the journey as an exile

In your post here, you talk about the journey as a kind of exile and the material it results in as an archive of exile:

Then there is a journal/blog/podcast (of words, music, visual images, and whatever else) of our responses to what we experience, which is ALSO in some way an archive of exile, because we ourselves are travelers in a more or less foreign land.

I think this is a very productive idea. I'm not going to try to say much about it right now but it seems deeply important to me: exile is often profoundly painful but, as we said here (your post and my comment), adulthood is a kind of condition of exile and you have to leave the house to grow up. To make a journey and look at the world as you go, particularly the experiences of others who have made journeys under greater duress, might be a working out of that insight.

exiles from childhood

for the sake of completeness, here's what I wrote to you on 21 may 08 about the project:

I happened to be visiting my aunt in san francisco when the email with the proposal came, and I mentioned it to her, a research psychologist specializing in infant-parent relationships, and she said something in passing about how we are all exiles -- from childhood -- which I thought was a lovely formulation of part of the experience of adulthood.