the.foreignness.of.it.all

... Marco Polo imagined answering ( or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.

At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: " You advance always with your back turned?" or "Is what you see always behind you?" or rather, "Does your journey take place only in the past?"

All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was just a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveller's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places... the traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have...

[above excerpt from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, expressing in fluid terms all the surfacing hopes and anxieties that I am feeling with regards to studying abroad.]

Nostalgia Kills The Soul.
Had a chat about nostalgia with a good friend the other night. Not specifically centred on the notion of nostalgia per se, but on peripheral matters that related and somehow reminded me of things, experiences, friends gone by. It always makes me sad to dwell on matters like these, but yet, being the self-indulgent person that I am (yes, quoting from the great O.B., unhappiness IS the most insiduous form of self-indulgence), I always find myself floundering in excessive and uncalled-for self-misery. I hate looking back on the sad events of the past, because I'd always felt that the past is concreted in history and cannot be changed. Friends who used to be so close but are now not even a phonecall away, people whose company you thought you could never have survived a day without, stepped out of your life leaving footprints of invisible ghosts. Happy times now relegated to indifferent obscurity; emotional security now assimilated into satirical independence. Innocence once lost can never be regained; disillusionment once possessed cannot be discarded.

Yet as I turned the pages of Invisible Cities, this fresh perspective on a traveller's past (as we all are on life's journey) struck a chord inside of me. The present, as what we understand of it now, reveals itself more to us in the future in the form of the past. This is perhaps embodied in the power of evaluating on hindsight, with a clarity of mind that comes only with detachment and thereby objectivity. Words said, feelings felt, heartbreak endured, take on less significance after being subjected to the arduous testing of time. We decipher the past with the tools of the present, although I don't suppose that we understand any MORE of the past- it's a different kind of understanding that encroaches upon our present. Age, and a different mindset, lets us see things from a more streamlined angle. How we react to situations and circumstances now, bear their roots in our family upbringing and the kind of attention we received as a kid. Similarly, DISPLACEMENT in lands that are foreign to us, allows for a deeper connection with our heritage, and the notion of what it means to be Asian, to be Singaporean, to be a Tan, to be a part of my family. These are the hopes and aspirations of a would-be traveller- to possess what he never can have.