I was moved—deeply so, as you will see—by Audrey Unverferth’s beautiful European Conservative essay explaining why she fell in love with Budapest, but could not stay here in the city we shared. Her family lives in the United States, and the pull of home was too strong. She writes not as someone too weak to live far from her parents and grandparents, but as a young woman who, having lived across a continent and an ocean from them, saw from that perspective what truly matters to her—and had the strength to return.
She writes:
Budapest is light and it is magic, but my family is not waiting behind the windows that glow along the riverbanks. Somewhat ironically, I’ve fallen in love with a city that can never be my home.
These months in Budapest are fleeting, but they have nonetheless taught me to pause—to seek beauty, not just when everything is exciting, but also when it is mundane. If I can lug a watermelon for miles in the heat back home and find it somehow, unexpectedly, glorious, then I will have really triumphed.
When I leave, I will miss my friends. I will miss Budapest’s beauty. I will also miss its mundane. Can I recapture this feeling back home?
Moreover, after months of train rides and walks around foreign cities, can I embrace what is grounded and familiar? Home is not ephemeral. For an American, it is not the German village barely glimpsed from a train window or the unexpected Estonian bar with live music. It’s landing in Montana after months abroad to find my grandparents waiting in arrivals. We were all tired and they took way too many photos, but it didn’t matter. Their welcome home was the highlight of my summer.
Audrey—I can call her that, because she became a friend while in Budapest—has taken what we call a “nostos journey,” a concept that comes to us from ancient Greece. The nostos journey is a pilgrimage back home after great and heroic adventure. Think of Odysseus and his long, winding journey back to Ithaka, and Penelope. Granted, Audrey did not have to resist the Sirens or do battle with a Cyclops; all she had to do was board a flight. Still, it is no small thing for a cosmopolitan young American who loves Europe to turn her back on it because she believes her true life is elsewhere—in her case, in the American West, a land quite unlike the capital of the Magyars.
Audrey’s observation about how an American can never really feel at home in Europe recalls a similar one made by the young American writer Truman Capote when he made his first visit to the continent, in 1948:
In London a young artist said to me, “How wonderful it must be for an American traveling in Europe the first time; you can never be a part of it, so none of the pain is yours, you will never have to endure it—yes, for you there is only the beauty.”
Not understanding what he meant, I resented this; but later, after some months in France and Italy, I saw that he was right: I was not a part of Europe, I never would be. Safe, I could leave when I wanted to, and for me there was only the honeyed, hallowed air of beauty. But it was not so wonderful as the young man had imagined: it was desperate to feel that one could never be a part of moments so moving, that always one would be isolated from this landscape and these people; and then gradually I realized I did not have to be a part of it: rather, it could be a part of me. The sudden garden, opera night, wild children snatching flowers and running up a darkening street, a wreath for the dead and nuns in noon light, music from the piazza, a Paris pianola and fireworks on La Grande Nuit, the heart-shaking surprise of mountain visions and water views (lakes like green wine in the chalice of volcanoes, the Mediterranean flickering at the bottoms of cliffs), forsaken far-off towers falling in twilight and candles igniting the jeweled corpse of St. Zeno of Verona—all a part of me, elements for the making of my own perspective.
Some Americans do make a permanent home in Europe, and take on its pain, even amid the beauty. Still, there is no way it can be ours in the way it belongs to those born here. This is through no fault of our own; this is simply what it means to live in Time.
In my own case, I might never again live in the American South, where I was born and raised, but the South lives in me, because it gave me my earliest memories, and therefore a framework with which to understand the world. If I remained in Budapest the rest of my days, I could never know this city and its people in the way I know Louisiana. Nor could a Hungarian who expatriated to New Orleans ever really know that place as a native does, no matter how much he loved it.
To some, this is a tragedy—in America, it is common to encounter immigrants who love the country with more passion than many natives, who take it for granted—but there is no way to escape it. To choose to make a place one’s home is a fine thing, but as religious converts know, it’s not the same thing as having received a place or a tradition as one’s own from the beginning. No amount of love for the place (or tradition) chosen can change that. The particular qualities of the thing become inextricably woven into the fabric of one’s sense of self.
It’s like this: in 2006, when I converted to Orthodox Christianity, I asked a priest what I needed to read to become Orthodox. He smiled at me, and said charitably that there are lots of books I could read to learn about Orthodoxy, but there’s only one way to become Orthodox, and that’s to live out the traditions, one day at a time. Eventually Orthodoxy would become my way of life—but not quickly or easily. I didn’t understand what he meant, but now, eighteen years later, I see he was right.
Orthodoxy is not so much a summary of theological propositions as it is a way of life. On paper, I became just as Orthodox as any Russian babushka on the day I was chrismated. But in experience, it took many years and much submission to the tradition for Orthodoxy to sediment itself into my bones—and even then, the babushka will always, at some level, participate in the condition of being Orthodox at a depth I can’t hope to reach.
It is surely for the best that Audrey has taken her nostos journey when it was relatively easy for her—that is, when she, by virtue of her youth, has been less marked by experience of the world than she would have been had she waited. This makes re-integration into the world of home much easier than it would have been had the experiences of life far from home had woven themselves into her consciousness. It is often said that you can’t go home again, which means that as Time flows through you, and through all the people back home, it changes you all, such that the recovery of the harmony you once felt becomes impossible.
I have lived that. But before then, when I was around the same age that Audrey is now, I lived something more painful: the shock realization that I could not go home again not because I did not fit in, and never had.
In 1993, I was twenty-six years old, and just beginning what looked like a promising career as a Washington journalist. I loved the city, my new friends there, and my work. Yet after only a year and a half, I packed up my things and moved back to rural south Louisiana, to my hometown. Why? My younger sister and her husband, who lived in our village, welcomed the birth of their first child. A new generation was now starting life on our land, and I ached to be part of it.
Yes, it was hard to give up my D.C. dreams, and my D.C. friends, to return to a small rural town on the Mississippi River. But the craving to be with my family there was overwhelming. It did not take long to realize that my father would be too difficult to live with. He was a great man in most respects, but he was also a domineering one, and insisted that to live in right relation to him, and to be properly reconciled to his domain, I had to be like him in every way. I was made of different stuff; it was unbearable. I returned to Washington a few months later, chastened, and determined not to make that mistake again.
In the years that followed, I built a good journalistic career for myself. I eventually married, and started my own family in New York City. We moved later to Dallas, had two more children, and in 2010 relocated to Philadelphia for a job. In that year, though, came the terrible news that my sister had terminal cancer. She lived with it for nineteen months before dying at home, in the arms of her husband. My wife and I decided that our place was now in Louisiana, with my family there, helping my widowed brother-in-law raise the children still at home, and giving our own three children a real sense of place in a land where their family has roots.
I made that mistake again; it went very badly. My family there rejected us because we were not like them. We were now City People in their eyes, and therefore always to be suspected, and kept at arm’s length, as strangers. I did not see that coming. The shock of it made me chronically ill for three years. Nor did my marriage survive the fallout. After ten years of often intense suffering that began with my Louisiana family’s verdict, my wife and I divorced in 2022.
For reasons that must remain private, my older son, then 24, and I left Louisiana for Budapest in the wake of his mother’s decision to seek divorce—a decision with which I ruefully agreed, though I would not have executed it as she chose to do. Since then, I’ve lived and worked in the Hungarian capital, recovering from this trauma and thinking hard about Home.
What does it mean when your birth family rejects you and your wife and children as unworthy, because you’re Not Like Them? And then, when your own family breaks apart for good? What is Home, anyway?
For me, the answer mostly comes through my reading of the Commedia of Dante Alighieri. This matchless poem of Western civilization—only the Iliad and the Odyssey can compare—emerged after the late medieval Tuscan poet suffered a total catastrophe halfway through his life. A celebrated literary figure by then, and a senior civic leader in Florence, his birthplace, Dante fell on the wrong side of the cutthroat politics of his city, and found himself suddenly exiled, for good. He lost everything, and spent the rest of his life as a wanderer, dependent on the charity of patrons for his livelihood.
Dante never fully recovered from the loss. But out of his suffering, he built a cathedral in verse, over 14,000 lines of the most beautiful and wisest poetry ever written. In Paradiso, the third and final volume of the Commedia, the pilgrim Dante (that is, the poem’s protagonist, who experiences an Easter weekend adventure in the afterlife) meets in heaven his ancestor Cacciaguida, who prophesies, within the imaginative time frame of the narrative, Dante’s coming exile:
You shall leave everything you love most dearly:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste
of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
descending and ascending others’ stairs.
Paradiso 17:55-60 (trans. Mandelbaum)
The Florentines do not put salt in their bread. Cacciaguida’s line means that with each mundane morsel of his daily bread, Dante will know he is not at home. And at both the beginning and end of each day, leaving his bedroom and returning to it, Dante will know he depends on the kindness of strangers. What the poet Dante—who, by the time he wrote Cacciaguida’s lines for the ears of his fictional self, had been living in exile for some years—says here is that Home is not an abstract concept, but is built from the materials of daily life. To not be able to go home again is a wound that never fully heals.
Along his difficult path, the pilgrim Dante learns that he erred in life by making idols of finite goods. Romantic love, for example, and Florence. At the end of his journey through the afterworld, a Dante purified of disordered attachments, is united mystically to God. His is a nostos journey that doesn’t end up in Florence, but in a place of spiritual rest.
This is how it has come to be with me, too. On this past Sunday morning after church, I sat with two friends—none of us Hungarian—as we prepared to say goodbye to one of us three, who leaves this week to go back to America. We have all been living in Budapest for the past two or three years, and discussed what life in this city has taught us.
For me, it has taught that though, per Capote, I can never really be European, I nevertheless feel at home here in a way I never quite have back in my own country. Somehow, I have always been drawn to old places, places thick with history and traditions, and ornamented with beauty. This is all very hard to find in the United States, such a young and dynamic country. It is strange to feel that one fits in better in a foreign land than one does in one’s own birthplace, but then, one hears this all the time from Europeans who moved to America because they resonated with its youth and dynamism—the very qualities that draw me to Europe.
Mostly, though, I have used these last three years to ponder deeply the lessons in one of my favorite movies, Nostalghia (1983), the first movie that the Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky made in exile. Nostalghia tells the story of Gorchakov, a Russian writer in Italy to work on a book, but far too trapped in his own head to get work done. Though the splendors of Italy unfold around him, Gorchakov’s morbid nostalgia binds him to Russia, and prevents him from relating to anything and anyone around him.
At a crisis point in the narrative, a drunken Gorchakov sleeps, and dreams of himself stalking the ruins of a church. In the dream, a saint pleads with God to speak to the lost and tormented writer, or to show Himself to the suffering man. God replies that Gorchakov couldn’t hear Him if he did speak, and is blind to divine revelation in everyday life.
I first saw this film in 2020, in the depths of depression from the world I had lost: a happy marriage, an intact family, a sense of Home in my Louisiana birthplace. I saw myself in Gorchakov, and resolved to do what I could to free myself from my morbid nostalgia for an irrecoverable past. Tarkovsky—who suffered as Gorchakov did from the pain of separation from his homeland—showed me that as long as I remained immersed in nostalgia, I could not truly live.
The film’s conclusion symbolizes the need to sacrifice one’s nostalgia, to die to one’s ideas about oneself, if one is to live, to truly live, in the new reality. Only by putting the hope that one can recover the irrecoverable to death can one move on. This is not about forgetting one’s past; that is neither possible nor desirable. It is rather about ceasing to believe that the perfect harmony one once felt with one’s past life is still a possibility.
If one does this, says Tarkovsky, then one can make a life from the blending of one’s perspectives. It will not be seamless – the film’s symbol is a Russian dacha placed inside the ruins of an Italian abbey—but it can be done.
And this is what I have tried to do in Budapest. With Dante and Tarkovsky as my guides, I have endeavored to put God and His will for me first, and to free myself from a past that was taken from me. For me, Home had to be what it became for Dante: wherever God was; everything else followed. I could only accept God’s will, and the new things He presented to me, if I surrendered captivity in my own nostalgic head, a prison whose lock opened from the inside. After all, how could I hope to receive the beauty, the friendships, and the possibilities open to me in the arms of this dear old dame straddling the banks of the Danube if my heart and mind were stranded elsewhere?
J.R.R. Tolkien once advised his son Christopher, as a young man, to refuse chivalry’s idealization of women. They are not goddesses, Tolkien said, but rather “companions in shipwreck.” The truth is, everybody we meet is a companion in shipwreck. Here in Budapest, I sometimes speak with young Hungarians who are fed up with life here, and want to leave to seek their destinies abroad. Maybe they are onto something. Maybe they are lying to themselves. Who’s to say? They will have to live the answer themselves. Nobody else can do it for them. This is less a problem to be solved than a mystery to be lived.
But I also meet more than a few Hungarians who, having lived abroad, have returned because the things they cherish most in life are available to them only here, with their own people, who speak their own language. They choose to accept certain material hardships that they could avoid living in the wealthier countries of Europe, or even America, for the sake of holding treasures that cannot be measured in euros or dollars.
One way or the other, life requires sacrifice. Attempting to escape this fact can only result in chronic anxiety, staying one step ahead of the ghost of unhappiness. That said, for some, a partial ‘geographical cure’ to the malady of displacement really is possible, in the sense that certain people can be happier in some places than in others. It is common, for example, for gay and lesbian young people to leave small towns for bigger cities, because they can be more at ease in more cosmopolitan locales.
On the other hand, we must not allow ourselves to think that those who stayed behind, who did not leave Home, have escaped the unease that drives some of us to move away. For years I puzzled over why my Louisiana family found it impossible to accept me, their son, brother, and uncle, and my wife and children. The answer, I think, is that they saw their own particular way of life—rural and small-town Louisiana, with its morals, tastes, and traditions—as a bulwark against the changing world beyond its borders.
They held an unstated belief that as long as they stayed safe at home, never departing from the place and its way of life, that they would be safe. And yet, my sister, who never once departed from the code, nor wanted to (she genuinely loved country life), fell ill in the middle of the journey of her life, and died of cancer, leaving behind a grieving husband and children. It was a cracking in the order of their cosmos. They did not recover. Nor did our family, which today has been scattered to the winds.
In his 1966 masterpiece Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky offers a scene in which the title character, a medieval Russian iconographer, stands shocked in the ruins of a sacked cathedral, talking with the shade of his mentor, Theophanes. They look up to see snow falling softly through the breach in the cathedral’s dome. “There is nothing more terrible than snow falling in a temple,” says Andrei. He means “terrible” in the sense of “awe-inspiring.” The meaning of his remark is that even amid catastrophic destruction, grace can make its way through the wounds.
But can we see it? My Louisiana family could not see the grace offered them by the return of their lost son and brother, with his own family, and refused it, only magnifying our collective loss. Their fervent insistence on nostalgia for the past foreclosed the possibility of a future—not just for them, but seeing how it led to the collapse of my own marriage and family, for us too.
Living in Budapest in the aftermath of the sacking of my marriage, I have worked to avoid a similar fate. I have tried to keep faith with God and His providence, and to learn to see the snow falling through the cracks in the dome of my own cosmos. Finally, three years into this unsought exile, graces are descending into my life—and to my great surprise, I am prepared to receive them.
So, where is Home? It is—it has to be—wherever God calls me to be. Maybe I will go back to America one day. Maybe I will stay in Budapest till my last breath. Maybe I will end up living somewhere else in Europe. For the first time in my life, I don’t know the answer to that question. But, also for the first time in my life, I am at peace as a wayfarer in this world. It turns out that for me—and maybe for everybody else—the true nostos journey is within.
It took many difficult miles, and many turnings, to learn this. There is no total solution to the problem of our homelessness; wayfaring is our common condition. “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you, O Lord,” said Augustine, 1,600 years ago. Human nature hasn’t changed. In our time, though, we have forgotten that this is our natural state. The 20th century Catholic novelist Walker Percy said that in our present, post-Christian age, a man who grasps the reality of the secular, consumerist culture into which he is thrown “becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony; which is to say, open to signs.”
Shipwrecked in Budapest from the wreckage of my 2012 nostos journey taught me to become radically open to signs, to the meaning of snow falling in a temple. I learned that we can choose to keep looking at our failures upon the earth, or lift up our heads to the heavens, with eyes open to redemption. Being at peace within the flow of Time, our souls and imaginations grounded in the Eternal: that’s the only true home any of us will ever find in this life.
The poet W.H. Auden, in his great poem “Atlantis,” about the futility of searching for utopia, writes of the journey through life:
Stagger onward rejoicing;
And even then if, perhaps
Having actually got
To the last col, you collapse
With all Atlantis shining
Below you yet you cannot
Descend, you should still be proud
Even to have been allowed
Just to peep at Atlantis
In a poetic vision:
Give thanks and lie down in peace,
Having seen your salvation.
If a shipwrecked American wayfarer is given to lie down on the banks of the Danube, snow falling all around, and stare into the Magyar sky waiting for a comet to pass by, who are we to say he is not exactly where he is meant to be?
Rod Dreher’s most recent book, Living In Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning In a Secular Age, was published in October in both the United States and Great Britain.
