The individual whose vision encompasses the whole world often feels nowhere so hedged in and out of touch with his surroundings as in his native land.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire.
In order to engage in an 'experiencing of the world,' one has to physically move oneself to the most diverse places on earth.
If you feel like an outsider, you tend to observe things a lot more.
The plain man is familiar with blindness and deafness, and knows from his everyday experience that the look of things is influenced by his senses; but it never occurs to him to regard the whole world as the creation of his senses.
Anyone who lives within his means suffers from a lack of imagination.
The peculiarities of my childhood, of constantly moving through so many different cultures, of always being the outsider, may have made me extraordinarily self-sufficient, but it had also bred a certain detachment, a sense that the world was a place to explore rather than truly inhabit. This manifested as a kind of shyness, even timidity.
Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.
In my normal way of doing things, there's a little bit of 'going native' that takes place, where you're in a world long enough, you can't really help but start to see things in a nuanced, more humanistic way. Just because you're with people and you start to, in general, slightly like the people you're with.
The man who has no inner-life is a slave to his surroundings.
A man who lives everywhere lives nowhere.