A Literary Prescription for

Xenia

For the stranger at the door, and the door being opened.

Xenia is the ancient Greek word for guest-friendship: the obligation to feed, shelter and protect a stranger who arrives at your door, before asking who they are or what they want. It was not politeness. It was a duty with Zeus as its enforcer, on the plain reasoning that anybody might one day be the traveller, and everybody is somebody’s guest eventually. The whole of the Odyssey runs on it. And it turns out to be one of the few very old ideas that has lost none of its use, because it works in both directions: there is the practice of receiving people well, and there is the quite separate experience of arriving somewhere as an outsider and discovering whether the door opens. These books, poems and quotes are for both — for anybody who feeds people, and for anybody who has ever been the one standing outside.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

The Odyssey first, because everything else is a footnote to it. After that: a psychologist asking why humans ever help somebody they will not see again, a priest with the best working definition of hospitality anybody has managed, a novel about a French village that will not let an Indian family in, and a cookery book that removes your last excuse for not having anyone round.

The Odyssey

Homer · c.700 BC

The founding text, and it is worth knowing that xenia is not a background detail in it but the moral spine of the whole poem. Odysseus is a stranger at door after door for ten years, and every household is judged by how it receives him. The suitors are destroyed not for being rivals but for being appalling guests. Read the Emily Wilson translation if you want it to move; it is the first by a woman and it is very fast on the page.

Reaching Out

Henri J.M. Nouwen · 1975

Nouwen frames hospitality as the movement from hostility to friendship, and his definition is the most useful one here: hospitality is not changing people, it is offering them space where change can take place. There is God in it and it works without him. The chapter on receiving a guest without an agenda is worth reading before any weekend when somebody difficult is staying.

Together

Vivek H. Murthy · 2020

A former US Surgeon General kept finding the same thing behind everything else he was asked to treat. What makes it useful here is his account of service: he found that the fastest route out of somebody’s own isolation was almost always doing something for a stranger. Hospitality turns out not to be a favour you do other people at your own expense.

The Kindness of Strangers

Michael E. McCullough · 2020

A psychologist asks the awkward evolutionary question: why would humans ever help somebody they will never see again and are not related to? McCullough tracks the answer across ten thousand years of religion, philosophy, science and accident. It is a history rather than a sermon, and it is oddly encouraging — universal concern for strangers turns out to be an invention, which means it was chosen, which means it can be chosen again.

Home Cooking

Laurie Colwin · 1988

Essays about feeding people, written by a New York novelist with a tiny kitchen and no interest whatever in perfection. There are triumphs and there are disasters, and the disasters are the useful part: nobody who has ever been fed in somebody’s kitchen remembers whether the sauce split. Colwin removes the last excuse, which is almost always the fear of doing it badly.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo

Christy Lefteri · 2019

Nuri and Afra leave Syria and make their way to England, and the novel is structured around the sequence of rooms they are put in and the people who decide what happens next: smugglers, volunteers, officials, a woman with a spare bed. Lefteri worked at a refugee centre in Athens and it shows in the specifics. It is the modern version of the oldest question on this page, which is what a household does when somebody arrives at the door.

An Everlasting Meal

Tamar Adler · 2011

Nominally a cookery book, and included here for its quiet insistence that feeding people well is a matter of attention rather than expense. Adler starts with boiling water and works outward through the ends of things, and the effect is to remove almost every excuse for not having somebody round. You do not need a dining room. You need a pot and the willingness.

Poems about hospitality and the stranger

Doors, beds and a bad inn in the Pyrenees

Four lines that solve the problem of exclusion in one move, a traveller asking whether there will be a bed, and a man remembering a thoroughly uncomfortable welcome for the rest of his life.

“Outwitted”

Edwin Markham, 1913

He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!

Four lines, and the entire ethic of xenia is in the last one. Markham was a Californian schoolteacher who came late to poetry. Note that he does not argue with the man who drew the first circle, and does not persuade him or defeat him. He simply draws a larger circle round the outside, which turns out to be the only move that works.

Shop Edwin Markham prints →

“Up-Hill”

Christina Rossetti, 1861

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
  Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
  From morn to night, my friend.
…
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
  Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
  Yea, beds for all who come.

A traveller asking the questions any traveller asks and somebody unseen answering every one of them plainly. Rossetti is writing about death, and the poem works equally as the oldest promise a household can make: yes, there is a bed; yes, for everybody; you will not have to ask twice. The last line is what a stranger at a door is really asking about.

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from “Tarantella”

Hilaire Belloc, 1929

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn’t got a penny…

The inn in the Pyrenees is not comfortable. The straw has fleas, the wine tastes of tar, and the muleteers are broke. Belloc remembered it for the rest of his life anyway, which is the useful thing about it. Nobody has ever recalled a welcome for the quality of the furnishings. They remember being let in, fed something, and allowed to make a noise.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about hospitality to keep

Short lines for the doorstep, on either side of it.

No one has ever become poor by giving.

Anne Frank

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Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place.

Henri J.M. Nouwen

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I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

Maya Angelou

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Let me live in a house by the side of the road and be a friend to man.

Sam Walter Foss

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A guest arriving is a small emergency of the best kind. It requires you to stop what you were doing, which is very often the whole gift.

Georgia Clare

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From Georgia

Easier company

A few short practices, on the principle that it is difficult to make room for anybody else while you are braced.

Daily Meditation for Connection with Universal Energies

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A gentle daily practice for softening the sense of separateness, and feeling your quiet connection to everybody else.

Listen Now For Free

Gratitude for Small Comforts

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A meditation for noticing the small, ordinary comforts already around you — the warm cup, the soft light, the quiet moment.

Listen Now For Free

Learning to Belong to the Life You Have

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On arriving somewhere as a stranger and slowly becoming somebody who belongs there, and what the people who opened their doors did for me.

Read the Essay →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations — steadier company for yourself, which tends to make you easier company for everybody who turns up.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Xenia

What does xenia mean?

Xenia is the ancient Greek idea of guest-friendship: the obligation to feed, shelter and protect a stranger who arrives at your door, before you have asked who they are or what they want. It was not manners. It was a sacred duty with Zeus himself as its enforcer, on the reasoning that anybody might one day be the traveller and everybody is somebody’s guest eventually.

Where should I start?

Start with The Odyssey, where xenia is the moral spine of the whole poem rather than a background custom — Emily Wilson’s translation if you want it to move. For the modern version, Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out has the definition worth carrying: hospitality is not changing people, it is offering them space where change can take place.

Which quotes about hospitality are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place” (Henri J.M. Nouwen) and Sam Walter Foss on living in a house by the side of the road and being a friend to man. You will find these and others in the quotes section above.

Is this the same as being sociable?

No, and the distinction is the point. Sociability is about people you have chosen. Xenia is specifically about the person you have not chosen, who has turned up, whose situation you do not know, and who is at your door anyway. Plenty of shy people are extremely good at it, and plenty of gregarious people never practise it at all.

Xenia

Prescribed reading

Doors, beds and a bad inn in the Pyrenees

Quotes about hospitality to keep

Easier company

Reading for Xenia

What does xenia mean?

Where should I start?

Which quotes about hospitality are worth keeping?

Is this the same as being sociable?

More prescriptions await.