by M. Allen Cunningham
“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” –T.S. Eliot
Occasionally I am asked one classic
question every author must encounter: “Where do you get your ideas?” – and
sometimes this variant: “Do you wait for inspiration, or do you just start
working and see what comes out?”
There’s one very good answer which
I’ve never really managed to articulate in person. It goes somewhat like this:
Inspiration waxes and wanes, and producing a book is most often a matter of
sitting down and sweating it out at the desk. But I also believe that inspiration
can be galvanized in certain ways, and one of these is to consciously put yourself into the realm of the unexpected. The most
reliable method of doing this is to
travel.
My wife and I have always been avid
travelers. The story of our relationship is, in a way, a travelogue. Major
moments in the narrative take international settings: London, Paris,
Switzerland, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Indonesia. Though our salaries have never
been much to speak of, throughout our married life we’ve made a point of using
a sizable part of our earnings to fund lengthy trips abroad (three weeks or
several months).
Some years ago, when we learned our
first child was on the way, we made a pledge to ourselves. Parenthood would
not mean our days of overseas adventuring had come to an end. Quite
the contrary. As we saw it, becoming parents mandated that we renew our
commitment to travel, and strive to foster in our child the consciousness of a
world citizen.
We wanted our child to grow up
well-seasoned in the boundary-breaking, humanizing act of witness, discovery,
and interaction that international travel can be.
The United States is vast and diverse,
but its very immensity makes it a chore to transgress its boundaries for any
significant period of time – and I’m speaking here of boundaries both
geographical and mental. Strictly American values and ideas pervade the thoughts and lifestyles of the
majority of U.S. citizens to the exclusion of any other ethos. This is not
surprising when you consider our geography. We don’t rub shoulders with other
nations, other ways of life. As for our nearest neighbors, Mexico and Canada, sadly we seem to do our most to ignore or aggressively fence out the former (except,
perhaps, when planning an all-inclusive beach getaway), and the latter is so
self-sufficient and peaceable that we forget about it for all but a few moments
each year.
To a large extent, our country is like an
island nation, culturally speaking. I was shocked to read once that some 80% of
Americans do not own a passport. Too often here in the U.S., the world outside
is viewed as the other, and in our worst moments we tend to forget
that these other nations even exist, let alone possess social models, cultures,
practices, and perspectives which we would often do well to borrow from – or
histories we would do well to study.
Being constantly aware of this
parochial American mindset, my wife and I made a parents-to-be pledge: We would
take a big trip abroad sometime within the first five years of our child’s
life.
This may sound naïve, but our impetus
was actually entirely practical. We knew that if we didn’t travel reasonably
soon after becoming a family of three – and thus failed to set the custom in
place early on – we might risk never traveling again. And that, from the
standpoint of two creative souls landlocked in the United States, would be
unacceptable. Unacceptable for us personally – and for the future of our child.
The thing is, we’ve always regarded
travel as something far more meaningful and edifying than the diversionary
experience that comes to most minds at the thought of ‘getting away’ or
‘vacationing.’ Travel, as we see it, means engaging a larger world, not
merely retreating from the one we know. It entails more than a flight from the
boredom of an urban grind, or the doldrums of suburbia, in pursuit of touristy
entertainments; it’s about seeking to become a part of (for a
while at least) an experience that transcends one’s native outlook, habits,
cultural predispositions. In other words, travel means joining in the human
experience.
"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land." -G.K. Chesteron
To tell the truth, I and my wife were
a bit haunted by the familiar refrains we’d heard from well-meaning
stay-at-home sorts who had long since subscribed to a peculiarly American
misconception–that lengthy travel is an extraneous indulgence of
youth. “Enjoy it while you’re young,”they told us. “Go while you’re
still free. That freedom won’t last forever.”
We were well aware that they spoke to
a frightful reality. We knew how it often goes: life becomes more and more
complicated as one’s children grow. Commitments, appointments, routines
multiply exponentially – and family finances get apportioned and stretched till
the notion of designating any amount toward something as fundamentally
non-essential as travel seems absurd.
And travel – particularly extended international
travel – is expensive. That fact alone relegates it to the realm of excess,
right? Well, we’ve never been convinced. The way we see it, there are vast and
innumerable benefits – and some clearly numerable ones – that come of distant
sojourning, and these make travel, however expensive, a monetary non-issue for
us. We see the act of going abroad as an investment, plain and
simple.
Here is a sampling of some major
benefits (not to be underrated) that come of one’s investment in international
travel:
- Stuttering in a foreign tongue
- Being subjected to the good graces (and yes, sometimes the rudeness) of others
- Being forced to ask questions of strangers
- Finding oneself confronted by things wondrous, unsettling, or simply difficult to understand
- Begging explanations for seemingly uninterpretable experiences
- Plumbing the histories and arts for some sense of what one has beheld and why it matters
- Putting oneself into the realm of the unexpected, where serendipity can unveil new horizons
- Generally feeling like an outsider
These experiences engender one’s
empathy for fellow human beings, better understanding of the challenges faced
by new immigrants in our own land, and overall discovery of things large,
small, enriching, or infuriating, whether they be works of art, episodes of
world history, or political conditions.
One example of a very small personal
discovery: I’ll never forget, on my first day in London at age nineteen,
finding the face of Charles Dickens on the ten-pound note and vocalizing my
astonishment that a nation would grant so high an honor to an author. I thought
it was perfectly wonderful, but I could not imagine such a thing occurring in
my own country. Robert Frost on the twenty? Emily Dickinson on the five? James
Baldwin on the ten? Somehow it seemed impossible. Even England – with whom we
share a language, sort of – could not differ more from America on certain values.
As a young would-be writer, I was astounded to find myself in a culture with so
strong and valued a literary tradition, and I was disturbed to compare this
with the paltry official regard accorded the arts in America. As author John
Gardner once drolly remarked: “In America, though federal, state, and
local governments make feeble gestures of support (the whole National
Endowments for the Arts comes to, I think, the cost of one frigate), it seems
clear that nobody quite knows what to do with artists.”
Realizations and
comparisons like this are the daily fodder of the international traveler – and
though more usually small than not, they accumulate powerfully, and their
personal resonance becomes positively seismic. The little things change and widen a
person. Adam Gopnik puts it another way in his wonderful book, Paris to
the Moon: “This can shake you up, this business of things almost but
not quite being the same. A pharmacy is not quite a drugstore; a brasserie is
not quite a coffee shop; a lunch is not quite a lunch.”
In short, the experience of traveling
abroad invigorates the imagination. And it is imagination that makes us into
human beings, enabling us to recognize the humanity in the world around us and
to reach out to others as fellow humans.
"For the profit of travel: in the first place, you get rid of a few prejudices…. The prejudiced against color finds several hundred millions of people of all shades of color, and all degrees of intellect, rank, and social worth, generals, judges, priests, and kings, and learns to give up his foolish prejudice." –Herman Melville
To be human is to be curious. And to
be curious is to travel, if not literally, then in the mind through books,
arts, cultural treasures. But too many Americans, bombarded with the rampant
scare-mongering that too often characterizes our nation’s political climate,
have retreated toward fear and loathing, while it’s precisely imagination and
outreach that could help to heal a great many ills. Perhaps travel is more a
necessity now than ever. To me personally, it feels very close to a moral
responsibility.
"The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main function of life." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
But travel at its best is a spiritual
investment – that is, it provides a value utterly unquantifiable by the
standards of the dollar or any other currency, though no less tangible. And as
long as travel remains an imperative in one’s life, an essential endeavor, a
means can be found to make it possible.
My wife and I keep a modest household
and our incomes are not large. But we hoped to break a cultural mold and start
our family life under the consciousness that travel is integral to a rich and
fulfilled life. Call us idealists, but we felt that if we could cultivate
sensitivity, tolerance, openness, and insatiable curiosity in our child, we
would have reason to put our faith in the next generation. I’m happy to report
that we made good on our early parental pledge and brought our son overseas
with us when he was four. By now he has been with us to five or six different
countries, including Spain and Japan, and he’s looking forward to our next
international adventure.
Like us, he knows that travel at its
best is a refresher course in human life on earth, with its millions of
dizzying customs, civilizations, and creations.
"With what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered, were we to walk down a corridor and on to a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our names. How pleasant to hold in mind, through the crevasses of our moods, at three in the afternoon when lassitude and despair threaten, that there is always a plane taking off for somewhere." -Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
For more reading on the subject of
travel, I highly recommend the following books and authors:
Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
Jan Morris, multiple titles