Neither Here nor There

Because this unfamiliar world is so entirely different from the one you have known at home; because it offers so much that is strikingly strange in image and sound, it brushes you sometimes, if you permit yourself to be attentive, with a momnetray remembrance of things long known and long forgotten: those intagible realities of your own life. And when this breath of remembrance reaches you from beyond the abyss that separates your world from that other, that unfamiliar one, you ask yourself whether perhaps it is not herein-and only herein-the meaning of all wandering lies: to become aware of the strangeness of the world around you and therby to awaken your own , personal, forgotten reality...."
------Muhammad Asad, Road to Mecca

For some people the world only becomes more familiar with time-far too familiar. It is these very same people who feel the need to break out of the world's monotony, to search out the exotic, to escape its solidity in a drug-induced dream. But-and this is what is so paradoxical-it is those very same people who have a certain type of love for the world and the security it offers. It is the warm comfort of identity, the radiant afterglow that tells us: 'I' and the world are one. For Augustine and the Church the real horror was not that the world offered a better picture of the truth, but that its charms were so seductive, that she could g so far in satiating our hunger. The world only becomes the world when we desire it so.

For others, though, the world and other people only become more opaque with time. Faced with this mystery one can do one of two things: either try and prise it open, clearly analyse, codify, classify, quantify all of that strangeness or allow it to pass, learn to understand that there are things we will never know. This latter response can, in turn, lead to a sort of fatalsim but , at its best, it can lead to a deepening sense of mystery, to an understanding that we are, by very our nature, always in-between states of being, always caught between nature and civilisation, city and desert, God and nothingness. We have but a faint memory of that Paradisal language, live a life that is always a life to come. Deep down in ourselves we know that we are strangers in this land and always will be, but another thought presses against our minds: we dimly perceive that there is no going back and that a bland future that consists of nothing but attestations of the spirit will be the end of us. We are truly neither here nor there. This exilic state brings us to tears. Are they of joy or sorrow?