... Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?
What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm? ...
But on our Canada trip I was thinking about another set of questions about travel, also from The New Yorker (Bishop's poem appeared in January 1956) but more recent, philosopher Agnes Callard's "The Case Against Travel." This essay gathers arguments from iconoclasts like Chesterton and Pessoa to suggest that travel is an inauthentic and self-defeating attempt to "experience a change" (a term she takes from an anthropology of tourism). Whatever we may think about our own travels, Callard dares us to admit that hearing about our friends' travels is wearisome, precisely because, whatever they may say, they're unchanged by the experience. The essay too quickly lumps together many kinds of travel, I think - potshots against tourists don't always work against study abroad, for instance - but the arguments are worth reading. Her own view comes at the end:
Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. ...
Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this, and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.
Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.
Putting aside the philosophers' snark, I think she's onto something. When I go somewhere, I'm not really there - not like the people I encounter, whom I encounter precisely as people who are there, are of there. (I know I'm just a passing phenomenon to them.) But, of course, while I'm not really there, I'm not back home either. Maybe I'm not of either place, a passing phenomenon everywhere?
For me, beyond experiences of joy and wonder at the built and non-human worlds, travel involves feelings of envy and schadenfreude towards my fellow humans - imagine living here! or, when it's a historic sight, imagine having lived here! - which add to the sense of vertigo, of being but a passing phenomenon wherever I go. In these moments, yes, I do imagine others to be more grounded than me.
But then they probably are! I have lived in more places than most - that is: lived for a while, then moved on. And I now live in a place where many people just pass through, and not just travelers. Perhaps we don't need travel. Or, more broadly, as settler colonials, are we doomed ever to keep traveling, haunted by the questions imagine living here! imagine having lived here?
Callard's provocation stayed with me as we explored the Acadian Peninsula, perhaps coloring my sense of Acadian pathos. But the argument didn't always stick. This wasn't a place I came to to fulfil some dream but a place I hadn't dreamed of, an enlargement of awareness, the discovery of more ways of living than we'd known existed. Perhaps travel can relativize our sense of self and place rather than show its emptiness. The flip side of "someday you will do nothing and be nobody" is that that's fine. Though we're all passing phenomena, plenty of other people are doing plenty of other things.
The folded sunset above is from our Airbnb in Val-Comeau, a place suggested on the Airbnb site when we were looking for places to stay in the Gaspésie, hundreds of miles away!
