Homes

Because in my estimation George F. Kennan (Milwaukee native, cold war diplomat, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian) has said most things better than most of the rest of us will ever say anything, I offer here, on the occasion of Nina's and my re-engagement with Lithuania, a quote from Kennan's incomparable memoirs:

“If Wisconsin, then, was not ‘home,’ what was?  Well, there was now Princeton, and the farm in Pennsylvania, and the cottage in Norway.  But there was more than that.  There were those curious places…where I had felt so overpowering a sense of familiarity as to evoke the mystery of a former life.  Home, then, was the whole great arc of the northern and western world, from Moscow across Scandinavia and the British Isles to Wisconsin.  One was, in other words, a sort of Nordic cosmopolitan, truly domiciled only in the natural beauty of the seas and countrysides of this northern world; in its seasons and its storms…”