When we see how "the last to go" is even threatening, that's the clincher for many people: Bridget Jones half-eaten by an Alsatian.

So home occupies a middle ground. We don't say, 'I feel at home on 17100 Monte Bello Road', or 'I feel at home in a Conservative government.' We say, 'I feel at home in New York / St John's Wood / Singapore.' There is always a sense of an intermediate environment. I use 'intermediate' advisedly, because of the dynamic relationships we have with our environment. Yet if I can speak of dynamic relationships with the environment, perhaps these relationships themselves should come under scrutiny. The French, who are always examining the relationships between people and ideas, appear to support me in this: the French word for property is "immobilier", which carries enough of its flavour into English, and although the French for home would be properly something like "maison", the other word that may come to mind is "chez", which, strictly speaking, includes the dative. A word that carries these relationships with it! And the relationships are aporectic ones. For example, one cannot conclude relationships of necessity to home (at least, not on any more than an individual level), but equally one cannot postulate its opposite. It's quite like the scene in Das Rheingold where Wotan proclaims how every living being desires to wander and change at the same time as he has Fasfolt and Fafner build his Valhalla for him.

For the youngest generations of Singapore, aporia is becoming the defining theme of our relationships towards our intermediate environment. One reason Tan Hwee Hwee's Mammon Inc. made as much of an impact as it has is because it strikes at a key preoccupation of many of her generation. "It's obvious we'll never fit into Singaporean society, or any society, for that matter," she has one of her characters say. "We're freaks, mutant hybrids of East and West – like trans-cultural X-men. So forget fitting in. Why don't we get out of this place and look for other freaks like us?" If our environment is a "construction from spare parts", as one of our more eloquent poets puts it, who bar the insensate and the postmodern ironist will find a home here? If you look around and see throngs of people with whom you feel no spiritual kinship, if you feel the weight and oppressions of nationality without the uplift, if you have two-and-a-half years of your life taken away for a crime you did not commit, if you feel oppressed by a majority even if you cannot define who that majority is, if you have no sense of land, if whatever emotional bond you feel for the place is slowly being wiped out by the URA and the neverending urge for 'progress' – where's Taman Serasi, where's Bidadari, where's Rochester Park headed? – so that you start wondering what this country has to forget and what it is ashamed of, then you have little chance of finding a home where you look around. You cannot feel that you belong. In other words, Singapore becomes just like any other spot in the world. Nothing more. In which case, why put up with the weather, the humidity, the mould growing on books and CDs, the drought of manners, the high cost of living, the price rises after every election, the patronising government and the narrow-mindedness?

I shall not answer that in any more definite a way – knowing how much I am already pressing down on the aporia I argue on the side of – than to refer to social historian Theodore Zeldin, who in An Intimate History of Humanity writes that "more and more people are becoming abnormal, and are not fitting neatly into a single civilisation. [The analysis] suggests that normal people should be proud of the civilisation into which they are born, because they need roots and self-esteem. Nevertheless, the dramatic action arises from the disappointment of those who have not personally tasted the full delights of their civilisation, who see no chance of influencing its evolution, whose family, as far back as they know, have been excluded from most of what civilisation offers… and who complain that admiring the great figures of their civilisation do not do very much to make them feel fulfilled". If that is the case, then it would be useful to approach the question of necessity in a different way. Although what Zeldin goes on to say, "It is odd to say that humans need roots as to say they need foliage… Applied to humans, this means that it is not just where they come from that matters, but where they are going, what kind of curiosity or imagination they have, and how they use it, both by day and by night", might appear to be an argument against the necessity for the idea of home, I would put it instead that Zeldin is contending not only that home is only as necessary as one makes it, but also that it can be what one makes it to be. And this makes the third and final Zeldin statement I shall draw up all the more tragic than it already is. "The world is still full of people who, though they have no recognised slave masters, see themselves as having little freedom, as being at the mercy of uncontrollable, anonymous economic and social forces, or of their circumstances… and whose personal ambitions are permanently blunted thereby." It is tragic because of the failure of perception, or the failure of imagination. It is tragic because for such people home has become quite the opposite of what it ideally is. Home is not the place where, in Frost's words, when you have to go there, they have to take you in, but the place where you let yourself be taken in, where you receive injustice and oppression, because you feel that there is nowhere else you can go. In this case, Heaney's words become literal rather than figurative: "I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home."

With thanks to Ralph Hanna and Leonard Schwartz

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