Page 66 - Vol V. #8

Shake Me Up, Judy (continued from preceding page)
limited to age: Weltschmerz, defined online as “melancholy” and “world-pain” or “world-weari- ness.” It may not be something to brag about. It’s also a solid element of art that people recognize with relief, even elation—think of flamenco or blues—because it makes them feel less alone. Wikipedia describes the word as originating with a German author who declared that Weltschmerz “denotes the kind of feeling experienced by some- one who believes that physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind.”
My granddaughters are in their teens; a stepson and nephews in their twenties and thirties. Some are starting families. All have to live through
the events and interactions that will form them. That’s sacred stuff to discover, consider, revisit, tweak, and reflect upon along the continuum of time—like one of those moving walkways at the airport. The walkway is a constant for all of us: the only variable being where, along its spectrum, we happen to stand.
We travel expecting something. We get something else.
For the young, understanding through the eyes, ears, nose, and guts that the rest of the world re- ally exists is no small thing—maybe even vital to the making of a moral citizen. When people say Buenos Aires or Bangkok or Pago Pago, it’s cru- cial for the young to know—in their bodies—that these are not just words but homes to fellow be- ings, their lives and dreams.
“Everything,” said a wise man to me once, when I was young and arrogant, “is exactly what you hold it to be.” We are free to create meaning; free to change it. The stories we tell ourselves will
be as real as needed, until the next story bumps it. Experience will bear out what we wish it to. Travel is a luxury, an emblem of courage or pluck, an edifying, sometimes life-changing milestone. Travel is a deluded, vain, superficial, exhausting, costly business, bad for the planet’s health and soon forgotten by its perpetrators—ultimately, by everyone.
I will lock away my own embattled weirdness and tell my young family there’s no more passionate, no more permanent an education than travel. That’s all I will tell them, and it won’t be a lie. Everyone—but especially the young—deserves
So why is not easier, I wonder, to “snap out of” Weltschmerz?
a shot at going to see what they can see. Ad- venture is still a sturdy word, and the vision it evokes from old Latin and French—a thing about to happen or better yet, what must happen—is still delicious. I will urge them to be sane, avoid war zones. But I will urge them to get out there. They won’t need (or want) to hear about my own weary tune, as I keep eyeballing those ads for a durable travel wallet popping up in the margins of my computer screen. The manufacturers make many claims for the product these days: slash- proof, waterproof, scan-proof, grab-resistant, and—they assure me—secure zip closure.
One guess is that it’s pure biology—an organism’s life-force slowing. But right up in our faces, gener- ations of artists do their best work in their sixties, seventies, eighties, even nineties. (Pablo Casals, asked why he was still practicing the cello in his nineties: “Because I think I’m making progress.”) Everything is what we hold it to be.
If the fault, then, is strictly a failure of imagina- tion, why can’t I just will a reversal? The truth makes such a buzzkill. I don’t travel well anymore. There it stands: homely, inexcusable.
But will I volunteer that to the young people in my life?
Frank is the author of six books of literary ction and an essay col- lection. Her last novel, All the News I Need, won the Juniper Prize for Fiction; other honors and awards include the Richard Sullivan Prize and two ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year awards. A MacDowell Colony fellow, She also reviews literary ction for the San Francisco Chronicle.
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