Photo: L’Enfant Terrible

It’s our third day in Dublin, and I wake up depressed.

This isn’t a latent sort of sadness. It’s an active force, a thing that comes over me suddenly and without warning, possessing every atom of my body. It’s an attack of what Holly Golightly calls the mean reds in Breakfast at Tiffany’s: “Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of.”

Being in Dublin doesn’t help. I’m a worrier by nature and I came here, as I often do when I travel, hoping to claim immunity from my worries. Anything to declare? Just a lot of unnecessary anxiety; can I leave it at customs?

I sit in a café with my boyfriend. I tell him I feel unhappy today, but that I don’t know why. There seems to be too many things to fret over: my desperation at being stuck in a job I hate; my long battle with anti-anxiety medication; my lack of money.

I feel that I could easily wallow all day. We walk through St. Stephen’s Green, along the edges, where leaves are falling most heavily and we can avoid the stink of the central pond. A trio of teenage boys play guitar; a pregnant woman passes, with flowers in one hand and a man’s arm around her. Infants run rampant, with parents trailing behind in helpless pursuit, all flapping limps and rattling prams.

A few other lovers hold hands. I feel unoriginal and uninspired; and then I feel the whole world to be unoriginal and uninspired.

Changing Locale

We chose Dublin more or less at random; it’s near enough to our home in England, the flights were cheap, we could fit it into a long weekend.

Photo: lrargerich

The destination was not important to either of us. What was important was the thought of going somewhere.

Autumn was upon us; the smell of decay, the naked trees, the dying grass. We hadn’t been away in months, and I was sleeping badly. We thought we could run away.

It seems simple enough. As humans, we’re trapped in our own chronology. We are born, we live, we die, and we have little or no power over any of it. What we can control is our physical location, our place on the map.

Nowadays, with the click of a button, we can buy tickets, be halfway across the world in twelve hours, seamlessly cross time zones, date lines, hemispheres, change latitudes and longitudes. Escape has never been so easy.

Or so impossible. Here we are in a new city, but everything is the same. We are as connected as ever to our past, our anxieties. The cash machines in Dublin are no different than the ones anywhere else, reminding me I’ve got only barely enough. The emails keep flooding in and I sleep as poorly here as I would anywhere else.

Because the trouble, of course, is that travel is not escape. Alain de Botton writes about this in The Art of Travel – he’s in the Bahamas when he realizes “how little the place in which I stood had the power to influence what traveled through my mind.”

When we go somewhere new we hope either that the banalities of everyday life won’t follow us, or that we’ll become someone different in the context of a different space. But travel is not some magical process of transformation.

Travel Is Not The Answer

At best, travel is a state of mind – a way of revising our views of the world and ourselves, of exploring and watching. But it’s never the answer to all of our problems, never a method of erasing anxieties, and to a certain extent this will always be a disappointment.

Bridge of Sighs, Oxford / Photo: rbrwr

What I forget is that it’s actually freeing to know all this – for if we do, we can start to think of travel beyond sightseeing and souvenir collecting.

I remember why I first traveled to Oxford, where I now live. I wasn’t trying to escape anything; I was trying to find something. That’s different, I now believe.

In searching for the Oxford I had read about in literature, I gave myself a purpose, a reason to explore, a kind of quest which framed everything I did. It was a positive, rather than a negative, reason; I wanted to enhance my life, not run away from it.

Of course, I abandoned my quest; I got distracted by a thousand little things. A love affair, an unhealthy affection for the pub, an obsession with the city’s history. Suddenly I was not visiting Oxford; I was immersed in it. I was part of it.

And that’s why we travel, or why we should. Not to forget our worries, which will follow us anywhere – across oceans, up mountains, through deserts, down every crowded alleyway and boulevard of the city – but simply to be somewhere else. To exist, as always; but to exist in different surroundings. What happens after that, we can never really predict.

Tourism isn’t about losing our inhibitions and acquiring postcards. It’s about a deeper, gut-level bond with a place, which requires we accept that the only way we can be changed by travel is if we’re willing to accept that we might not be changed by it at all.

“Geography is not an inert container,” writes Franco Moretti in his Atlas of the European Novel, “is not a box where cultural history ‘happens’, but an active force.”

Every country we visit is an active force. Every city, every street, every patch of woodland or plain has the potential to swallow us, if we only let it decide for itself.

Soaking Up Place

Photo: wolfsavard

Later in the afternoon, my boyfriend and I decide to forgo our hopes for soaking up the culture of Dublin.

We take a long stroll across the Liffey to a huge, ugly theater, buy two tickets, and sit in the dark, eating popcorn, sipping soda, doing something we could do anywhere.

And I enjoy it so much that when we emerge, I have a smile on my face, I feel light, as unfettered as I have in a month.

Maybe going to this cinema, fleeing the sunshine for the smell of popcorn, the endless dark corridors, the escalators – maybe this is the point of Dublin. Or of anywhere. It doesn’t matter what we do in a place; just that we do it at all. We soak things up without trying; and maybe, if we tried a little less, we would soak up a little more.

Do you think travel can act as an emotional escape? Share your thoughts below.

Mirror mirror on the wall / Photo rougerouge

When I was 16, an uncle gave me a book he thought I might like, by a man called Pico Iyer.

I did like the book–in fact, I loved it. But I soon became as fascinated with Iyer himself as with his writings.

Born in Oxford, raised in Santa Barbara, educated in England and Massachusetts, Iyer has followed a geographical trajectory that I, in my own way, have imitated.

We overlap without ever having met; a characteristic of the modern condition.

I find myself drawn to Iyer’s work not only because I know we share certain locales, certain geographical understandings, but also because his books are perpetually trying to answer the question: how does the modern world exist in the way that it does?

As a travel writer, Iyer emphasizes place and movement. We are always in motion–”global souls,” he calls us.

I grew up on a windswept cattle ranch on California’s southern coast, where all was wild and empty but for hills, and sea, and cows; now I live nestled among the terraced houses and university domes of Oxford, near to the Cowley road, a whirlwind of bars, cafés, tiny markets, rainbow-colored murals, charity shops and hairdressers.

Often I can scarcely believe that these two places coincide. I wonder how it is that I can leap so easily between them–and what this does to me. Does it stretch me, does it make me delirious?

In Between Worlds

After six solid months in England, I come back to the ranch for a visit, feeling myself in a state of in-between-ness.

I lie awake at night and take long naps in the early afternoon. I think of the sleeper’s hour in a city, the time when those late to bed and those early to rise share a moment’s dreamtime.

In the husky darkness, roads that otherwise never rest give a shudder of weariness; bars and pubs shut for the night, the grocery stores glow tiredly, then turn dark.

This is the song of urban living.

In Boston, as a student, I once walked to my apartment from a friends’. It was late, and the police had broken up our party.

It took me nearly an hour to cross from the almost-suburban outskirts to my cramped, central apartment, but the constant stillness sustained me: major roads, roads with life, with character, made brief, slumbering refuges for the weary and the displaced.

Here, at the ranch where I grew up, where my parents live still, here is the opposite of urban, and here that stillness, that mythical sleeper’s hour, is something altogether different.

Perpetual Jetlag

The coyotes do not cease their howling simply because the clock has slid its languid hands to three o’clock, nor does the wind abate; and the stars, moving across the sky in steady rhythm, still shine, or else the moon douses them with its faint light.

Perpectual motion / Photo fabbriciuse

Stillness shows itself in the early evening: before the nightly winds kick up, before the shadows crawl up the house, there is a moment, if you look out at the sea, in which all seems calm.

In my jet-lagged restlessness, all of this starts to almost make sense to me: the ranch, the city, the arbitrary rhythms of sleeping and waking, the way we move between places.

Maybe we live in a perpetual state of jetlag–and maybe this is why I sometimes cease to think how unlikely, how magnificent it is that when it is 3:30 in the morning on the Cowley Road, here I am at 7:30 on a California evening, listening to the frogs in the creek.

This is an impossible era; we flit from world to world as time-travelers.

We must have an instrument in our beings that allows us to accept that Oxford, dripping in her medieval spires and teeming with high street shops, rushed cyclists, robed students, tracksuited young mothers, can be as much a home to me as the Ranch, with all its ruggedness.

The Linked Universe

Sometimes it starts to slip out of my hands; I wonder if this is indeed plausible, if there is any way that the universe can produce two such opposite ways of living and then link them through a single human being?

Should I not be inept in one if I can move easily in the other?

Maybe the mystery is not how these worlds coincide, but how people move so effortlessly between them.

They coincide because geography dictates that they must; because populations are as mutable, as adaptable, as the earth on which they live, and for one to mirror another which has sprouted out of utterly different circumstances would be an evolutionary gaffe that would lead certainly–in our Darwinian minds–to extinction.

Maybe it really is that simple; and so we have all become constant travelers, often without even knowing.

There is a global culture of relatively affluent nomadism, such as my own, which transcends the idea that we can only be comfortable, can only thrive, in our original, circumstantial niche. And, as Iyer writes, “under jet lag, you lose all sense of where or who you are”.

So when we come down, when we emerge from the shadows of our travel-induced haze, we have the wonderful freedom to reinterpret, and to reinvent.

What are your thoughts as a global time traveler? Share in the comments!