Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. - Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent”
So this weekend I’m shifting with the family to a new place in Kembangan, which seems as good a reason to allude to a Kundera title as any. Moving always seems to invoke a whole flood of emotions. Once you spend enough time in any one space, once you hang your hat and claim it as yours, you realise it’s not just that you occupy the space - the physical space ends up slowly, through some dim process of accretion, occupying your psychic space, infusing random corners of the mind with associations and memories. Which leaves me knowing two geographies: the one of physical corporeal dimensions, and my personal psychogeography, defined by imprints of the past.
My essay on leaving Harvard after graduation, writen 4 years ago.