Diverging roads

"Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government.  They learn, if they are lucky, humility. Experiencing on their senses a world different from their own, they realize their provincialism and recognize their ignorance." (Paul Fussell, in the Norton Book of Travel)

Flaubert said that travel made one modest because "You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world."

You discover that you can be a patriot and still acknowledge that someone else does something better. You experience the grace of individuals who do not assign to you personally all the wrongs perpetrated by your country since time immemorial.

You see that the night sky hanging over the yurt is the same one you can see in your own backyard, should you take the time to look.

By going and coming home, you discover that you are changed somehow.  You will surely shrink back into the everyday pettiness and circumcision of interest that daily life very nearly requires.  But you will not wholly forget, and in those moments when you have a small choice whether to open your mind to something new or to stay in a safe place, perhaps sometimes you will choose the former because you remember.  You remember that there are many paths, and that you can choose.

the intervening years

When we are young, we stack our days with heaping piles of activities, from end to end, even stealing from short nights to avert loss of an opportunity to squeeze one more thing in. And we look on the middle aged with a mix of contempt and pity, vowing that we will not, unlike our parents, ever choose a full night's sleep over the chance to watch a meteor shower, or give up an opening night seat because it would mean a fifth night out in a row.

Alas, the weight of our days begins to accumulate, and we too yield to the summons from within, to focus in on the gems we have discovered along our raucous headlong journey. In order to accommodate this close regard of a few things, whether chosen of free will or forced on us by life circumstances, we very gradually begin to let go of the periphery, allowing it to diminish as does the road behind us, still part of our personal history, but no longer part of day to day life.

I would like to say that this middle-aged selection process is not the beginning of the narrowing that comes with old age, that we don't expand our horizons for 29 years, and then having unknowingly summited one day, cross immediately into the other watershed, where the flow of golden life is gradually drawn away from us.

I'd also like to say that pigs fly and there really are unicorns.

To follow the bread crumbs

You never know what may result from a seemingly insignificant happening.

I'm  reading some letters written by Anton Chekhov during his travels to the eastern edges of Russia- all the way to the penal colony on the island called Sakhalin. His report on the state of life there is of less interest to me than his reports to family and friends about the journey.

Travel seems to me to be a literal analogy to the exploration of the unknown.  Obvious statement, that. Or maybe not.  I've discovered that people travel for different reasons, with very different approaches.  Still, if one keeps at it, even the stubbornly single-minded are in some way affected by what they see, smell and hear.

I read recently a quote from T. S. Eliot:
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time"

Who am I to say he got it right? But I'll say it anyway, because I've found it so.  Home, wherever and whatever we assign that moniker to, is never seen the same way after once leaving it.

And then a friend tells me she is reading T.S. Eliot's letters, as I am reading Chekhov's. So the trail leads me toward T.S., no doubt long overdue.