The Paradox of Travel

Tripping Through Covid into the New Year.

The year ends in holiday and with that holiday travel. In the USA, we call holidays vacation. The idea is to vacate the regular toiling of things, to find some rest.  

This reminds me of one of my all-time favorite essays of Aldous Huxley, lost somewhere within one of the 6 volume sets squeezed into the dusty, crowded shelves of my apartment. I can’t even recall the name of it and keep discovering new essays every time I try to find it.

In this lost-out-there-somewhere-essay, Huxley writes about the paradox of travel. He begins by discussing the challenge of selecting ideal travel reading. After critiquing romance, thrillers, classic novels, and fashion magazines, Huxley ardently (albeit satirically) argues that the ideal book to pack on a holiday trek is an encyclopedia. He unearths the etymological links of the word travel to travail, suggesting that there is a weight and burden to traveling; our trips ought to be more about getting lost and discovering something hard fought. The essay highlights the modern contradiction: trips planned down to the very detail. There is no getting lost. There is no surprise. There is no discovery. There are just prepackaged outlines for each site, meal, performance, and road map. 

I was thinking of some of this just before I left New York City the other day for Ireland. I almost didn’t go. With all the bad news about Covid’s global Omicron assault, I began to fear getting stuck trying to come back home. I was just about to cancel all my plans during a Facetime call with my friend Declan, who had invited me to spend the season with him and his family in Westport in County Mayo. We had planned this trip months ago. But now… Declan Irish-joked that if I got a positive test result, I could just cross out the word positive and write in the word negative. 

And with that magical flicker of fantasy and relief, I plunged into the heavy travails of journeying. 

I was not really burdened about Covid. I was also very much thinking (or perhaps more so feeling) the stinging disappointment with my past year. The problem here was that 2021 was for me too good for its own good. I had made and stuck to so many of my ascetic goals and challenging plans this year that I am now unable to deceive myself, as Americans do, that it is only a lack of more accomplishment that ails us. After a year of cold showers, shirtless winter running, healthy eating, and reading all of Proust, I’m still left with the aching deep existential feeling of being lost. 

I do not mean lost in the sense of trying to find the Fountain of Trevi after taking a few wrong turns. I mean it in the Huxleyan sense: abutted against a kind of rut out of which only more ruts ensue.

The trip. Vacationing. 

But vacating what? The luggage alone proves our paradox.

My version of the Huxleyan critique would aim at how much we pack on vacation rather than what books we choose to take. 

So, here I am at JFK airport, exactly 5 hours before my flight, standing on an impossibly long queue leading to the official check in procedure – that culminates in the act of releasing our ridiculously heavy and over-packed suitcases that are in fact too large or too much anyway to just carry onto the plane, but will be placed underneath the plane, to go with us wherever we go. And what about that madness of standing in a daze at that end of the flight huddled around that random redistribution of our non-vacation vacation baggage? 

No, if it were a true vacation, we would get on planes with no bags at all. That’s right, nothing. Maybe just a paper bag with toothpaste and dental floss. Wallet. Passport. Smartphone. That’s it. A true vacation needs no deodorant, creams, change of clothes. Who needs to shower? We’re leaving society, the rut, the struggle for an escape — off to get lost to get found again.   

The line moved very slowly. I was early and plenty distracted and entertained by the repeated flow of passing the same people until they became almost finished characters in a yet-to-be-written novel. I was in love with the redhead guy wearing the University of Georgia hoody. There was a man just up ahead who kept sneezing. In all of this crowd, there did not seem to be anyone who was talking too loudly except for one, about whom I happily thought, “Well, if you must speak too loudly, it may as well be in French.”  

The Dutch woman heading to her family in The Netherlands directly in front of me was saddled down with all the weight of the world. She was there all alone with her baby in his stroller, an enormous car seat strapped to her back, and two large suitcases on wheels, with an extra backpack yet dangling from one of the shoulders already crushed by the straps of the baby supplies. Once the child started screaming and crying, I offered to push the stroller if and whilst the mum preferred to hold the child. She agreed and I pushed. 

Another gentleman insisted that she had the right to skip this long line. The woman agreed. I agreed too. The airport worker who seemed stunned by the question did not agree. The lone mother and that baby and all their formidable baggage had to keep snaking around like everyone else.

By now, an hour had passed since I said farewell to my Uber driver, who is originally from Ghana. I enjoyed my long commute to the airport. The driver, at one point, called me wise, I think, because I made some statement about how having too much good in society weakens our ability to handle the bad. We talked about Ghana. In the traffic right next to our car, I saw a Nigerian driver, I presumed because of the Nigerian flag dangling from the rear-view mirror. I told my driver about this and how I have traces of both countries in my bloodline found from my Ancestry.com DNA test. I said, “I think I’m going to take these results to Nigeria to see if I can claim some ancestral land. Surely I should be able to recover 19% of homeland entitlements.” 

He laughed and agreed that for that I’d be lucky to even get a room.  

Travel as trip. Trip as travel. I was thinking about Michael Pollen’s book, How to Change Your Mind, in which he recalls the vernacular depiction of psychedelic hallucinations as tripping.  Foreign travel to me has always felt like hallucination – being forced into child-like wonder and radically shifted consciousness. I like that part of traveling. 

I recall something my friend Theodore A. Tripp, III said back when we both were teenagers in college in the late 1980s. I had been scolding him because he did not seem to be taking life seriously enough. I said that he needed to be more realistic, to stop being such an idealist. 

“What!” he shouted. “Thank God I am an idealist! ” 

He then began to enumerate all the unbearable facts of life against which his idealism or fantasies served masterfully to block. 

This was stunning. It came to me on this trip.  

There is a euphoria that envelopes me when I travel abroad, and no place like my trips over the decades to Ireland. I like to attribute this to my need for connection and the deep ache for love that highly communal cultures gratify. But it is way more than that. It is like Ted Tripp’s doctrine of ideals. Travel is for me a fantastical contemplation of the unabsorbable oceans of reality. It is a dry and high perch from which to watch it, feel it, reshape it. 

I am too old and perhaps now also too wise in the Ghanaian sense of the word to think travel can ever really be an escape. There is no escape! 

So, I pack a little bit of reality within both checked and unchecked bags. I roll it over between the priceless conversations brought about in happenstance. Like Thomas Arnold who sat next to me during the flight from New York To Dublin. The joy of meeting him – learning his life and story and girlfriend and quirks and strong and rapid mind and wit and kindness, his worries and trauma and the bright glimpse of future and promise, not to mention his deep interest and capacity to grant the same to me – made the whole of the trip complete before it started. 

It is for this kind of thing that I travel. But not only that. It seems a little easier to fathom a pending threat to Roe V Wade over a Guinness sipped foamily under the fomenting clouds of County Mayo. Easier to suppress my nagging doubts — that my world travels are frivolous acts of whimsy and privilege — and accept them for what they truly are: acts of freedom to be savored and seized for those who, like my perpetually incarcerated little brother, cannot. Easier to feel that with so much bad, there is still good. And with so much good there is still bad. 

I have not yet stopped smiling here on my Irish Christmas holiday in Westport. I think the cliffs here might even rival Moher. 

I did not pack an encyclopedia on this trip. But bundled dustily and now tossed to the side of our many impromptu excursions and family meetups are Batya Unga-Sargon’s Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy. 

The Mountain is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery, by Brianna West

The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet, by Carlo Collodi

The Slave Play, by Jeremy O. Harris 

And one of my many wonderful Christmas presents from Declan is a book called, A Poem for Every Night of the Year, edited by Allie Esiri. 

The new year approaches where the old one ends, between which many stunning cliffs and roadways wander. Pointing out across the sea toward the blinding Sunset, which darkened Keem Bay behind and beneath us, Declan grinned with the delight of sharing “his mountain,” as he called it. 

He then said, “That’s America that way.” 

I said, “Is it?”