The Roots of the Banyan Tree

Beginning of article

A wanderer who found himself at home in exile

Does the idea of exile that our civilizations share with Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the baroque, classical and romantic eras, make any sense in the age of the Internet?

In the past, exiles were people who were wrenched from their native soil and cut off from their childhood and mother tongue, and experienced the heartache of mourning and nostalgia in a foreign land. Exile was regarded by the political authorities as a public punishment and civic death. It was a tool of the penal code which forced individuals to leave their homeland (or their adopted home) and forbade them to set foot there again. Their appetite for life and their integrity as citizens soured into an endless season of bitterness and distress as their uprooting became an incurable disease. Excluded by historical forces from the land of their birth, scarred …