Friday Reading: Questions of Travel

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

-- Emerson, Self-Reliance

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

-- Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus"

I remember, some time ago in Vermont, I saw a sheep grazing on the grass, with his head stuck through a square of wire fencing. Behind him lay an immensity of green, open fields entirely at his disposal, and yet, like the cliche that he was, he couldn't help preferring the grass on the other side.

I was chatting with a student today about the passage above. This is a passage that gives many a bit of trouble. Emerson's assessment of traveling at first glance seems a bit cynical and restraining, insistent as it is on the well-worn notion that wherever you go, there you are.

There are, however, two ways of dealing with this truism: with cynicism, lamenting the inescapability of the self, the curse, as it is, of being. C.P. Cavafy offers us a gloomy rendition of this sentiment:

You said: "I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.

How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally."
You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.

While this may be depressing, I don't think, even here, that the alternative is recommended -- the alternative being a kind of renunciation of movement, a surrender to futility, a descent into the realm of, say, Dostoevsky's "Underground Man." Hamlet, complaining of "the prison" that is Denmark, offers us, perhaps surprisingly, another option:

Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.

If "thinking makes it so," the lines seem to suggest, one may at least learn to think differently. Elsewhere, Hamlet says:

I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.

Though bad dreams are, generally speaking, involuntary, they are just another way of "thinking it so." Emerson's admonition against traveling is similar. He is far from recommending the cloistered life. He does not issue a fatwa against travel, but rather proposes a methodology for traveling rightly -- and this is, I think, the second possible approach to the truism. He writes:

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Emerson warns here against traveling as a collector of dead relics, as a lifeless conoisseur, a maker of catalogs. This is the man who "travels to be amused," to go, in the false hopes of Cavafy's traveler, of finding "another city better than this one." Rejecting the notion of a city better than this one, however, is not to reject the benefits of novelty and difference. To travel is to experience, as it is to stay at home. These experiences are, so long as we keep in view the fact that our valuations of each are a matter of "thinking it so," only different in the details. The gathering of details is also indispensible for Emerson, as he recommends in "The American Scholar" a great deal of learning, both from nature and books, experience and history. But on their own, without the active intervention of the self-reliant consciousness, without using these details to create new forms, new details of our own, in speech, in writing, or in action, then they become nothing more than a catalog, a ledger of deeds already done, experiences had by others. The new city will not be "better" than the old, but it will have been a city that we've been to -- and our arrival and our departure, if we come and go as "sovereigns" and not "valets," affects not only ourselves, but the places themselves that we visit, in the same way as T.S. Eliot suggests that each new addition to the literary canon is not only affected by it, but affects fundamentally the entire structure of which it has just become a part. Each new addition to the world makes the world new. The city may be not better for our arrival, but we can nonetheless say "we were here," and add a new statement, a new meaning to our collective vocabulary. As Emerson says about language: "Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word"; and thus the syllogism can complete itself.

So Emerson, unlike Thornton Melon, does not say to us: "Don't go!" Instead he reminds us to "go alone," reminds us that the intoxication of displacement is only an illusion. Unless we make of the experience something of our own, we are simply borrowing or stealing from others -- taking instead of making our metaphors. The city itself in Cavafy's poem is, of course, only a metaphor, and Emerson's talk of travel is likewise figurative. Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet who perhaps never felt at home, whether at home or abroad, examined this problem in a poem of her own, one which I always like to measure against the compact darkness of Cavafy. While Cavafy ends his poem with a grim declaration, Bishop ends hers with rhetorical questions, questions that imply, to my mind, answers not only ambiguous, but affirmative. I'll leave off with her leaving off:

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"