En route from Jo’burg to LA with a two day stay in beloved NYC, so technically from NYC to LA, I picked up the Christmas Edition of The Economist. Outstanding variety of topics. This one stayed with me probably because the timing was, personally, too appropriate!
Beware, then: however well you carry it off, however much you enjoy it, there is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner, even a genteel foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasises over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia—a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost. It is not the possibility of returning home which feeds nostalgia, but the impossibility of it.
But we cannot expect to have it all ways. Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The dilemma of foreignness comes down to one of liberty versus fraternity—the pleasures of freedom versus the pleasures of belonging. The homebody chooses the pleasures of belonging. The foreigner chooses the pleasures of freedom, and the pains that go with them.
The rest of the original article is no longer available for free, which is a shame (it may be available again after some time passes). However, comments to the original article can be found here: Being Foreign. The Others: It is becoming both easier and more difficult to experience the thrill of being an outsider.
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