This is another test post on the blog, written a helluva lot later, after the project went into hibernation. I ask myself whether I should delete the blog, but it’s always nice to have some testing grounds, and why the hell not – jest keep ‘em lying around on the net.
The biblical image favors a cliche according to which exile means looking back towards the country of one’s origin. And, indeed, many poems and novels have been written in this century by exiles who describe a region of the world from where they have come as more beautiful than it had been in reality, simply because now it is lost forever Yet an objection imposes itself here. Displacement creates a distance measured by kilometers or miles, hundreds and thousands of miles. The biblical image is that of a movement in space from the Gates of Eden or, translating this into modern notions, from the borders of a state guarded by armed soldiers. However, distance may be measured not only in miles, but also in months, years, or dozens of years. Assuming this, we may consider the life of every human being as an unrelenting movement from childhood on, through the phases of youth, maturity, and old age. The past of every individual undergoes constant transformations in his or her memory and more often than not it acquires the features of an irretrievable land made more and more strange by the flow of time. Thus the difference between a displacement in space and in time is somewhat blurred. We can well imagine an old expatriate who, meditating on the country of his youth, realizes that he is separated from it not only by expanse, but also by the wrinkles on his face and grey hair, marks left by a severe border guard, time. What then is exile if, in this sense, everybody shares that condition?
Thomas Elsted & Czeslaw Milosz
