Sept. 20, 2001. The assignment was to write an article for this magazine reflecting on Baruch's new home; had it been delivered a week earlier, this would have been a different essay. But on Sept. 11, six weeks after Baruch College began moving into its new "home," the rules of the game permanently changed. For now we realize that it is only in games that the definition of HOME cited here holds true; only in games, to our unappeasable sorrow, can one expect to be guaranteed freedom from attack. Among the many reasons New Yorkers in particular have been so hard-hit by the catastrophic assault on the World Trade Center, at least one has nothing to do with our geographic proximity to it. People worked there, and perhaps in this city more than any other, we invest ourselves so totally in our work that we come to regard our office as our home. The following heart-wrenching exchange between a parent and a child who had witnessed the implosion of the World Trade Center towers suggests how psychologically dangerous this identification of work and home can be: "Daddy, is it real? . . . That can't happen in my house, right?" Human beings need to feel safe somewhere, and, whether it is true or not, we will continue to want to believe that in our homes we are. Yet it was never truly accurate to refer to a college as a home. Alma mater, we say: soul mother, the source of our spiritual and intellectual development, but not our real mother, not the source of our physical being any more than the place where we meet to study and to teach should be our home. College is a place where the soul can be free and safe precisely because it is something other than a home. Consider the literary evidence: from the earliest times, the most profound fictions all disabuse us of sentimental notions of home. From every point on the globe, artists warn that human beings live in a state of longing for a place that ultimately eludes our grasp. Yet searching, not resting, enables us to learn and grow. The foundational myth of the monotheist religions tells us that human accountability begins only when we are evicted from the paradise that was intended to be our home, that to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil we must give up the security of home and set out, somewhere East of Eden, to make our living in struggle and propagate our kind in pain. The classical tradition begins with the Iliad, a poem about the destruction of a great civilization. Homer equates Troy with the royal palace, a huge home with bedrooms galore, for the 50 sons and 12 daughters of Priam. The Achaeans who burn this structure down have been absent from their homes for 10 years, and the great plays and poems that follow the Iliad look hard at the price the Greek forces pay for the conflagration of Troy. Having razed the home of their rivals, they find little comfort in their own. As the Odyssey opens, the Nostoi, the stories of the difficult homecomings of those who vanquished Troy, make Penelope weep for her lost husband. The fate of Agamemnon in particular, butchered upon return to his palace home, haunts Odysseus. When clever Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca, he has only a moment of peace before he must slaughter the arrogant youths who have taken over his home. Then he has to clean up the mess and set out again to find an inland place where the inhabitants have never seen an oar before he can return home once again—and die. The Chinese myth of the Peach Blossom Spring describes such a hidden place, a haven conjured into being by refugees from the turmoil of the early Ch'in (221–207 B.C.). Like Brigadoon, this version of home survives only by sealing itself off from contact with the outside world; so stifling an environment may be alluring, but it can hardly serve as a model for the intellectual life. In Japanese art and letters, suffused with the pathos of homes lost and abandoned, the appreciation of beauty springs from the certainty that buildings fall to ruins. Directional taboos regularly uproot people from their dwelling places, exquisitely fragile structures not built to last. Displacement gives us more great art than domesticity; exile provides the motif for sublime poems like Moonlit Night by Tu Fu, whose memories of domestic bliss stir the mind to creative activity. The great heroic poems of medieval Europe, from Beowulf to The Song of Roland to The Poem of My Cid, recount desperate efforts to protect against invaders. Even the rare victory in battle could not guarantee stability. Life was understood as a pilgrimage, a journey to a heavenly city, the ultimate home, if only one could reach it. On earth, security was nowhere to be found. The Middle Passage, an enforced exile, robbed generations of Africans of home, bringing them to the New World, where as slaves they built and buttressed homes for others. Slave narratives exposed the hollowness of those homes (think of Frederick Douglass's characterization of the Great House Farm, where as a little boy he was kept with the other children of slaves half-naked and barefoot, eating from a trough like pigs, humanity denied). In our time, American writers like William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and Derek Walcott have bored into the elegant white-columned facades of the slaveowners' homes, false models of domesticity that crumble under the investigation of probing minds. Even the capacious novels of the 19th century, centered on family life, caution against uncritical celebrations of home. Recall the chilling note handed to Pip, the narrator of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, when he comes to the gates of his urban apartment late one night: "DON'T GO HOME." Like so many fictional protagonists, from Adam and Agamemnon on, Pip has violated the presumed sanctity of a home he never really had, and so he is excluded from the simulacrum of home that he has tried to create in the big city. Home for Pip is the place where one is stalked. Robert Frost offered another sobering set of options. In this curt exchange, a married couple dispute the right of a worker who never fulfilled his obligations to return to their farm to die. The judgmental man of the house scornfully pronounces one definition: 'Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/ They have to take you in.' His wife attempts another: 'I should have called it Something you somehow haven't to deserve.' The Death of the Hired Man, ll. 118–120 In the modern world, fewer and fewer of us live out our lives in the place where we were born. How many of us can go back to a place where "they" have to take us in, which we don't have to deserve, when so much of our energy is spent in leaving that place? Faced with precisely this dilemma, emigrant writers like Salman Rushdie have shown us that one of the archetypal narratives of the 20th century is The Wizard of Oz. Innocent little Dorothy dreams of escaping from Kansas. As her vision of Oz spirals out of control, she has to be told how easy it is for her to get home—all she need do is click her ruby red slippers together. But in black-and-white Kansas, she had no ruby red slippers. Where did this power of return originate? And once you've seen the bright lights of Oz, how long will you stay in Kansas? Let us not look for home in a 17-floor building, then, no matter how it may gleam. Fraught with emotional baggage, home confuses and confounds us even though it may draw us on. How much more appropriate is the name that we have begun to use for One Bernard Baruch Way—the Vertical Campus. On a newly named street, we tread this oxymoronic reality, for campus comes from the Latin for field and memorializes a horizontal space dedicated to exercise and games, the Roman Campus Martius. Stacked floor over floor, a newly cleared space gives us common ground on which to pursue the mental exercises and games that answer to their own dispassionate rules. College is ultimately a state of mind, as is home; and each has its own sphere. Paula Berggren is a professor of English and the coordinator of the Great Works Program at Baruch. Like the works explored in instructional software centering on The Experience of Pilgrimage that she and her colleagues have developed for these courses in world literature, the texts mentioned in this article typify the readings that students from around the globe join together to discuss in ENG/LTT 2800-2850.