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In just one year I had lost my home, my friends, my job, the possibility of returning soon, but also the desire to return … At forty-five years old I found myself in the world with a bag containing the most essential items, as though the world were a bomb shelter.
Over coffee, Kira tells me … ‘You know, we're all alike in a way, we are all looking for something … As though we had lost something.’
In reflecting on the psychological aspects of geographic exile, a condition that has become ever more prevalent globally at the turn of the century, I have wondered whether it might not be worthwhile to consider that, in a variety of different ways, each human being is obliged to go forth from an original home and, in one way or another, lose the more-or-less sustaining environment of his or her earliest childhood. Thus, even persons who have been spared the forced abandonment of homeland, mother tongue, and basic learned ways of being in the world must nonetheless withstand a form of psychological exile that might be related to other more traumatic forms. In the following pages, I shall explore an aspect of this possibility with the demurral that no simple parallel or reduction is implied. These pages contain merely juxtapositions that may prove fruitful for certain readers. Even though I myself am not a person who grew up as a child of exiled parents, this theme has for me, nonetheless, a certain autobiographical resonance. To address it, I have connected it with aspects of my own life, and, like anyone lost in unfamiliar surroundings, related whatever seemed new and different to