Perhaps being stationary is more an exception than the propensity to travel to move towards something, perhaps even unknown, or to move away from something, to move on. It evokes movements of people and trade routes that stretch from the Indian subcontinent to the Middle East, to Africa, Europe and the Americas, carrying spices, tea, coffee, weapons, horses and slaves it includes the exchange of ideas, ideologies, values, technologies and peoples, as much as it does touristic travel and existential journey.
It is predated by a history of constant resettlement and expansion, colonisation and imperialism, trade and exchange, migration and the internationalisation of labour. Of course travel is not a distinctly modern phenomenon the movement of people across the world has a long history well beyond the contemporary period that we now associate with globalisation. In this sense, in the contemporary modern world it is possible to be “at home” both everywhere and nowhere we live in a world of contingency one of movement and change rather than stability and certainty. Heller’s question contains a query not only about where it is we might call “home”, but what designates this sense of “home”, notions of shared history or citizenship, a sense of welcome or belonging, an accident of birth or family, an apartment or a cat? The modern world, she suggests, is one characterised by “geographical promiscuity” our propensity to travel and general ease and ability to do so (at least for wealthy and middle class westerners) means we no longer privilege “home” as a spatial category as perhaps we once did but now experience it as temporal – one of living in the “absolute present” rather than one of place. This exchange captures not only one of the most salient features of modern life – the incessant movement of people(s) – but also raises questions about place and “home”, of geography and history, of contingency and dislocation. Recalling a previous conversation with an old friend thirty years earlier, who had never once left the place that was his home in Rome’s Campo dei Fiori, Heller was motivated to inquire of her on-board acquaintance: “Where are you at home?” The woman thought momentarily, and then replied, a little perplexed: “Perhaps, where my cat lives.” She spoke five languages and owned three apartments in different cities. The philosopher Agnes Heller once wrote of a conversation she had with a middle-aged woman she was sitting next to on a long haul international flight to Australia the woman had an occupation that required endless travel.
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