August 04, 2004
Travelling light
We travelled to London and Belgium over the past couple of weeks, and my experience was similar. Starting in London I tried to watch my own reactions to differences from my usual life ("Wow, they're so ...", "It's amusing how they do that", "Why doesn't anyone...."). I began to differentiate between the part of me that's built of my cultural environment and the rest of me -- can I call it the core part of me? No, wait.
In Belgium I was working with a language that I only partially understand and speak with much less fluency than a native three-year-old. So as I tried to follow conversations or even initiate a gramatically tortured statement, I was acutely conscious of language as the vehicle for thought (a jalopy in my case). As I found myself turning French phrases over in my head (things I sometimes didn't even fully understand) I became more aware of the running dialog (usually in English) in my head that I usually take for my own opinions and thoughts. Stripped of this running dialog, there's finally direct experience. And that, maybe, is the real attraction of travel. August 04, 2004 07:31 AM
Two quotes in June's Sunbeams (pdf) stood out when I read them:
Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes — with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.
- Michael Crichton
Traveling is a fool’s paradise. . . . 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.Emerson's view is very close to Crichton's, though its dour negativity springs from the thwarted goal of escape.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
We travelled to London and Belgium over the past couple of weeks, and my experience was similar. Starting in London I tried to watch my own reactions to differences from my usual life ("Wow, they're so ...", "It's amusing how they do that", "Why doesn't anyone...."). I began to differentiate between the part of me that's built of my cultural environment and the rest of me -- can I call it the core part of me? No, wait.
In Belgium I was working with a language that I only partially understand and speak with much less fluency than a native three-year-old. So as I tried to follow conversations or even initiate a gramatically tortured statement, I was acutely conscious of language as the vehicle for thought (a jalopy in my case). As I found myself turning French phrases over in my head (things I sometimes didn't even fully understand) I became more aware of the running dialog (usually in English) in my head that I usually take for my own opinions and thoughts. Stripped of this running dialog, there's finally direct experience. And that, maybe, is the real attraction of travel. August 04, 2004 07:31 AM