They are the result of becoming incrementally more objective about life. The rooms seem smaller, the conversations less interesting, the family squabbles more annoying. The quantum of change is too small to be noticed on a trip away from home to the shops or the daily commute to work but the effect emerges into the macro-world when things seem different at home upon returning from holiday or visiting from university. It may be necessary for psychic survival but it becomes more false by the day. Thus whatever it was that ‘kept one going’ in the trials of exile, voluntary or not, is a self-preserving fiction. What does remain is a designation empty of any real meaning - countryman, neighbour, friend, relative have no pragmatic import. Stay away long enough, say thirty years or so, and whatever commonality that existed is dissipated by the winds of unshared experience. Living with fixed memories, no matter how accurate, means disappointment in proportion to the time away, for both the traveller and the keepers of the hearth. The real suffering and trauma of exile occurs not in the time away from one’s homeland but upon return. Homer got it wrong in the Odyssey, at least for modern folk.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |