Looking at the world
Finding my curiosity again on a trip to Scotland.
Dear friends,
When I was sixteen, I spent the summer in Paris. This sounds more romantic than it was. My grandparents, who hoarded aluminum foil when it went on sale and wore decades-old polyester clothing, allowed as their single extravagance a trip every other year to visit relatives—siblings of my grandfather who had settled there after the Holocaust. I was at loose ends after graduating from high school, so they brought me along.
There was no itinerary, no bookings, definitely no bus tours. When we arrived, my great-uncle presented me with a “carnet”—a stack of Métro tickets. While the older generation played cards, drank tea, and caught up, I was free to explore the city on my own. The only rule was that I had to come back to the apartment for mid-day dinner, served by the Polish housekeeper caring for my great-aunt, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. (When I returned to the city as an adult, my partner was amused and a little shocked to learn that I had never eaten in a Parisian restaurant.)
A French cousin introduced me to some of the city’s delights, including crepes with butter and sugar from our local street stand. I went to the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Rodin museum. But mostly I wandered, learning the streets and the Métro and practicing my French whenever I got lost, which—in the days before Google Maps—was often. I climbed up to the Sacré-Coeur, the most beautiful building I had ever seen, and happened to visit the Père Lachaise cemetery on Jim Morrison’s birthday, when his grave was swarmed by fans and impersonators. Each afternoon, when I punched in the door code for my great-uncle’s apartment building and climbed the three flights up to his door, I was more confident, more curious, than I had been the day before.
In all those hours alone in a foreign city, I learned its sounds and sights and rhythms, but I also learned about myself: how to spend my time when there was no one to tell me what to do, what I liked and didn’t like. This is what drives us to travel, I’ve come to believe: the desire to see new places and experience new things, but also to experience ourselves—or, if we’re not alone, our travel companions—in new surroundings. We exercise our curiosity and resilience, muscles that tend to wither in our daily lives, spent taking the same paths and racing through the same routines. And we learn new things about ourselves or the people we love, and return home changed.
In my twenties I traveled a lot, enjoying the cheap student airfares and flexibility of life in college and grad school. I studied and worked in Poland for nearly a year and spent time exploring Italy and Greece. Back in the U.S., I worked for a well-known budget travel guide series, detailing every step of journeys in Germany and the southwestern U.S. and editing a guide to Eastern Europe. But having kids largely grounded me. Traveling with them can be so complicated and expensive. We did trips to the beach and to the American Southwest, which I still love. But the days of more spontaneous travel were largely over—until recently.
I wrote much of this post from a village cafe in Scotland, where my husband and I spent a week in July. With two older kids in college mostly doing their own thing and our youngest at sleepaway camp for two weeks, we took our longest trip alone ever. We didn’t really have a reason for choosing Scotland, other than the fact that it appealed to my husband (who travels a fair amount for work and doesn’t normally consider it a leisure activity). As a New Yorker, I mostly wanted to get away from crowds. Aside from where to spend the night, we didn’t plan much in advance.
Our vacation wasn’t without bumps, including a flat tire on a remote peninsula served only by one of Scotland’s notorious single-track roads. (You proceed gingerly along, praying no cars will come from the other direction; if one does, either you or the other driver head—possibly in reverse—for the nearest “passing place,” a cut-out on the roadside about half the size of a parking space.) But in general, it was exactly what a vacation is supposed to be—relaxing and reinvigorating. We went for a hike, or at least a long walk, every day; we tried new foods (including, yes, the notorious haggis); we slept in without waking to tend to dog, cats, or children. We spent time in what must be some of the world’s most beautiful places, filled with lakes and mountains in more shades of green than I knew existed. We puzzled over the local culture, especially the traffic signs, which often begin with the word “Please”—bizarre to us New Yorkers. And Scots seem to bring their dogs everywhere, even to restaurants, some of which feature special dog menus!
Initially, I felt guilty about taking a vacation. Working for myself as a freelance writer is a privilege, but it’s also hard to justify taking time off—no one’s paying me to do it, after all. But my experience over that week helped me see the value of travel again. It’s not just about the rest, although I’m sure taking a break from my projects benefited my creativity and focus, as my friend Gretchen Rubin also recently noticed. Spending a week wandering around Scotland made me feel a little bit more like the sixteen-year-old discovering herself along with Paris. I felt anew both the enormous possibilities of the world and my own openness to experiencing them.
In a gorgeous, moving essay for The New York Times Magazine, Francesca Mari (whom I worked with ages ago at The New Republic) describes a trip she took with her father, who is suffering from Alzheimer’s, in an attempt to connect him with some of his own lost memories:
What about you—what’s an important trip you took? Who were you with? How did it make you feel? Let me know in the comments.
What I’m reading
I’m still working on The Parisian by Isabella Hammad, which is longer than I anticipated—I’m only about halfway through. I hope to post a thread before next month’s letter.
Reviewing Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise for the New York Times Book Review, I started with a visit to “The Portal” and reflected on Van den Berg’s novel as a metaphor for post-pandemic life:
“Is our life just on pause or is this pause now our life?” the narrator wonders at the start of her Covid isolation. Despite the passage of time — in her world and in ours — things haven’t entirely gone back to the way they were. By forcing us to conduct so much of our lives via screens, the pandemic collapsed the space between the virtual and the real, opening up greater opportunities for the two to overlap.
Where I’ll be
Starting in October, I’m teaching a new course about Shirley Jackson through 92Y, this time focusing on her first three novels: The Road Through the Wall, Hangsaman, and The Bird’s Nest (my favorite of the bunch). You can sign up for them individually or take all three! Link here.
As ever,
Ruth
Ruth, I find this post so great especially since we are on a family vacation in Paris right now. I am writing from a cafe while Misha is at a park across the street on a work call and both kids are next to me on their devices. I agree vacations are a way to get you out of your comfort zone and allow you to see new things with fresh eyes. Family trips are always a challenge for us - we all like to relax in different ways and energize in equally different ways. I’m trying to remember that I only have my teenagers for a few more short years (if that) before they’re off experiencing the world without us, like you at 16. We were at Sacre Coeur yesterday and were able to cheer on the woman’s Olympic bike race as they passed us by three times. What an experience! Being here I have also learned much about myself. How guilty I feel to sit in a cafe and watch the world pass by, how there is no ice or a/c anywhere here and how rude it is to assume everyone can help me in English. My favorite thing to observe is the overall beauty in the simplest of things - the huge doors in a variety of colors and the smallest of coffees - just a sip, really. Oy vey … viva Paris!
My now-wife and I climbed to Sacre Coeur in the summer of We Are the World, and were met by a spontaneous choir of tourists and locals singing that anthem. That was before the world went mad with the realities and fears of terrorism and pandemic. When a street vendor’s sandwich of Brie on a baguette was ambrosia and nobody counted their steps on the walk from Montmartre to St. Germain. Before take off your shoes at TSA and Charlie Hebdo, when all we had to worry about was mutually assured destruction barbecuing the planet. Paris was simpler, then, and it was possible to imagine Hemingway, Hugo, and the grandeur of Napoleon without the context of their wars and the millions gloriously slaughtered.