On the wandering and exilic being of knowledge seeker

An eminent Saxon scholastic theologian Hugh of Saint-Victor (1096 – 1141) noted in his monumental encyclopedic treatise Didascalion:

“All the world is a foreign soil to those who philosophize… It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil, and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant’s hut, and I know, too, how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.”