Somewhere along the road, I seem to have found comfort in being a foreigner. Moving to a new country with a different language and faces, with different air and water and stars has alleviated most of the mysterious heaviness that I felt since I was eleven (maybe earlier). My own tongue felt like my enemy – always betraying the disarray of my thoughts, how poorly the frame of my mind could hold a picture of the world. And now, in a foreign city, it flows so much more easily in this second language I’m writing in now. With English as my lifeline, and that of all others around me with whom I had to communicate, I finally entered a world where… everyone else stammers too. Pauses a bit long to find words or to structure a thought more accurately. Makes mistakes. The way I know people always do, but somehow always felt worse under an evening college party tent, at the fringes of buzzing adolescent heat, in the city I was born in without a sense of belonging.

Five years ago, before I moved continents, I came across a passage of Edouard Leve’s Suicide translated into English, and never more in my life felt that words were reading me right back.

When you traveled, it was to taste the pleasures of being a stranger in a strange town. You were a spectator and not an actor; mobile voyeur, silent listener, accidental tourist… You liked public places where no one was surprised if you stood still in the middle of the urban flux. The crowd guaranteed your anonymity …. In the midst of this utopia, which only your fellow lone voyagers would perceive, you used to transgress society’s rules unknowingly, and no one would hold you accountable for it. You would mistakenly enter private residences, go to concerts to which you had not been invited, eat at community banquets where you could only guess the community’s identity when they started giving speeches. Had you behaved like this in your own country, you would have been taken for a liar and a fool. But the improbable ways of a foreigner are accepted. Far from your home, you used to taste the pleasure of being mad without being alienated, of being an imbecile without renouncing your intelligence, of being an impostor without culpability.

I’ll hold on to this passage for the rest of my days. How perfectly he captures finding comfort in the foreign and strange because, before you ever set foot outside your own hometown, you were already a foreigner right where you were. 

This was a unique kind of pain that I would only later find fantastically described in Ursula K. LeGuin’s anarchist classic The Dispossessed. 

Herein the protagonist Shevek lives in Anarres, an anarchist moon-colony with high social cohesion, a  flexible labor system, egalitarian resource division, no private property or patriarchy, and an overall well-functioning society despite facing material hardships in a resource-poor region. Despite living in this awe-inspiring world, which has almost no social or economic inequality as we know it, Shevek still is pained by the curse of just being inexplicably different:

Since he was very young he had known that in certain ways he was unlike anyone else he knew. For a child the consciousness of such a difference is very painful, since, having done nothing yet and being incapable of doing anything, he cannot justify it.

In Shevek’s case, he had an early fascination with physics and spent a lot of his childhood making calculations about physical phenomena, and trying to get others around him to be interested in his ideas. As an interesting aside, rather than being bullied by his peers for his obscure passion, he is bullied by his elders in the style of Anarrestian society. Here’s how his elder shuts him down as a 10-year-old boy, for trying to discuss the Zeno’s paradox during a Speaking-and-Listening session with his peer group:

“Speech is sharing – a co-operative art. You’re not sharing, merely egoising… You didn’t see that for yourself, it wasn’t spontaneous. I read something very like it in a book.”

Shevek stared at the director. “What book? Is there one here?”

The director stood up. He was about twice as tall and three times as heavy as his opponent, and it was clear in his face that he disliked the child intensely; but there was no threat of physical violence in his stance, only an assertion of authority, a little weakened by his irritable response at the child’s odd question.

“No! And stop egoising! … Speech is a two-way function. Shevek isn’t ready to understand that yet, as most of you are, and so his presence is disruptive to the group. You feel that yourself, don’t you, Shevek? I’d suggest that you find another group working on your level.”

This shaming is apparently justified as pro-social discipline, to discourage children from self-centered chattering (“egoising”) about topics only interesting to themselves. Shevek does fall in line as he grows up, though he never loses his passion. As a young adult, he goes on to be the most brilliant and prolific physicist in Anarres – except Anarrestians don’t prize solitary, theoretical achievements, so he’s just sort of regarded as a regular member of society with an esoteric special interest. (As he maybe should be, though it’s hard not to sympathize with his struggle to find anyone who cares about his ideas AND isn’t a jealous colleague trying to sabotage him.) 

Eventually, Shevek becomes so alienated and desperate for acknowledgment of his research that he takes a spaceship to planet Urras, which is basically our Earth. He resigns himself to becoming a pariah on Anarres and lifelong foreigner on Urras, where at least physicists do get lots of recognition, respect, and institutional support. (The disadvantage of living on Earth, Shevek finds, is just about everything else.)

In LeGuin’s astute vision, there will always be someone left out in a society configured a certain way. And perhaps this can’t be avoided. Even in an ethically considered, planned human collective as Anarres – new people will be born, the world and climate may turn, and needs are going to change. Let alone in the societies we live in now, sustained by division and violent hierarchy, where man is lord, white is king, capital is emperor, firepower is god. 

There was a solution to this conundrum in The Dispossessed, not to be disingenuous, but I won’t go into that for now. I’m still hung up over the inevitability of irreconcilable difference, through some twist of fate. If it hadn’t happened to me, it’d still be happening to someone else. I have to hope this cavernous loneliness is more common than it seems, yet that too is frightening to contemplate.