Status Updates From A Book of Migrations: Some ...

"Suburbia has... seemed to me a voluntary limbo, a condition more like sedation than exile, for exiles know what's missing." Thinking about the girl going viral for visiting Spain and seeing a bakery and flower shop and butcher apparently for the first time.

Was not prepared for her reflections on pastoral to agricultural to lead me to an internal debate on population and perhaps the control of it..

…to be alienated in one's own country, in one's own hometown, among one's kin and peers, was problematic, but nothing could be more natural than to be alienated in a foreign country, and so there I had at last naturalized my estrangement. This may be one of the underap-preciated pleasures of travel: of being at last legitimately lost and confused.

Though possessing ancient origins may, for the sedentary scholars of Travellers, confer greater legitimacy on them, it is apparently of less interest to the subjects themselves. The authenticity of origins, the historical basis for identity, may not be their method.

second last essay, Travellers, about Ireland’s indigenous nomadic people

Ireland fractures the unity of Europe, the notion of whiteness, the Atlantic divide, and from it the cracks in the citadels of culture can be seen too. Spenser and Sidney, the poets of the pastoral, become the founders of an antipastoral, and the shadow of their political lives lies across their artistic merit.

Essay/chapter 10

Or perhaps what is most peculiar… the English poetry of that time celebrates the pastoral. Most literally, the pastoral is about pastures… shepherds tending their flocks… In the pastoral genre lies the origin of the modern aesthetic appreciation of landscape.
Theoretically, then, a country of wandering poets and pastoralists should have enchanted the English rather than appalled them.

Essay/chapter 10