Undercutting a Blush

Pride is a slippery, tricky creature. The second you think you've found it and caged it up, it slips through the bars and slithers into the shadows, not to be seen until you look closely at yourself and see its familiar outline against the backdrop of an otherwise sunny landscape. It makes a good chameleon, because it tells you what you want to hear about yourself, and who bothers to look back and see the face attached to the voice whispering in your ear when the kingdom you survey appears exactly as you believe it ought to?

It's not just sunshine either. Jerome Miller talks about the pride that undergirds self-hatred, and the way that it hides behind our own ways of punishing ourselves. We do not realize that we have wrapped ourselves in the comfort of a dissociation: the judge, self-righteous and stern, digs his booted toe into the side of the self that we don't wish to be. In our own self-hatred, we do not acknowledge that we are that self.

This sounds extreme, fair enough. But what about self-deprecation? It's the petty cousin of self-hatred. The part of the self that wishes to get in a snarky comment about one's flaws just as if to say, I may be flawed, but I am self-aware. I see what you see. And I can belittle it even more quickly and cleverly than you. It's the perverse game we force ourselves into, because even in our moments of loss, we're playing to win. Humility admits a fault. Self-deprecation flaunts it.

Small Homes in Large Spaces

There's this bit (I think it might be in Heretics but really just the entirety of Manalive while we're at it) where G. K. Chesterton criticizes Kipling for something like being a man who is so much thinking as a world traveler that he has never bothered to understand home. If you happen to have read Manalive, I'm drawing a connection with the idea of being actively, even aggressively content with your circumstances rather than endlessly pursuing others, that is, occupying your own small world rather than always seeking something out in the bigger one.

I have this conundrum where I don't like small spaces, but I don't want to take the whole world for granted either.

It can be stifling, after all--the small space, that is. I was just reading this New Yorker article called "Life in the Nineties" by Roger Angell, and he talks about the comfort of a serene almost-boredom, when one has had the same friends for decades, the same haunts, the same daily patterns. The predictability is no longer a threat, but rather has become a friend itself. I sympathize with that sort of sentiment--I do, after all, go to the same coffee shop every morning around the same time to order the same thing and do more or less the same sort of work for the same amount of time--but still, it sounds like a gradual slide into claustrophobia. If you have to ask yourself whether you're doing something because you want to or because you have to, then maybe it's time to rethink your routine.

Coffee shops aren't the only things that become fixtures. The way we think. The way we choose to communicate. Our relationships that don't really go anywhere, but are what we know, so we stagnate in a back and forth between appreciation for loyalty, or at least longevity, and aggravation over those quirks that we have learned to live around without ever quite resigning ourselves to them. We put off ambitions until tomorrow, because what we're doing right now seems to be working for us, if we just ignore five, ten, fifteen years of duct tape and krazy glue. And slowly the world shrinks into an infinity of circles.

I loved the moment this morning when I was, yes, drinking my usual morning americano while eavesdropping on the accent of an American supervisor meeting with his English supervisee and reading the aforementioned New Yorker article. There are many things I could say in Cambridge's favor, but one thing is for sure, I never quite get to feel like the world is small here. I am perpetually reminded, whether from overhearing French, German, Italian, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, so on, so forth or from brushing the tips of my fingers lightly along the disconnected connectedness of home ever presently but impotently invading the here and other, that though Cambridge is small, the world is huge, vibrant, complex, and not as far away as it seems.

How long, though, until that feeling too becomes commonplace?

It's so easy to get addicted to a feeling without even noticing it. I became so accustomed to moving at one point that it felt wrong to stay anywhere longer than ten months. I didn't know how to live past the introduction, familiarization, beyond the strangeness into acculturation. Selective vulnerability comes cheap and easy when you know it doesn't have to last for very long. It was the thrill of newness coupled with re-creation--just move on before the gaps show through, and you have to deal with what's behind them. It's like the illusion of freedom that comes from skinny dipping. Like if I just take all my clothes off, all of the expectations, constraints, failures, whatever, somehow I will be liberated from all of the hurt and the pressure.

Where to suspend oneself between wanderer in the broad world, at risk of jaded cynicism, and occupant of a self-sufficient yet tiny space, at risk of suffocation? Not a question I'll pretend to have an answer to - nor do I think there is any particularly objective one. As usual, they both have their place, somehow, in the bigger picture. So perhaps, for now, to embrace the time but remembering to look it full in the face, every now and again, to trace its peculiarity and recall its fragility, and at last to go home without protest, relinquishing what is no longer right nor life-giving.

Placating the Weather Gods: A Selection of Vinaigrettes from the Other Side

[It's a joke. I do know the difference between a vinaigrette and a vignette, thanks.]

The lights are off. The curtains are open. The stars look on, impassive, as week two is blown away by a wind so chill that it cuts through coats, sweaters, and scarves to lacerate your skin and make all but the hardy few retreat to their radiators and sweatpants.

That feels like how it ought to be: dramatic, intense, and exciting, and sure, it's all those things. But this is also everyday life. Even as culture shock and travel weariness have faded and made way for routines peppered with lectures, hours upon hours of reading, supervisions, seminars, more americanos than I care to admit, and the like, what I said in my last post still holds - and probably will always hold, since it is a rare individual who masters the art of confronting the wild and wonder of every fleeting second of his life.

So if it is not an edge of the seat thriller, what is it?

Moments.

The colleges seem to be oriented largely around staircases. It's a little hard to explain to Americans, because we're used to a single staircase connecting different floors, and I think that's probably the case in most modern English buildings too. But it seems that rather than creating significant horizontal levels, the rooms are all organized around staircases, a few to a level. There's another girl from the International Programme who lives on my staircase at Corpus Christi, and she has been something of a saving grace to the past two weeks. When a friend of hers came up from London today, we bravely sallied forth to fight weekend tourists for a spot at a tea shop and ended up getting surprised in the street by a sudden hailstorm instead. It had been windy and was drizzling a bit, but we were still caught off guard when the drizzle broke into an icy downpour, driving us into the closest doorway along with every single other hapless individual so unfortunate as to be out on the pavement. Startled, with nervous laughs and stamping feet, caught in a tiny space with a crowd of the similarly marooned, watching in wonder as signs blew across the paving stones in the gusts and employees ran to rescue their outdoor furniture. Breathing in the scent of warm crepes and wondering, in a cafe with every table filled, what next?

The half hour before you email your essay to your supervisor is the worst, especially when it's your first one - or maybe it gets harder afterward, because you're afraid that your writing doesn't reflect the careful, thoughtful input you received the week before. I don't know yet, since I've only submitted one paper. But your heart races a little bit, and as you scroll through the Word document one more time, every single flaw and failure is highlighted in glowing neon, as if you've contracted temporary synesthesia when it's too late to be any help. Redundant points that can't be ripped out and mended over, the suspicion that for every good quote and explication you've made there isn't a shred of argument to be found, everything merging into a pang of doubt that says, "Maybe they made a mistake. Maybe you shouldn't be here." The sweetest relief is the moment when your supervisor tells you that, sure, you didn't have an argument, but you had a really great understanding of the text, and that your writing is stylistically good, and then launches into a discussion of the differences between American and British education systems as if it's not really the end of your life and there's always next week and the week after to walk together through the learning process.

For my first two days in England, I thought it might end up being a repeat of the last trip. I thought maybe the sun loves it when I'm here. Then the clouds came and reality set in along with the occasional shower (it's not as rainy as you'd think, but it's usually damp and puddly, and there's always the sense that it's thinking very seriously about doing something a little more official in the way of downpours, only maybe after it's had its tea and biscuits, thanks). The clouds conspire with the lack of daylight savings time to make mornings interesting. The first day that I was able to wake up before 8 was a victory, because it's hard to drag yourself out of bed when the sun probably won't even show its face before the afternoon sets in. That's when you get those two blessed hours of beautiful blue skies that serve to slacken the tense threats of the morning's dishwatery gray clouds, but the hours pass quickly enough, and then it's a prematurely aged day, already conceding defeat and climbing into its armchair with a newspaper and a mug of warm milk near at hand.

It has been two weeks of so much coffee and tea, finding dining halls, nutella and stroopwafels, late night episodes of The Wire, stressing about Plato, making friends, trying not to miss family too much, serious hunts for the best postcards in town (relatively speaking), navigating absurdly complicated libraries with their own absurdly complicated cataloging systems, sitting silently through hour and a half long reading groups with postgrads who are excitedly arguing over painfully fine points of philosophy in the early middle ages, eating Chelsea buns from Fitzbillies but not too often, and occasionally waking up from a deep sleep with the jarring realization that getting out of bed means going out into an unfamiliar world to live an unfamiliar life, grateful for every outstretched hand that anchors your heart and your sanity.

Some of the moments, not all of them, not particularly dramatic or exciting, though often intense; and still more are waiting in the wings, ready for their cue to enter from stage left as their predecessors take a quick and, for some, final bow.

Alterity on the Ground

A wise friend tells me that the best way to get over jetlag is to sleep at the normal hours, but that doesn't help me much with jetlag-induced insomnia. Can't say I've experienced it before, but since I'm too tired to read Plato and too awake to do more than toss and turn, how about a first blog post of the trip?

There is something fascinating about the first few hours, or perhaps even days of one's first venture far outside of one's comfort zone. The body shuts down and goes into survival mode. It's the fight or flight response, a state of heightened awareness tempered by exhaustion, and if I recall my Psych 101 correctly, part of that response is a temporary shut down in the digestive system. Fact: I like to eat. But when faced with the unfamiliarity of another culture, however close to our own, and the uncertainty of awkwardly navigating various modes of transportation to get from point A to point D, the absolute last thing in my mind, except perhaps as a weary mental note, is whether I've eaten or not.

You learn a lot when you listen to your body.

One of the myriad fantastic things that Jerome Miller observes in The Way of Suffering is that we always find ways to patch over ruptures in the fabric of our everyday reality, all of those little or large tears that point to the deeper fact of our lack of control and the indifferent world outside of our small, secure space. We don't dare look them in the face ("Only that now you have taught (but how late) my lack / I see the chasm."), because we fear the unknown and what it might do to our concepts and our percepts.

That's how I could sit at Gate A17 and hold back the ocean of tears that arose at the aching prospect of saying farewell to my sisters for over five months. Keep looking past the ache, and it's not there. That's how I could step off the plane and get through immigration (without being detained, hallelujah!), maneuver through Heathrow, and then navigate the Underground more or less calmly and rationally (excepting that moment at Canada Waters when I totally missed my stop and prevented some poor woman from getting on the tube) without collapsing after a long week, a red eye, and a meager four hours of sleep. If you don't let the sensation of walking in an alien place get to you, then maybe it isn't really happening after all.

The problem is that if I don't let the alterity of the situation affect me, then I might as well have taken a semester off to hang out in West Chester. I might have even learned more that way. It's how we respond to the ruptures, daring to near them, even embrace them perhaps, that really opens up our minds and our worlds.

On the other hand, this insomnia thing? Not a good time to listen to my body. So the real moral of the story is: be alert enough to listen, and be wise enough to discriminate. Or something like that.

From Nowhere to Nowhere and All That Lies Between

The kind of travel to which we aspire should tolerate uncertainty and discomfort. It isn’t about pain or excessive strain — travel doesn’t need to be an extreme sport — but we need to permit ourselves to be clumsy, inexpert and even a bit lonely. We might never understand travel as our ancestors did: our world is too open, relativistic, secular, demystified. But we will need to reclaim some notion of the heroic: a quest for communion and, ultimately, self-knowledge. Our wandering is meant to lead back toward ourselves. 

This is the paradox: we set out on adventures to gain deeper access to ourselves; we travel to transcend our own limitations. Travel should be an art through which our restlessness finds expression. We must bring back the idea of travel as a search.
{from "Reclaiming Travel" by Ilan Stavans and Joshua Ellison}

This week has begun rather oddly. For the first time since I got my license, I am entirely without a vehicle and have to depend on the graciousness of my family members to get me to and from work and class. Thankfully, I also have a semester pass that covers trains, buses, trolleys, and subways in the area, and today, I very nearly used it for the first time to take the bus home from campus.

Perhaps it sounds silly and naïve, but I was kind of excited at the prospect. I have only once traveled by bus inside the US, and only once by myself. As a creature of habit, I don't ordinarily break out of my comfortable modes of existence, even in trifling instances. Sometimes I'll skip dinner on campus rather than trying to make a decision about where to buy food, because I'm unfamiliar with the various eateries and can't be bothered to explore a new situation. But as a product of the countryside who has just admitted to never really being without a car for the past seven years, even riding the train is still a novel experience, and a bus ride even more so. It has all the excitement of a challenge: coordinating subway and bus schedules, navigating unfamiliar territory, figuring out payment methods without coming across as a total moron, and people-watching.

When we throw ourselves into new situations, we learn stuff.

In my Intro to Interpersonal Communication class at community college, we talked about this concept illustration called a Johari window. Basically, it's a square divided into four quarters, and each quarter represents an aspect of the self in terms of knowledge and awareness: the blind self is the part that others see, but you don't; the open area where what others know coincides with self-knowledge; the hidden area, which is all the parts of your self that you hide from others; and the unknown is that which neither self nor others have had opportunity to discover.

These quarters are not equally divided, nor are they fixed in size. Over time, the parts that involve self-knowledge increase (theoretically - I've been accused of believing too much in the reflective powers of average human beings, but it seems like the more generous interpretation). So too, the parts of yourself that you share may change depending on whether you become more open and trusting, or perhaps begin to shut away more in order to protect yourself in reaction to circumstance and pain.

Since "stuff" is a taboo word for good writing, let me expand my thesis. When we throw ourselves into new situations, our learning experience is two-fold: we learn about the world with its inhabitants,  social construction, and material reality, but also about ourselves as we respond to and situate ourselves within that framework.

The journey to the center of the earth is simultaneously a journey to the center of the self, not in some deplorably egocentric way, but simply because we cannot help but change and grow responsively when we begin to think  critically about the experiences we undergo. That's why I love that quote from Stavans and Ellison's article, especially as I begin mentally preparing myself to leave for Cambridge.

On the one hand, yes, I'm satisfying a dorky preteen's goal to study at one of those old English universities, and as I am receiving my courses and meeting supervisors, I'm increasingly excited by the intellectual opportunities that are open to me. But travel is a holistic educator, and my mind is not alone in readiness. When we remain at home, we have to actively and intentionally pursue discomfort. It will not seek us out, except perhaps when an unpredictable entity invades our perfectly ordered space. But when we travel, we are ourselves the unpredictable entity, challenged to be vulnerable, to be humble, to ask questions, and to dare the awkward and uncomfortable. And if we are malleable and open, suffering the inconveniences and embracing the challenges, then perhaps we shall find that as we invaded the world, it invaded us: we are unable to see with our old eyes or think quite like we used to. You approach things differently when your concepts have faces.

So yes, in the end, riding on a bus is a ridiculous excuse for an adventure. But I can't always afford to be wandering over oceans and time zones, so it'll do for now.