I am in a bath with a cup of peppermint tea thinking about why humans go anywhere at all.
Outside the window is a city that is not mine. It’s a beautiful city, one of the greatest cities in the world. I admire the symmetry of Regent’s Park and the colour of the lilacs blooming, matching a doorway painted lavender, and the number of different cafes a person can sit in to have a cup of coffee in the morning.
Somewhere between here and home, in a gallery, I stood in front of a thousand years of humans trying to save something and thought: what am I doing here? Not in the gallery. Here. In any of it. The going and the looking and the note-taking. The train tickets and the jet lag and the press of other bodies in the underground, the air pressure shifting through tunnels, blowing warm dirty air past my face.
I take the tube. I smell the BO. I feel the air change. I think of all the people who have been here before and will be here after. I look at how the houses are built, one on top of another, streets and pathways and stairs piled up without plan or permission, just the accumulated consequence of humans needing to get from one place to another across centuries. Then Paris, which wiped all that away for order. For grand boulevards and symmetrical facades. Two philosophies of how to manage the fact that we all want the same things and keep bumping into each other wanting them. And despite the stink of urine under bridges and dog shit and sewer and exhaust and dirty Seine water, the people are beautiful. The je ne sais quoi is in full force. In these costumes I cannot tell tourist from resident, but all look enchanting. All here to look or to buy or to get from one place to another, as people are in any city.
That’s what you see when you go somewhere else. Not the difference. The sameness, in different form.
Food, water, shelter, work, family. The young men carrying skis onto the bus in Austria to zip down a mountain are zipping on a Vespa around corners in Paris and dancing in a club in London. Everyone competing, showing off, having fun, falling in love, growing old. In Paris it shows in how one looks. In London it shows in how one sounds. The medium changes. The reaching doesn’t.
I used to need this. The strangeness. The not-being-known.
I grew up when I got lost in the canals of Venice on a misty day. Grew up again when I found my way back to my rented apartment that night.
As a young woman I sought out all the new, all the exciting. Foreign cities were playgrounds of unknowing. People didn’t know me and I didn’t know them or the place or who I was. I went to strange cities to find myself by losing myself, to use the foreign as a kind of permission. Nobody here knows what I’m supposed to be. I could be anything.
I have heard people say: I thought I was Italian until I went to Italy. They are the Italian frozen in time, the version their ancestors carried when they left and then kept alive in diaspora, bouncing off others like them, making something new. An Italian-Canadian that isn’t quite like everyone they know at home and definitely isn’t like who they meet on holiday. The home they imagined was already gone before they arrived.
There is a particular deflation in arriving at the place you imagined as home and finding that it is simply a place. That you are still simply you. The fantasy of elsewhere turns out to be a fantasy about yourself.
But I am not disillusioned. I am something else. Saturated, maybe. I have built my comforts now. I have made a life that fits me. And the same crowds that once felt like freedom now feel like something to recover from. I understand now why a person wants a weekend house away from the noise and the busyness. The smells and the beautiful chaos that I once moved toward, I sometimes move away from.
Is it age? Energy? Or is it simply that I found what I was looking for and no longer need the same method?
In the gallery, I moved through a thousand years of trying.
The Byzantine painters put gold leaf and lapis lazuli behind their flat, enormous saints. The sacred had to be large and otherworldly so the faithful would feel small and reverent. Then came the Greeks, the legends, the bodies becoming real, the Madonnas with actual faces, children who looked like children. Then political stories. The world broadening. Then Monet’s haystacks, Manet’s prostitute, Pissarro’s ordinary street. Art for everyone. A different determination of what matters.
What I saw was this: across a thousand years, across every shift in theology and power and politics and taste, humans kept doing the same thing. Saving a thought. Preserving an image. On wood panel and canvas and paper and wall. Egg tempera to oil to pastel. The medium changed. The impulse didn’t.
In the impressionist rooms I felt something open in my chest and didn’t know why until later, in this bath, with this tea. It was recognition. All those painters standing in front of a haystack or a river or a woman in a cafe, trying to catch something before it was gone.
That’s what we’re all doing. That’s what I’m doing.
Travel promises knowledge. Perspective. A kind of learning that can’t happen at home. And it delivers, but not always what it promised. You go to find out about the world and find out about yourself instead. You go to encounter difference and find the same human hungers dressed in different clothes.
So what is home then?
The familiar. The known. The way we do things that we can only see clearly when we stop doing them for a while and watch someone else do it differently. We have access to so much now that it starts to become the same. Cities hold the same shops. Airports are interchangeable. The local is always already global.
What travel still gives us is the interruption. The disorientation that makes everything visible again. The unfamiliar puts us somewhere new and uncomfortable, and that discomfort can make us either put up defences or grow. It can make us love what we have. It can make us see, for the first time, what we have.
I came to Europe for research. I went to archives. I sat with documents and photographs and the handwriting of people long dead, trying to find something true about the past. Some inkling of what came before and how I came from it. Where do I fit in humanity?
I’m not sure it matters. I’m not sure it doesn’t.
After a while it all becomes different versions of the same end. We are all reaching. We are all trying to save something, to be known, to leave something on the wall. We compete and compare and dress for the city we’re in and speak the way that gets us heard. We find meaning in the small and the local and the particular. We look for connection and occasionally we find it and that’s enough to keep going.
I am in a bath in a city that is not mine, writing this to figure out what I think, without any certainty about who it’s for.
That, I realize, is the thing.
I didn’t go to Europe to become a travel writer. I went to find something, the way I’ve always gone to find something, with a notebook and an open question and the willingness to be changed by the answer. The making is the method. The art is the seeking.
The most foreign country is always within. And the only way I have ever learned to explore it is by going somewhere that is not home and then sitting still long enough to notice what the strangeness reveals.
There is a woman in a bath with a cup of peppermint tea. She is not so different from the painter standing in front of the haystack. She is trying to catch something before it is gone.
She is trying to figure out what she sees.
this is so beautifully written!