The street migrates into the living room

So the house is far less the refuge into which people retreat than the inexhaustible reservoir from which they flood out. Life bursts not only from doors, not only into front yards, where people on chairs do their work (for they have the faculty of making their bodies tables). Housekeeping utensils hang from balconies like potted plants. From the windows of the top floors come baskets on ropes for mail, fruit, and cabbage. 

Just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar, so, only much more loudly, the street migrates into the living room. 

 

Walter Benjamin, 'Naples' in One-Way Street and Other Writings (NLB, 1979) p. 174 

En flyttande människa är inte rotlös

 Alla vet att en flyttande människa inte är rotlös – hon flyttar bara mellan olika hem.

Det finns en hisnande motsättning i de svenska myndigheternas tolkning av ordet "nomad". Eftersom nomader per definition är människor som flyttar, anses de kunna flyttas på.

Elin Anna Labba, Herrarna satte oss hit (Norstedts, 2020) p. 71

Answering for a dwelling place

We had also recalled the fact, at one point, that the problem of hospitality was coextensive with the ethical problem. It is always about answering for a dwelling place, for one's identity, one's space, one's limits, for the ethos as abode, habitation, house, hearth, family, home. So we should now examine the situations where not only is hospitality coextensive with ethics itelf, but where it can seem that some people, as it has been said, place the law of hospitality above a "morality" or a certain "ethics."

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 149-151 

There is no house or interior without a door or windows

In order to constitute the space of a habitable house and a home, you also need an opening, a door and windows, you have to give up a passage to the outside world [l'etrangerl. There is no house or interior without a door or windows. The monad of home has to be hospitable in order to be ipse, itself at home, habitable at-home in the relation of the self to itself.

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) p. 61 

One can become virtually xenophobic in order to protect or claim to protect one's own hospitality

The perversion and pervertibility of this law (which is also a law of hospitality) is that one can become virtually xenophobic in order to protect or claim to protect one's own hospitality, the own home that makes possible one's own hospitality. [...] I want to be master at home (ipse, potis, potens, head of house, we have seen all that), to be able to receive whomever I like there. Anyone who encroaches on my "at home," on my ipseity, on my power of hospitality, on my sovereignty as host, I start to regard as an undesirable foreigner, and virtually as an enemy. This other becomes a hostile subject, and I risk becoming their hostage.

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 53-55

The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right

A proper name is never purely idividual.

If we wanted to pause for a moment on this significant fact, we would have to note once again a paradox or a contradiction: this right to hospitality offered to a foreigner "as a family," represented and protected by his or her family name, is at once what makes hospitality possible, or the hospitable relationship to the foreigner possible, but by the same token that limits and prohibits it. Because hospitality, in this situation, is not offered to an anonymous new arrival and someone who has neither name, nor patronym, nor family, nor social status, and who is therefore treated not as a foreigner but as another barbarian. We have alluded to this: the difference, one of the subtle and sometimes ungraspable differences between the foreigner and the absolute other is that the latter cannot have a name or a family name; the absolute or unconditional hospitality I would like to offer him or her presupposes a break with hospitality in the ordinary sense, with conditional hospitality, with the right to or pact of hospitality. In saying this, once more, we are taking account of an irreducible pervertibility. The law of hospitality, the express law that governs the general concept of hospitality, appears as a paradoxical law, pervertible or perverting. It seems to dictate that absolute hospitality should break with the law of hospitality as right or duty, with the "pact" of hospitality. To put it in different terms, absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights.

Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) pp. 23-25

Through permanent childhood we maintain the poetry of the past

The house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting.

[...]

The house we were born in is more than an embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams.

[...]

It is on the plane of the daydream and not on that of facts that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us. Through this permanent childhood, we maintain the poetry of the past. To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit it in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) pp. 15-16

The house shelters daydreaming

If I were asked to name the main benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace. Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths. Daydreaming even has a privilege of autovalorization. It derives direct pleasure from its own being. Therefore the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p.6

An entire past comes to dwell in a new house

An entire past comes to dwell in a new house.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p.5

Only those who have learned to curl up can inhabit with intensity

After having followed teh day-dreams of inhabiting these uninhabitable places, I returned to images that, in order for us to live them, require us to become very small, as in nests and shells. Indeed in our houses we have nooks and corners in which we like to curl up comfortably. To curl up belongs to the phenomenology of the verb to inhabit, and only those who have learned to do so can inhabit with intensity.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1969) p. xxxiv

Everything is visiting. Nothing is native.

Almost the entire flora and fauna of Britain has arrived in the past 10,000 years. Everything is visiting. Nothing is native.

Fred Pearce, The New Wild (Icon Books Ltd, 2016) p. 108

The nagging worry of departure

Packing up. The nagging worry of departure. Lost keys, unwritten labels, tissue paper lying on the floor. I hate it all. Even now, when I have done so much of it, when I live, as the saying goes, in my boxes. Even today, when shutting drawers and flinging wide an hotel wardrobe, or the impersonal shelves of a furnished villa, is a methodical matter of routine, I am aware of sadness, of a sense of loss. Here, I say, we have lived, we have been happy. This has been ours, however brief the time. Though two nights only have been spent beneath a roof yet we leave something of ourselves behind.Nothing material, not a hair-pin on a dressing-table, not an empty bottle of Aspirin tablets, not a handkerchief beneath a pillow, but something indefinable, a moment of our lives, a thought, a mood.

This house sheltered us, we spoke, we loved within those walls. That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (Virago Press, 2003) p. 49

Build and dwell

The human being cannot build and dwell, that is to say, possess a dwelling in which he lives, without also possessing something more (or less) than himself: his relation to the possible and the imaginary.

Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) p. 82

Glass is the concrete negation of dwelling

Glass is the concrete negation of dwelling. Not only because architectural form drowns in it, but, because glass, when so used, renders visible those who seek shelter within it. [...] The language of absence here testifies to the absence of dwelling – to the consummate separation between building and dwelling which no heterotopia is capable of remedying. The "great glass windows" are the nullity, the silence of dwelling. They negate dwelling as they reflect the metropolis. And reflection only is permitted to these forms.

Massimo Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’ in Oppositions, 21 (M.I.T. Press, 1980) p. 114

To build is to know oneself as a dweller

To build, for Eupalinos, was to know oneself – since building is dwelling and dwelling is being, being-in-peace, being-at-home. To build is to know oneself as a dweller. And homes are cherished by the dweller as beloved objects.

Massimo Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’ in Oppositions, 21 (M.I.T. Press, 1980) p. 109

Stories and legends that haunt the urban space

Totalitarianism attacks what it quite correctly calls superstitions: supererogatory semantic overlays that insert themselves "over and above" and "in excess", and annex to a past or poetic realm a part of the land the promoters of technical rationalities and financial profitabilities had reserved for themselves.

Ultimately, since proper names are already "local authorities" or "superstitions," they are replaced by numbers: on the telephone, one no longer dials Opera, but 073. The same is true of the stories and legends that haunt urban space like superfluous or additional inhabitants. They are the object of a witch-hunt, by the very logic of the techno-structure. But their extermination (like the extermination of trees, forests, and hidden places in which such legends live) marks the city a "suspended symbolic order". The habitable city is thereby annulled.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (University of California Press, 1988) p. 106

All places are dis-places

All places, including homelands, are dis-places.

Ackbar Abbas 'Migration as spatial fantasy' in After the event: New perspectives on art history (Manchester University Press, 2010) p. 42

The trick is to be at home in many homes

It is not true, the novelist and the philosopher suggest in unison, that great art has no homeland – on the contrary, art, like the artists, may have many homelands, and most certainly more than one. Rather than homelessness, the trick is to be at home in many homes, but to be in each inside and outside at the same time, to combine intimacy with the critical look of an outsider, involvement with detachment – a trick which sedentary people are unlikely to learn. Learning the trick is the chance of the exile: technically an exile – one that is in, but not of the place. The unconfinedness that results from this condition reveals the homely truths to be man-made and un-made, and the mother tongue to be an endless stream of communication between generations and a treasury of messages always richer than any of their readings and forever waiting to be unpacked anew.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 207

The world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts

He told the boy that although he was huérfano still he must cease his wanderings and make for himself some place in the world because to wander in this way would become for him a passion and by this passion he would become estranged from men and so ultimately from himself. He said that the world could only be known as it existed in men's hearts. For while it seemed a place which contained men it was in reality a place contained within them and therefore to know it one must look there and come to know those hearts and to do this one must live with men and not simply pass among them.

Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing (Picador, 2011) p. 137

Home is a place where you have never been

You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and more reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossed (Gollancz, 2002) p. 48