Question Six/Video

Is exile always a misfortune?

Depends on your perspective. For many writers, particularly in the early portion of the twentieth century, exile resulted in the writers doing their best work to date. Of course, exile here is being used more in the ex-patriot form. Those artists found, not surprisingly, that America was best viewed from across the Atlantic. They found that distance brought them a new clarity unavailable in the grand old United States. Any writer worth their salt would pretty much confirm the virtue of exile from one's work in order to view it afresh. Ie, I'm using exile in a different way again, in which a writer waits a few months or a year before approaching a piece of writing again, so that they are able to see it as an outsider would and thus become able to see the faults that might not be available from inside the thing.

Exile for many people often arises out of necessity. Obviously we have a very salient example right now happening in Libya. This sort of exile could be classified as beneficial only in so far as these people are getting to a safer place. However, exile as unifying idea certainly can serve a good purpose. Ie, the absence of a place can serve as a common unifying thing between people in a way that it couldn't otherwise.

In general though exile is a misfortune. Being tossed out of a place that a person believes to be home is certainly not something that a person would wish, good results withstanding. I'm not sure that the perspective gained by exile is at all worth the pain a person would feel at the loss of home. Certainly Einstein's exit from Nazi Germany was both boom and bust on a variety of levels. However, on a macro scale I'd call his exile a positive one for the capital W world. The point is, exile needs to be defined before we start quibbling about whether it is always a misfortune.

Videos of the baby.

Most of these end in crying.

Sadie enjoying some quality literature.

Sadie showing appropriate respect for bears.