The beauty, which is the challenge, of the modern moment is that the very terms “home” and “away” have become as mongrel, as mobile, even as interchangeable as those old standbys, “East” and “West” (or “high” and “low”). Home exists somewhere in the future for many of us—an idea, a vision, a language or set of values that we carry around inside ourselves and that has more to do with where we’re going than with where we came from. And “away” therefore becomes equally slippery, as some of us suspect that in fact it’s the place where we were born, the land whose passport we carry, the culture we embody in our faces and voices that is the truly foreign place.

Traveling across the world today, you find the very MTV video or McDonald’s outlet or overfriendly neighbor you’ve journeyed 6,000 miles to get away from; yet waking up in the place that you think of as home, you find yourself surrounded by the rhythms and stories, the histories and costumes of cultures that not long ago belonged to the far corners of the earth. The new century is asking us to redefine “citizen” and “community” and “tradition,” to expand our notions of “travel” and “exile” and “exoticism.” But most of all it’s asking us to create for ourselves, each one of us, a new and living sense of “home” and “away.” The Other is on our doorstep, and home is less a place we inhabit than one we devise, as we move around a world that is moving around us, faster than ever before.

Copyright © 2007 Pico Iyer. All rights reserved.

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