leaving.
Physical, social, mental mobility refreshes the meanings of a simple act of going away: never forced, free of finality and desperation, leaving — of places, faces, minds, fields of thought, states of consciousness — becomes a core fleedom, a lifemaking favorite, an addiction for some. Habitually vagrant, we only see a place through the colored glass of eventually leaving it — so hurry to love it the more; settled for life or always on the air, alone or with a kingdom, chasing a soul candy or staying to intake a this-here corner of the world, we are lifelong leavers: “leave it to make your love of it meaningful,” “without leaving there’s no coming back,” navigare necesse est. In Humans as in Minds, leaving is rejuvenation — rebirth, deep sleep is the ultimate leave-and-return; forgetting can be a net gain (a realization that cured the “hoarding fever” of the early digital era with its explosive growth of data vs. the always-finite storage). Imprisonment isn’t inhumane because it precludes moving: it is torture for the inability to leave. ■ With a general decline of competitiveness, leaving lost the pragmatics of ensuring the last word or “shutting the door” in communication. In an earthbound dialog you would walk away — a slow, charged gesture (“turning your back”), especially awkward when the conversation wasn’t properly closed; now you fly off at any time — light, plain, dreamlike, without so much as change of posture. Withdrawing in the middle of saying something is no rude cutoff — more like punctuation: a syncope, a pause for effect, a grace period to come up with a response; it shifts your talk but not necessarily ends it because you need to get quite far off to no longer be heard and seen: conversations rarely end as such but are left and returned to, put on hold and resumed when convenient. Sparsening disadvantaged all kinds of routine, narrowly pragmatic, forced (or forcing) language, pushed spoken communication towards the elaborate literary end — but then the “leaving ferment” and humans' flying mobility (the word fly used to mean leave or escape) lowered the onus of consistency, paradoxically returned speech to its spontaneous improvisational roots; now all exchanges happen, literally or not, on the fly: let go of your words into the boundlessness as you coast within sight of your interlocutor.