Crossing frontiers . . .

"...the past is a country from which we have all immigrated, its loss is part of our common humanity [. . .] [a person] out of country may experience that loss in intensified form. It is made more concrete [. . .] by the physical fact of discontinuity [. . .] forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional nature of truth [. . .] people who root themselves in ideas, rather than places and material things; people who have been obliged to define themselves - because they are so defined by others - by their otherness [. . .] The migrant suspects reality, having experienced several ways of being.

To see things plainly you have to cross a frontier . . ."

Culled from Imaginary Homelands, bt Salman Rushdie