When you teach grad students, as I do every winter, especially those would-be masters, the brainy, dreamy, slack-ass selves who have been squeezed directly through the educational intestine from high school through university and into the relatively expansive bowl of highest, never-ending education, you keep having a recurring thought, each time you enter a seminar room and scan the robust, nascently cynical faces of the whatever generation horseshoed around the table, receptive to the morsels of your wisdom and the tricks of your trade, and the thought is an admonishment, and the admonishment is this: When are you guys ever going to get the fuck out of here?
And I don’t mean finish the degree, get a job, a life. I mean turn your life upside down, expose it raw to the muddle. Go. Put out, as the New Testament would have it (Luke 5:4), into deep water. A headline in the New York Times on gardening delivers the same marching orders: “If a Plant’s Roots Are Too Tight, Repot.” Go among strangers in strange lands. Sniff, lick, and swallow the mysteries, even if you can’t digest them. Learn to say clearly in an unpronounceable language, Please, I very much need a toilet. A doctor. Change for a 500,000 note. I very much need a friend. I very much need an air strike.
It’s not the traditional Grand Tour I’m advocating, though some of the most enduring lessons of traveling are inaccessible until you’re out there moving and then they’re indelible upon the soul. One thing about crossing borders, going into the world—you quickly learn that despite your marvelous ideals, you can’t change it, at least not easily, but the world beyond the horizon can easily change you, and not just a little. Unless perhaps you are cursed, even at a young age, with being unchangeable.
Wandervogel is good for starters, tramping around as the accepted right-of-passage stuff for postadolescents who will wire home for return passage when their boots wear out. Travel per se isn’t so bad—sampling, moving on; sampling, moving on—lovers, cities, pilsners; achieving a sort of existential velocity through which everywhere is nowhere (as Seneca warned aimless wanderers millennia ago). Learn a lot, forget a lot—the road as another type of consumerist school.
But let the road end; stop at a crossroads where the light is surreal, nothing is familiar, the air smells like a nameless spice, and the vibes are mesmerizing or just plain alien and stay, long enough to truly be there. At least once in your life, you have to do that, and why you should is finally pretty simple. If you want to know a man, the old proverb goes, travel with him. And if you want to know yourself, travel alone. If you want to know your own home, your own country, and your own place in your own country, go make another home in another country (and I don’t mean Canada or England or most of Western Europe). Become an expatriate, a self-inflicted exile for a year or two. Stutter through a second language. Sink into an otherness that reflects a reverse image of yourself, wherein lies your identity, or woeful lack of one. Teach English in Japan, aquaculture in the South Pacific, hygiene in Bangladesh, accounting in Brazil. Join the Peace Corps, volunteer for Save the Children, work in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, set up a fish camp on the beach in Uruguay, join the diplomatic corps, become a foreign correspondent, study Islamic architecture in Istanbul, sell cigarettes in China.
And here’s the point, despite the fun, the challenge, the risk, the discomfort, the seduction and sex in a fog of communication, the tax-free money, the servants and thieves, the disease, the great food, the shitty food, your new friends and your new enemies, the grand dance between romance and disillusionment. You found out a few true things you really needed to know, that you thought you knew but really didn’t until you lived it.
You’ve learned to engage the world, not fear it, or not be paralyzed by your fear of it. You found out, to your everlasting surprise, how American you are—Guess what, it’s 100 percent, you can never be anything but—and that is worth knowing. You discovered that going native is self-deluding, a type of perversion. If you’re black and you went to Africa, you found out you weren’t a black guy in Africa, you were an American in Africa. If you were a white woman in Pakistan, you found that the only thing that provided you with an illusion of security was the troubling fact that you were an American. Whatever gender or race you were, you found out how much you are eternally hated and conditionally loved and thoroughly envied, based on the evidence of your passport. You learned that life is despairingly cheap, justice uncommonly rare, and people more beautiful than you ever imagined.
You found out what you needed to know to be an honest citizen of your own country, patriotic or not, partisan or nonpartisan, active or passive. And you understood in your survivor’s heart not to worry too much about making the world better. Worry about making it worse.
For once in your life, you have some hefty context to work with.
And it’s true: When you come back home, it’s never quite all the way, and only your dog will recognize you.
(2002)