On Exile

Profesora Loca comments on the resonance of my last post with one's increasing sense of exile in the USA. You must be younger than I; in my generation we were internal exiles and *then* we got Reagan!

Exile is a deep theme, of course. In Psalm 137 (and the reggae versions of it too), we read:

  By the rivers of Babylon,
    there we sat
    sat and wept,
    as we thought of Zion.
^...
  How can we sing a song of the LORD
    on alien soil?

And, there's Ovid's wonderful book of poems written from the exile to which Augustus banished him for life,

The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters

Tristia. It's exceptionally beautiful, full of Ovid's smart-ass brilliance along with his deep feeling of distance from all in the world that matters.

But, to me, the expression of exile that means most to me is by Hugh of St. Victor, and it turns the subject on its head altogether. If I didn't know better, I'd think Hugh was a Kabbalist (all of creation is exile in the mind of the great 16th century Kabbalist, Isaac Luria).

We'll get to the Kabbalah later. Meanwhile, here is what Hugh wrote:

It is good for the mind to experience change in all visible and transitory things, and later to leave them altogether behind. A man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner. One who is at home in every land is already strong. Perfect, however, is he to whom the whole world is exile.

"...perfectus vero cui mundus totus exilium est."