Unheimlichkeit

I've been thinking a lot lately about this feeling of unheimlichkeit. I first encountered this term freshman year of college in my Reading Literature through Science course, and it's remained with me ever since. Essentially, it's a German word meaning uncanniness, or un-home-liness. We used this terms in our discussions about parallel universes, free will, and the moral dimensions of a universe that has no privileged frame of reference.

I'm talking about it in a much more concrete manner here, because it's a feeling which has been nagging at me for a while now. Last night, I was kept up by a stealthy migraine, and as anyone who's had a migraine understands, you can't do anything to solve the migraine. Pain forces you to live on its own terms. It takes your time and distorts it. It saturates colors, heightens noises, and makes even the faintest smells unbearably nauseating.

Picture me sitting at my desk, a lamp with a towel thrown over it to muffle the light, trying not to throw up all over the scattered papers. I turned to writing, as I often do, to try and distract myself from the migraine, and I found myself returning again and again to this word, unheimlichkeit.

What does it mean? I suppose the closest I can come to describing it is that it's how I felt homesick for England before I'd ever been there. It's a wanting sadness, a knowing sickness for heimat. A profound desire to belong.

I don't feel as though I fit exactly anywhere. I grew up Catholic, embrace Judaism, and espouse Atheism. I was born American, descended from Irish, feel myself British. I don't even fit well into a specific academic discipline. Literature, language, theater, Classics, computer science . . . all of these I have known, but none is my exclusive home.

The only place where I feel that sense of heimat is in the books I read, among my beloved characters. It is a home constructed, assembled from ink, glue, and paper, conjured into being with my sorcerous synapses and sinews. Steven King called reading a "strange alchemy," and that describes my home as well as I can say. Being alchemical, it is not made out of things earthly or divine, but transmutes freely between the two. One day, I live in the dirt, the next in a palace of gold. Both are equally un-earthy, neither substantial or insubstantial.

This is the only place that is home, that feels like home. Between the pages of a book is nothing, and in that nothing, I have found everything.