2

god’s zoo the word ‘exile’: nowadays it is employed with scant attention to its original meaning, which is banishment, from the Latin exilium or exsilium. An exsul was a banished man, one commanded to quit his native soil. Ovid was such a fi gure, Dante another. True exiles are now rare. Solzhenitsyn was bamboozled out of Russia. Pasternak almost certainly would not have been able to return had he gone to collect his Nobel Prize. Th e most debased use of the word is when one hears of tax exiles, when exile is synonymous with a Bacardi nightmare. A favourite buzzword of journalists, pollsters, demographers and sociologists, the term ‘exile’ has been stripped by them of any metaphysical dimension and is therefore the most unsatisfactory of handles. Whenever I use it, I do so reluctantly. Th e modern exile is someone who has been forced to leave his country because of war or economics or is unable to return for fear of punishment or starvation. And even if we accept this limited, limiting defi nition, we are looking at something that is substantially diff erent from what it was even half a century ago, when the decision to leave, or not to return, was considerably more drastic, almost certainly irreversible. Th e sense of isolation is no longer felt to quite the same degree. Th e letter that once upon a time took several weeks to arrive, which, after being tampered with by the authorities at the other end, might have brought news of birth or death, has been largely rendered obsolete. Communication is now immediate, and as such it has altered the very condition of exile. Space and time are no longer the obstacles they once were. What does remain the same, however, although in ways more diffi cult to measure, simply because things are not as clear as they once were, is the internal shifting of one’s tectonic plates. I want to know what happens inside. Artists are already exiles of a kind, which is to say the position they occupy in society is not what it used to be, when, say, a poet was his country’s conscience. Th is is not strictly true, of course, because in some parts of the world, where there are no government subsidies other than those provided for the forging of prison bars, a man of words can still deliver strong punches. What a meltdown there’s been, though, in the aff airs of men. We are truly bound ‘in shallows and in miseries’. Artists have become, at the very least, internal émigrés, retreating further and further into themselves. And being fi ercely individualistic, most of them, they are wary of sharing