my review of anthony esolen's 'nostalgia'

"You could say that culture is nothing less than proper adoration for the dead, both literal and figurative. Robert Harrison writes in The Dominion of the Dead that to be human and living in the world means to be a creature of “legacy.” “That explains why the living housed the dead before they housed themselves,” Harrison says. “They placed them in graves, coffins, urns—in any case they placed them in something that we call their resting place so that their legacies could be retrieved and their afterlives perpetuated.” The idea of home, then, as something more than just a temporary shelter for the living to take a moment’s rest in, but as something consecrated in both time and place, comes from the recognition of those original inhabitants and the knowledge that we’ll someday join them. Understanding this, we can see that a home can be more than a house. It can be a language, a song, a meal, or a game. Each can act as worthy abodes for remembrance of and communion with the dead.
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In Nostalgia: Going Home in a Homeless World, Anthony Esolen brings up the bodies, so to speak, and reminds us of what the ancients took for granted–that a home that doesn’t house the dead alongside the living isn’t worthy of the name."

Here.