Isaac Bashevis Singer recreated in America through memory and imagination the life gone forever of the Polish Jews. And Igor Stravinsky, in spite of malicious rumors, according to which after the Rite of Spring his talent, not enlivened by Russia, was on the wane, remained productive and very Russian during his long exile. In every one of these examples, and they can be multiplied, a pattern is noticeable. A farewell to one's country, to its landscapes, customs and mores throws one into a no man's land comparable perhaps to the desert chosen as a place of contemplation by early Christian hermits. Then the only remedy against the loss of orientation is to create anew one's own North, East, West, and South and posit in that new space a Witebsk or a Dublin elevated to the second power What has been lost is recuperated on a higher level of vividness and presence.
Exile is a test of internal freedom and that freedom is terrifying.
Everything depends upon our own resources, of which we are mostly unaware and yet we make decisions assuming our strength will be sufficient. The risk is total, not assuaged by the warmth of a collectivity where the second rate is usually tolerated, regarded as useful and even honored. Now to win or to lose appears in a crude light, for we are alone and loneliness is a permanent affliction of exile. Once Friedrich Nietzsche exalted the freedom of height, of loneliness, of the desert. Freedom of exile is of that lofty sort, though it is imposed by circumstances and, therefore, deprived of bathos.