This by Ian Marcus Corbin is gathering so many threads that I have previously mainly seen in different places. I am sure I will write more on it, but if you have any romantic/communitarian instincts and or and concerns about the psychological and spiritual homelessness (and homesickness) of modernity, get yourself a copy.

He argues that cultures where humans can feel at home have a “vision of our common life, in which we are tied safe in participatory relationship with nature and one another, fed by customs of sharing, and leavened with periodic irruptions of contemplation and awe.”

BUT

“The glittering promises of individual wealth and technologically mediated comfort and pleasure have proved almost irresistible to many human communities, and when they haven’t industrial modernity has very often been forced on recalcitrant communities by violence. This ethos has been integrally joined with with a particularly modern cosmology, which pictures the cosmos as utterly cold and mechanistic. The cultures that have emerged from this marriage have often been marked by a deep and persistent longing for something lost, however dimly understood, and have undertaken and number of catastrophic attempts to satisfy this aching, obscure human longing”