, don't stop!
We live in the so-called "Information-Age" typified by Cisco Systems commercials picturing people happily sending each other vacuous videos. The message: technology will provide meaning to your life.
But the onslaught of mass communication slowly dismantles the bonds of society. People watch television alone, go to bars with recent acquaintances, become addicted to pornography, disassociate from their families in order to "find themselves" and embark on a host of other wanderings.
Basically, people are becoming estranged from their homes.
Nothing more grossly portrays the future loss of home than Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." The main character is a "fireman" charged not with fighting fires but with destroying all the books in the world.
One old woman prefers to die with her books rather than go on living. The fireman's wife, on the other hand, spends all her time at home with "the family," which is a giant room with enormous television screens.
Which is it going to be, books or TV? As Bradbury suspected, in our day and age the answer is increasingly television. Televisions, instead of creating an imaginative sense of home, more often create fake connections with fake people.
Just look at "American Idol." What could be emptier than trendy youths (poorly) singing the kitschy tunes of yesteryear to millions of grinning fans?
So I naturally thought it was ridiculous when, during orientation, a professor described Duke as the new home of incoming freshmen. Duke is no home, just a brief stop on the modern journey of technological self-indulgence.
But what is a home?
Home is a place of family, where you can be comfortable among people who love unconditionally. Family members provide support: they commiserate with your failings while celebrating your successes. With family you can laugh and find joy in a hostile world.
Home is a place of familiarity. The home allows people to forge identities without undertaking senseless and ephemeral introspection. By looking out the windows and seeing sturdy trees and friendly neighbors you see your place in the universe and your self reflected in the world.
Home is also a place of religion and wholeness. You can believe in God and take pleasure in the glory of creation. A proper home is a unity such that all things take their places in a proper order. This creates a sense, even if it is an illusion, of belonging.
The best song, if you ask me, in the Talking Heads concert-turned-movie entitled "Stop Making Sense" is called "This Must Be the Place." Its author, David Byrne, called it a "love song to a lamp," but really it is a story of being happy at home.
Byrne sings, "Home is where I want to be." It is a place to be "loved until the heart stops." In other words, he seeks permanence in life through love and togetherness despite the nearness of death.
He sings later that "home is where I want to be but I guess I'm already there." Home is the end of all our searching, when there is no more searching left. It's both the beginning and the end of life.
The Talking Heads concert reveals our difficulty in coming home and finding meaning in the modern world. Our challenge is to find a private place of home apart from the superficiality of public life.
Samuel Johnson wrote that "to be happy at home is the end of all human endeavor." If only we could find such a place.
Such a place where the anxieties of life beckon not a little. A place to which all effort aims but where one needs no effort to live peaceably. A place where even talk and conversation are not always necessary-where glances, looks and smiles could suffice. A place of rest and relaxation. A place to come back to. A place, in other words, to call home.
Wheeler Frost is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every other Monday.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.