aliens among their kindred

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place.

Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace,

and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood

or the populous streets in which they have played,

remain but a place of passage.

They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred

and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known.

Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men

far and wide in search for something permanent,

to which they may attach themselves.

Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer

back to lands which his ancestors left in the in the dim beginnings of history.

Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs.

Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before,

among the men he has never known,

as though they were familiar to him from his birth.

Here at last he finds rest.

-from The Moon and Sixpence

by W. Somerset Maugham, 1919