Only earlier today I had a minor epiphany. (And thank you, UCLA library ching-chong girl, for helping the public to remember such a great word.) Here is what I was writing at the time:
Yet - if the joy of a thing is in the doing, and not the having done, then surely the reading that I have done due to this list is its own reward, and the "completing" of a list is but a silly by-product of time well-spent.
I have often wondered at the many activities in which I engage, and the value they could possibly hold. I (and much of the world, incidentally,) at some level think that Travel, (with a big T,) somehow leaves one with a bigger soul. Or that having a wide range of experiences, (like having been forced to eat one's own liver in an igloo in the frozen north, or having sex with two women) or mastering certain skills (like playing a musical instrument while having sex with two women, for example,) leave us with . . . I don't know - an expanded conception of our own humanity - a better sense of who we are - a richer life . . . something like that.
It was a couple of years ago, in the midst of achieving a life-long dream, that I first began to wonder about this, or began to realize that there was something here of which I was not sure. It was in Egypt, at one of the numerous famous sights filled with antiquities which to the American mind are so impossibly ancient as to be beyond an age worth thinking about in specific terms. (Frankly, the longer I am outside of the US, the better I do in thinking things that are 600 years old are "somewhat" old, and those of a thousand years "rather" old and those of 2000 years "quite" old, and those preceding that . . . well, now - that is "really very," isn't it?)
But in any case, I was in Aswan, say, or Luxor, staring at some unbelievably dusty piece of rock that some poor slave or 400 had labored over extensively every day for probably the better part of a year, and the afternoon sun was causing my brain to smell like an overdone quiche, and the tourist police kept gesturing to me to follow them off somewhere private, where no doubt they would show, (or, I am told, do) something for which I would have to part with a sum so small as to border on embarrassing, with which they would (whatever the sum,) pretend to be discontented, and demand more, and the sweat was trickling down my back and being absorbed into the backpack which pressed into my back and the dust had over the past hour accumulated again into the small rivulet-stained lines from the last time I poured water over them in an attempt to cleanse them (which had instead just left them muddy,) and I had to ask myself if it was worth it.
After all: What was I here for? Why was I not seated in the shade somewhere, drinking something cold and heavily infused with stupeficants? To what end was this damn misery being endured? (It was at moments like those that I think I came closest to understanding the mindset of the British colonial masters; because frankly, had I been handed a riding crop and a pistol and had a man-servant to walk behind me porting a cooler of cold gin, I too,would have tolerated a lot less cheek from the local touts, I am sure.)
First, I suppose one reason for enduring this misery was because long ago as a wee lad, I had made a goal: to see the pyramids, and The temple at Abu Simbel and such. (And what is the point of making goals if you are only going to discard them later because it necessitated a bit of sweaty traipsing-about and being annoyed by men leading camels?)
Secondly, this "Traveling" thing was supposed to be good for one. After all, why else does one, (and oh, one does!) hear so many people under the guise of "getting to know each other" start trying to out-story and out-travel and out-country each other? Why would people do this, unless at some underlying level, we have the belief that travel makes one . . . smarter? more experienced? more worldy-wise? better-traveled? special-as-a-two-headed-animalcracker? I don't know what it is that we think it does, but it seems overwhelmingly apparent that we do think it signifies something and that something is, to us, very, very, positive - boast-worthy, even.
Consider, then, the number. Have you (I have!) ever heard the question posed: "So how many countries have you been to?" No one ever asks how many meals you've eaten - how many haircuts you've had, how many times you've stubbed your toe in the middle of the night. No one inquires how many times you have broken the speed limit or eaten an ice-cream sundae. No - the number question only comes up in a few areas: How many countries? How many tattoos? How many years? With how many people?
Is there a common thread here? Certainly we ask these questions because we believe that the answer informs us of something. How many years/How old are you correlates to a degree of experience, perhaps? We certainly expect people of different ages to have differing views on life - note the reassessment that takes place when you find out the perfectly acceptable 25 year-old guy at the party is really 36. Suddenly he begins to seem mentally stunted in a way that is only acceptable for people under the age of 26. How many people have you had sex with? The question presupposes that the numbers will communicate something relevant to the person's life experience, or medical history, or values, or to what degree they prefer to stay up late and tolerate crap conversation from drunken people rather than going home and reading a good book. How many tattoos do you have? OK, you got me there. I have no idea why anyone asks that. I certainly don't, as it seems to make fat men begin to disrobe in restaurants.
So given that we think travel does something for one, shouldn't one know what it is that one is trying to do, so that one may arrange one's travel the better to achieve said end? What is it about staring at a carven rock, or paying to ride an elevator to the top of a tower, or being overcharged for drinks that constitutes something regarding which later we would boast?
After a great deal of thought, I believe I have arrived at a (for myself) satisfactory conclusion, and here I offer it to you: There is no particular aspect inherent to travel that would cause one sane person to commend it to another for whom he felt anything more in the way of human feeling than absolute mortal hatred. In other words, paying for an airline ticket and hotel room is absolutely unnecessary unless you absolutely cannot find a way to be inconvenienced, pushed-about, swindled, conned, baked, broiled, dusted, dehydrated, wearied, worn, confused, (actively and passively,) and generally put-upon and put out within the confines of your own familiar hometown.
For that is what we travel for; there is no magic in monuments the simple viewing of which will activate an attack of the wisdoms. Rather we wish to encounter the unfamiliar - to taste the novel, in order that we may think that which we had not yet thought, and feel that which by dint of long exposure, for our own stones we no longer feel. We wish to be pushed free from our well-worn grooves and have our familiar hand-holds taken suddenly away that we may find ourselves fumbling to feel again the security of our own well-known home.
It is, in short, experience that we seek. The travel, the time on the train, the airfare and waiting lounges and even the majestic sites themselves are incidental. It is an inconvenience and an accompanying exercise in patience, it is a hunger and a thirst which our own well-marketed lands will not permit us, it is that modern-stand in for xenophobic combat, the clash of wits and wills within a swindle brought on by the sound of a foreign accent lilting of lightly of Lira's; it is these and more that we seek when we from our quotidian ways wander.
So I had made a goal - so what of it? Goals are worth the breath it takes to think them up. But my goal was made in service of an underlying and then unarticulated value. At that time, at the eloquent age of seven, if queried I would probably have said simply that I wanted to see and do everything. At a later and more mature stage of romantic illusion I would probably have stated that I wanted to secure for myself a life rich in experiences. Later, as the awareness of my own mortality began to close round me I rephrased the same point to say that when on my deathbed I wanted to have certain experiences to look back upon, by means of which I could convince myself that I had not here wasted my time, hoping thus to ease the apprehension and poignant sense loss I might then suffer when poised upon that last precipice.
Now I will not say that any of those are untrue. They all are, in each their own way, still very true to me, and speak in tones relevant to and resonant with my own mind. I have, however, come to a better understanding of what it was that I wished upon myself, or what the essence of these things are. Depth no doubt counts for much in many times and places, but breadth has also its day. Each in its way poses its own difficulties, though those of depth consist of grinding deeper into a groove long-established, while breadth is only found by forging new paths through rough and rocky, unfamiliar and unbroken ground. It is by being dislodged from our familiar footpath onto a bumpy and rocky way that we wear ourselves into a form a little finer.
So it is not in the seeing of the sight that we find what we were seeking. It is in the going and the doing - the site which we came to see is just an another interesting rock along life's weary way.
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