Exile is a dream of glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air. He hangs there, frozen in time, translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly above his native earth, he awaits the inevitable moment at which the photograph must begin to move, and the earth reclaim its own.

Why therefore should we hesitate any longer to grant to it the movement which accords naturally with its firm, rather than put the whole world in a commotion — the world whose limits we do not and cannot know? And why not admit that the appearance of daily revolution belongs to the heavens but the reality belongs to the Earth? And things are as when Aeneas said in Virgil: “ We sail out of the harbor, and the land and the cities move away.” Page 23

Riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away.

Exile is a dream of a glorious return. Exile is a vision of revolution: Elba, not St Helena. It is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back. The exile is a ball hurled high into the air.

Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere. The concepts of exile and return imply a point of origin, a homeland. Without a homeland and without a true mother tongue, I wander the world, even at my desk. In the end I realise that it wasn't a true exile: far from it. I am exiled even from the definition of exile.

I believe that for his escape he took advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds.

Call us an exodus, Plagued ten times over, For all we see is red. Intentional language, like a poem, Is to separate our waters like a gash, To find the sea also grieving & giving Enough to be walked through.

Escape may be checked by water and land,
but the air en sky are free. -Daedalus

And then away for home! Away to the quickest and nearest train! Away from this cursed land, where the devil and his children stil walk with earthly feet!

He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.

They march from safety, and the bird-sung joy
Of grass-green thickets, to the land where all
Is ruin, and nothing blossoms but the sky

Well I come from a land,
from a far away place, where the caravan camels roam.
They will cut of your ear if they don't like your face,
it's babaric, but hey,
it's home.

One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest.

I have fled my country and gone to the heather.