Likely one of the last below-freezing evenings in a winter that proved a bit difficult to endure. I am at the coffeehouse that proved to be a lifesaver when I found it open after the morning of the first blizzard.
I've just written a very long essay that was lost completely when the sbux internet connection dropped underneath when writing it. Perhaps some fragments of it will allow the entire thought to regrow.
The psalms begin by blessing one who doesn't sit in the seat of the stranger. Literally, this is the seat of the 'babbler', which some scholarship connects to the travellers between towns, the merchants. The mercantile laws of England developed in relation to the legal orders of the local aristocrats, providing a legal order sufficient for commerce between towns. The one who stands outside the city becomes the foundation of the larger order, not because he is beyond the law, but because he is subject to a higher law; the laws of the world are inscribed on the staff of the traveller.
Likely, I come off as a bit military. This is only because of the limited range of paradigms of strength; a strong and disciplined person is thought to be properly a soldier, just as a someone skillful with ropes and navigation in a seafaring town might be thought to be a sailor.
The Germans divide culture and civilization. Culture is that living force that is awakened conceptually by the others, and it takes the form of visual arts, music, stories, etc. It is an inward strength, but one called forth by the presence of others, and shared with them. Conversely, civilization is the ability to navigate social forms with sufficient dignity. The shared facility of encountering others in ways that are conducive to social projects and productivity. The city is a complex mix of these two things, and the one who stands outside the order of things must preserve their own forms of them.
There is an old Russian film about some soviet earth scientists who travel to the barren north, mapping the territory and seeking mineral deposits. Natural disasters and misfortunes pick them off, one by one, and at the end, the last survivor lashes some logs together and throws himself into the stream of the river, trusting that it will take him to populated areas. At the end, he has a vision of the cities that will come, after these times of privation and struggle against nature.
But the cities are not solutions in themselves to the problems of mankind. Some even make the problems worse. The one that I am in right now seems sometimes to only provide sufficient material security so that the people can function as greedy end-users of consumer products, and fight ruthlessly for position in the local social order. It's not exactly the divine city that the most extreme partisans of the local faiths sometimes make it out to be.
The storytelling of the cities also preserves the notion of the wanderers between the cities. Islamic stories tell of wandering angels testing the hospitality of men. The wandering Jew, Prester John, the ships that travel eternally in the night, Wotan the wanderer, with the laws of the world inscribed on his staff. It's odd that these narratives would preserve some notion of travellers subject to a moral order higher than the local order; the partisans of the city would seem to have little to gain from this. But perhaps these are stories told against the city, preserving the memory of life from outside of it, and the world elsewhere.
There is a sort of purification involved in standing outside of things. Perhaps this is the condemnation of the psalmist. On the coldest of mornings, I was struck by the scents, the microbial life, of those around me -- I had been purified of such things by the cold. Inwardly as well, the body becomes less able to digest things, as the microbiota die off, and the guts become less fecund. Panem angelorum.
But this is a form of death as well. The city will rise up against the traveller; the nature that the city has overcome similarly stands ready with its own attacks. Many of those caught between worlds simply slink back into the depths of the city; the alternate-history Oedipus lurks the dark corners of Thebes, afraid to leave.
There is a priesthood of the one caught between worlds, or perhaps that is a pleonasm, as a priesthood is by definition one caught between two (or more) worlds. Like culture, it is distinctively inward, but it is called forth by the social order that surrounds him, and seems to attack him. A higher discipline and self-regard than the circumstances might tend to indicate.
The laws of the world are inscribed on the staff of the traveller, as they are not inscribed in his heart, and in his relationships with others. Their inscription is objective, not a form of life for him. He understands them, and strives to honor them. Both in the fight against nature, and among the cultures of the cities, the traveller stands apart, purified by the adversities. But the purification of the winter is not the final word. These fragments of remembered truth, now reduced to obective language from memory, grow within him, and from them, there is a higher culture, and a notion of a higher civilization.
Panem angelorum.
He will not survive within their worlds, but he will live.