Page 65 - Vol V. #8

“We travel expec ng something. We
get something else.”
administering a good hard series of downward shakes. You can hear the crack and pop of rear- ranging bones.
and spiritually) to discern and to name, flavored by who we are in the moment of seeing; what shape and strength of mind and soul we bring to it. What we see will forever inform everything we think, say, and do, including (if we are look- ing carefully) a fresh understanding of our own potential barbarism, our fearful, greedy parts. We know more, respect more, are humbled by more—most of all by what we don’t understand.
And yet.
Why should anyone’s aversion to risk and discom- fort, particularly as they age, automatically translate as weakness of spirit? Emily Dickinson seldom left her house. Proust, in the habits of his person, was not exactly an action figure. While we live, there’s no report card. After we die, there are only platitudes. Why not do more of what we like to do and less of what we don’t? In the same way that perceptions refine with age, why shouldn’t tastes?
I can no longer buy the stock salespitch, the hearty take your weird-tasting travel medicine and become a better person bromide. It’s too pat. One size may not fit all.
Facts? Travel beats us up. It’s shockingly expen- sive. Its effects upon the planet, and upon those we visit, are morally questionable. It takes a chunk of time to recover. (The cells remember that, too.) There is also, floating over these con- cerns like a polluted cloud, the troubling fact
Why the Bear Went Over the Mountain
An aging east-coast friend, a shrewd and vibrant writer, once told me she was embarking on a brief getaway to a small Italian town with her (eighty- something-year-old) boyfriend—and that while there she meant to try her best “not to learn anything.”
of a scarcity of human interpenetration. That
is, most tourists are routinely buffered first to last by a sealed environment, so that their “trip” consists of acting out in familiar ways, in familiar language, against a borrowed landscape. (If you have ever lived in a resort destination, you have dwelled in the graphic, daily evidence of this.)
That shocked me a minute. Then it flooded me with delight. I still delight in it when I think about the great earnestness of most Americans—me foremost among them. American earnestness often seems a kind of solipsistic apple-polishing, a shiny dream of self-in-the-world, a story we tell ourselves, while stepping off the cliff, about who we are and (for that matter) that the world cares.
Other tourists make a prideful mythology of travel ordeals: “It happened this way, which proves that I am right about what is real.” Though telling stories later is not strictly why we go. (No one’s listening for long, immersed as they are in their own stories.)
It also enables us—strangely—to do things we did not know we couldn’t.
We go, I think, driven by combined ennui and curiosity, for the same reason the bear went over the mountain: to see what we can see—mean- ing, to my thinking, what we are able (physically
Or shouldn’t.
What I finally suspect about my growing dismay
I am uneasy, however, letting that argument plant its smug flag there and dust its hands.
is that it springs from a common condition, not
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