Sara Mansfield Taber

Czeslaw Milosz notes that places now left behind are nevertheless imprinted on a child’s psyche:  Knowledge does not have to be conscious. It is incredible how much of the aura of a country can penetrate a child.  Stronger than thought is an image—of dry leaves on a path, of twilight,…

Here is a passage from my writing guide for global nomads, Of Many Lands: Journal of a Traveling Childhood:  Holland is for me what childhood should be: freedom, bikes, canals, fields. The brick row house in downtown The Hague where I spent the five middle years of my childhood was the…

Edward Said on the global nomad’s struggle to fit into a new school: It was as an American businessman’s son who hadn’t the slightest feeling of being American that I entered the Cairo School for American Children (CSAC) in the fall of 1946, the first day made easier by the…

Andre Aciman’s Aunt Flora on the split loyalty of being from two places:  “Even today, I continue to live my life that way.  I cross the street on the slant, I always sit in the side rows at concert halls, am a citizen of two countries but I live in…

Milosz writes of one of the global nomad’s particular challenges: the problem of integrating multiple sense impressions and selves, and of having no sturdy culture against which to shape oneself:  My own case is enough to verify how much of an effort it takes to absorb contradictory traditions, norms, and…