C.S. Lewis puts his finger on this desire – a yearning homesickness – as the deepest human longing, and what eventually led him to Christianity. He describes it as “that unnameable something [the] desire for which pierces us like a sword at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves.”

Whenever I moved somewhere new, the question: “How are you settling in?” used to bother me. What do you mean by that—the relationships? That our toilets are working? Figuring out where to buy your produce? Over time I’ve capitulated, and now I use the question like everybody else, as a default. The open-endedness of the question isn’t a flaw, it’s a feature. When asked in the right way, you cut someone a blank conversational check. You’re saying, “Moving to a new place is brutal. Talk to me about that.”

The question begs a deeper one: What’s the goal of settling in? It’s a feeling more than anything else—the feeling of home. Since the Covid reshuffling, we’re a whole country of immigrants. It’s easy for new arrivals to cast a wistful eye on longstanding locals, whom you figure must be vanishing into coffee shops and pubs like Diagon Alley. But if you stop to talk to one of these natives, you’ll discover they share your wistfulness. Their town is not what it was, and that’s often the harder change than moving to a new one. The question is: “When will it feel like home?” That’s the trouble. It never really will.

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