Why didn't he join them, the former Essex postgraduates, who fled Britain?, W. wonders. Why did he stay behind? W. remembers a Kafka parable. - 'Where are you riding to, Master?', the servant asks. - 'I don't know. Away-From-Here, that's my destination'.

Away-From-Here: that's where the Essex postgraduates went. Away-From-Britain. That's where he should have gone, W. says: Away-From-Britain. He should have stayed overseas after his studies.

Do I know what brought him back?, W. says. Do I know why he didn't stay in France? British humour, he says. Having a laugh, British style. Taking the piss. Having the piss taken out of you. That's what he missed, W. says. They don't take the piss in France, or have the piss taken out of them in Luxembourg. He saw nothing of taking the piss in the trains of Europe, or in the European archives. No one takes the piss out of the Germans ...

Away-From-Here ... But he'll never get away, will he?, W. says. There's Canada, of course, his Canadian dream. But the Canadian universities don't even reply to his job applications. They don't even send him rejection letters ... 

He's been left behind, W. says. He and the other former Essex postgraduates, who found academic jobs instead of leaving Britain. He compromised, he says, he who had been shown that life is elsewhere, and that one should try to struggle into that elsewhere; that life flared into its fullnesss somewhere else, in another place; that life moved there like fire in fire, like weather on the sun.

Life was elsewhere. Life is elsewhere, that much is clear to him, W. says.