40 Chapter 3 Home in its most profound form is an attachment to a particular setting, a particular environment, in comparison with which all other associations with places have only a limited significance. It is the point of departure from which we orient ourselves and take possession of the world. Oscar Handlin (191, p.8) in his study of immigrants to the United States, writes: “... Twas born in such a village in such a parish’—so the peasant invariably began the account of himself. Thereby he indicated the importance of the village in his being; this was the fixed point by which he knew his position in the world and his relationship with all humanity.” It is difficult if not impossible to maintain that this sort of attachment to a home place is characteristic of contemporary society. The Appalachian farmer cited above looked back to a house that was gone; Heidegger writes of home in the past tense and declares: “Home nowadays is a distorted and perverted phenomenon. It is identical to a house; it can be anywhere. It is subordinate to us; easily measurable and expressible in numbers of money-value” (Vycinas, 1961, pp.84-85). Possibly it is true that modern man is, as numerous existential philosophers and sociologists claim, a homeless being, and that there has been widespread loss of attachment to home places. But this dismissal of the significance of home by Heidegger is too sweeping; there are surely more stages of association with home places than complete attachment and complete unattachment. Furthermore the associations and commitments that do exist between people and their homes may be largely covered up by attitudes of materialism, and become apparent only in times of loss and hardship. Mare Fried (1963, p.151) a psychiatrist investigating the reactions of a group of residents from Boston’s West End whose homes were expropriated and who were relocated elsewhere in the city, found that many of them had emotional responses that could “properly be described as grief ... including a sense of painful loss ... continued longing .. a sense of helplessness ... and a tendency to idealise the lost place”. Harvey Cox (1968, pp.423-424) cites the example of a woman from Lidice, the Czech village destroyed by the Nazis, who admitted that the greatest shock she experienced, in spite of the death of husband and separation from her children, was to come over the crest of a hill and to find nothing left of the village—not even ruins, A similar example is given by R.J.Lifton (1967, p.29) in his study of the survivors of Hiroshima: a history professor described his reaction to the destruction thus— “T climbed Hijoyama Hill and looked down. I saw that Hiroshima had disappeared ... I was shocked by the sight .... What I felt then and still feel now I just can’t explain with words. Of course I saw many dreadful scenes after that—but that experience, looking down and finding nothing left of Hiroshima—was so shocking that I simply can’t express what I felt.”