There was also the change in habits, once again I was having to get used to new faces in new surroundings and to learn new ways of talking and lying. Laziness is almost as compelling as life. The new farce you’re having to play crushes you with its banality, and all in all it takes more cowardice than courage to start all over again. That’s what exile, a foreign country is, inexorable perception of existence as it really is, during those long lucid hours, exceptional in the flux of human time, when the ways of the old country abandon you, but the new ways haven’t sufficiently stupefied you as yet.

At such moments everything adds to your loathsome distress, forcing you in your weakened state to see things, people, and the future as they are, that is, as skeletons, as nothings, which you will nevertheless have to love, cherish, and defend as if they existed.

A different country, different people carrying on rather strangely, the loss of a few little vanities, of a certain pride that has lost its justification, the lie it’s based on, its familiar echo-no more is needed, your head swims, doubt takes hold of you, the infinite opens up just for you, a ridiculously small infinite, and you fall into it…

Travel is the search for this nothing, this bit of intoxication for numbskulls.
 

– Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night, 1932)