July 2006
At the end of it all, you don't want to be a global citizen, you want to belong, belong to one city somewhere, feel that you are Coming Home and look down and smile with a hint of tears in your throat as the plane comes down from the clouds and the yellow lights now start moving and you can make out roads and sodium-vapour lamps, and you know all this unreal abstraction from up here will soon transform to the solid reality of a vehicle that leads you to a door that will take you to that corner of the bed which has your very own blanket and pillow, and nothing, nothing can get real-er than that and you are happy to learn that yet another time...
And so, you wish you could have one city where you could belong belong belong, which is overwhelmingly home home home and which you could look down from a plane window and feel something, something, something other than relief at finally getting out of an aircraft where the airhostess asks you Veg or NonVeg? while you desperately search for some tissue to wipe your eyes.
I fully agree, but Le Guin seems to console my expatriate longing for home...
ReplyDelete"He would most likely not have embarked on that years long enterprise had he not had profound assurance that return was possible, even though he himself might not return; that indeed the very nature of the voyage, like a circumnavigation of the globe, implied return. You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again. That he knew; indeed it was the basis of his view of the world. Yet from that acceptance of transience he evolved his vast theory, wherein what is most changeable is shown to be fullest of eternity, and your relationship to the river, and the river's relationship to you and to itself, turns out to be at once more complex and reassuring than a mere lack of identity. You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been." (p. 55)
- Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Wow.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much, I now have so many new authors to discover! I hardly know or meet anyone who reads the kind of stuff I like, so my reading is mostly solitary, no scope for discussions, or introductions to new writers. This is so wonderful. Thanks once again.