"I not only lived physically away from my native land, but the values and critical judgments of those closest to me became stranger and stranger"
About this Quote
Exile here isn’t a postcard of distance; it’s a slow-motion recalibration of reality until the people who should feel most legible start speaking in a foreign moral accent. Goytisolo isn’t only describing separation from Spain in the literal sense (though his life, shaped by Franco-era repression and self-imposed expatriation, supplies that backdrop). He’s naming the more corrosive dislocation: the moment when your closest circle becomes an ecosystem of assumptions you can’t breathe in anymore.
The line turns on a quiet escalation. “Physically away” is almost administrative, a fact you could stamp on a passport. Then comes the sharper wound: “values and critical judgments.” Not customs, not food, not nostalgia. He targets the machinery by which a community decides what counts as decent, shameful, admirable, unsayable. That phrasing is clinical on purpose; it treats belonging as something enforced by evaluation, not merely felt. The doubling - “values” and “critical judgments” - suggests both the inherited code and the daily policing of it.
“Stranger and stranger” reads like a refrain from a relationship ending, which is the point: exile as a deteriorating intimacy, not a heroic adventure. For a poet and dissident, this estrangement also contains a dare. If the home culture’s judgments become unintelligible, the writer is freed - and condemned - to invent a new tribunal, one that can’t rely on familiar consensus. The subtext is bleakly modern: alienation isn’t a rupture you survive once; it’s a gradient, a widening gap between your evolving conscience and the community that insists it hasn’t changed at all.
The line turns on a quiet escalation. “Physically away” is almost administrative, a fact you could stamp on a passport. Then comes the sharper wound: “values and critical judgments.” Not customs, not food, not nostalgia. He targets the machinery by which a community decides what counts as decent, shameful, admirable, unsayable. That phrasing is clinical on purpose; it treats belonging as something enforced by evaluation, not merely felt. The doubling - “values” and “critical judgments” - suggests both the inherited code and the daily policing of it.
“Stranger and stranger” reads like a refrain from a relationship ending, which is the point: exile as a deteriorating intimacy, not a heroic adventure. For a poet and dissident, this estrangement also contains a dare. If the home culture’s judgments become unintelligible, the writer is freed - and condemned - to invent a new tribunal, one that can’t rely on familiar consensus. The subtext is bleakly modern: alienation isn’t a rupture you survive once; it’s a gradient, a widening gap between your evolving conscience and the community that insists it hasn’t changed at all.
Quote Details
| Topic | Loneliness |
|---|
More Quotes by Juan
Add to List
