Why Am I In Thailand?

I get this question on a regular basis.  My answer is never the same, and usually it has little to do with the reality of it. 

I'm reading "Moby-Dick" again, and you may thank me now that I don't bother you on a daily basis with my sad insights into the levels of meaning that a reader can find there.  But I did come across something that has immediate bearing on the above question.  

The author was speaking of a man who found himself overcome by ruin and thereafter took refuge at sea as blacksmith of the Pequod.  Bad choice for a refuge, that!  Melville opines that this kind of retreat to "the immense Remote, the Wild . . ." is a comfort "to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide . . ."

Going to Asia is functionally similar to going to sea.  The invitation to the remote is phrased as follows:


"Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.  Come hither! bury thyself in a life which, to your now equally abhorred and abhorring, landed world, is more oblivious than death.  Come hither! put up thy grave-stone, too, within the churchyard, and come hither, till we marry thee!"  


We have places to go, and things to do, we broken-hearted, that can distract us from the prospect of intermediate death.