Louise DeSalvo - On Moving: A Writers Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again

How easy it was to long for a different life,

how hard it was to find ones way there.

EVA HOFFMAN, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

The great affair is to move; to feel the needs

and hitches of life a little more nearly.

RICHARD HOLMES, Footsteps

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.

D. H. LAWRENCE, The Sea and Sardinia

The hard part is the moving, but maybe staying can be harder.

CONSTANCE FENIMORE WOOLSON TO HENRY JAMES, IN COLM TIBN, The Master

When, in the autumn of 2003, my husband, Ernie, and I move for the first time in more than thirty years, my thoughts and emotions become unsettled. Id looked forward to this move. Yet I was experiencing a sense of loss almost as profound as when my mother died a few years before. Surely a move shouldnt feel like mourning the passing of a family member. But it did.

I sought to learn from friends and acquaintances whether their moves too had unleashed such a storm of feelings. I wanted their wise counsel, their solace. But mostly I wanted to hear that I wasnt the only one who felt this way, that others also believed their lives had been torn apart. I wanted to learn how they became accustomed to a new placewhat they did to temper the trauma of a move.

I contacted friends whod moved recently, some across the country, some across an ocean. One said, Id rather not talk about it; another, It was awful but youll get over it; a third, What can I say? Its best endured and forgotten, the sooner the better; still another said, It took me a year to scrub the old inhabitants out of my house. Only one person immediately felt excited and energized by moving and leaving her old life, embracing her new life without regret. Beyond these glimmers of their responses to moving, I learned nothing. Is moving so difficult that once its past people want to forget the whole experience? Is moving such a significant part of the American dream that discussing the often difficult reality of this experience is taboo? But even if we dont talk about it, feel the pain we do. I myself discovered moving entails significant emotional and physical consequences. It ranks as the third-most-stressful life experience (after the death of a spouse and the loss of a job). If a move involves losing a cherished home, or if a move is desired but cannot be undertaken because of financial issues, normal stresses are, of course, greatly magnified.

This book began as an attempt to examine my thoughts and feelings about moving. But it developed to include how a score of other writers and thinkers have written about the subject. It seems that the written word is far better than conversation for describing the reality of this complex transition. I wrote this book to record the most useful moving histories I found, those that aided me in understanding my own experience in the context of my familys and my past; I hope that it will help readers gain a new perspective on this, one of our most significant life experiences, and that it will impel them to reconstruct the history of this important transition in their own lives.

I began by keeping a journal. But because I wanted this to be more than a personal story, I quickly moved to reading the letters, journals, memoirs, poetry, and fiction of my favorite writers and other creative people, searching for what they said about the experience of moving as it was occurring and their reflections on it years after. I wondered whether they would be extremely conscious of the effect of moving upon their lives and work.

Did Virginia Woolf reflect on her moves? Did as lofty a thinker as Sigmund Freud care about where he lived, how he furnished his home? What about Carl Jung, preoccupied by pondering the mythic dimensions of everyday life? Or Pierre Bonnard, that divine painter of interior spaces? Or D. H. Lawrence, driven from En gland by the censorship of his work and his expulsion from Cornwall? Or the Pulitzer Prizewinning poet Elizabeth Bishop, who moved often and to far-flung places? Or Henry Miller, who left New York for Paris nearly pennilessdid he plumb this transitions meanings?

As I worked, I learned that these figures indeed reflected on their moves and the significance of their new homes; they often compared a recent move with one past, a new home with one lost to them; they often thought about these moves in the context of their early lives, trying to discover how their family history impacted their choices of domiciles as adults, trying to find a pattern in their experiences that would render them more meaningful. Sometimes their later thoughts about a move are quite different from how they first assess it. It seems that moves can develop a mythic quality as they recede into the past and that the meanings we assign them help us define who we were, who weve become, and what remains: a person who needs stability; one whos a wanderer and profits from a frequent change of scene; one who needs to be rooted in the past. Sometimes, though, these creative people reflected on the fact that what they seemed to need was faulty and that acting on the basis of these suppositions harmed them.