During the years I was growing up in Crown Heights, the one-and-a-half mile expanse of the Brooklyn Bridge was the symbol of a seemingly unreachable distance between my working-class, immigrant neighborhood and the cultural and intellectual worlds of Manhattan. I dreamed of crossing the East River, not just for a film or dinner in Chinatown as my family often did, but to live. When my mind wandered, I saw myself on the other side, performing the imagined life of my potential self.
This longing was motivated by a deep desire: to become educated and to experi ence as many aspects of the world's complexity as I could. The dream was deep ened by my daytime imaginings of life in the far cities of Europe and Africa that I had read about in books and magazines. I wanted to be the kind of person who naturally could find herself in such places. And because there are times when determination can make it so, I have been able to spend a good deal of my adult life in almost constant motion, traveling—either alone or with students, friends, or family—to lecture, work, or just for adventure in Europe, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Korea, Tunisia, Jordan, Turkey, Mexico, and other locations. Eventually my need to travel to many places has been replaced by a desire to return to those that resonate most deeply with me and in which I could never spend enough time. I have tried to visit one or more of these destinations as often as possible, like a migrating bird touching down briefly on a beloved spit of land: Athens and the Agora (the marketplace of Ancient Greece); Venice and the Accademia (the great repository of Renaissance painting); South Africa and the ochre soil of the Kalahari.
Because of this rhythm of return, established over a lifetime, I was stunned, like many, when travel was forced to a halt in 2020. I had already made sum mer plans: a stay at my favorite hotel under the Acropolis before traveling on to Crete and the Mani Peninsula, the southern part of the Peloponnesus; a week in Provence to officiate at a wedding of dear friends. But there would be no such journeys for me and most other travelers. Covid-19 had made certain of that.
And so, hunkered down in another favorite place, our cottage in rural Michigan, I observed in the early days of the lockdown that, although I was physically staying put, I was psychically still traveling. While walking on a country road, chopping vegetables for dinner, or during my morning yoga and meditation practice, small scenarios of past travel came involuntarily to mind, as if I were quickly flipping through a photo album. Strangely, these unexpected scenes were not of dramatic or significant moments, but rather of small, mundane events. Suddenly, I saw myself walking down a back street near the Plaka in Athens en route to the chiropractor, jumping onto a crowded vaporetto in Venice, running through the Tanzanian airport to catch a flight to Arusha, or drinking rooibos tea at a bed-and-breakfast on a cold morning in the Karoo.
Each of these flashes—scenes of lived moments—unleashed a barrage of sensorial memories: the texture of light at a particular hour, the smell of damp wool or freshly washed cotton. I didn't know why certain images appeared at particular times, why my mind had retained them, or why it was presenting them to me in seemingly random order. At first these familiar filmic events were a welcome diversion from my newly imposed sedentary life but then they began to make me uneasy. I feared this uncanny and awake dreaming, unconsciously summoned, might take over, becoming more vivid than the present.
Some hypothesize that before people die their life passes before them in a series of images. I now understood how such a phenomenon could be possible. Visual experiences, large and small, stored in great detail in my mind, were now replaying themselves back to me like a travel archive set on shuffle. I became concerned that perhaps I was revisiting my life's itinerary because my time was coming to an end, soon. Or perhaps I was simply saying goodbye to a world that, post-pandemic, would never reconstitute itself in the same way again, a world that none of us would move through as fluidly and trustingly as we once had. Or perhaps the stillness of being shuttered was allowing me to empty my psyche, inadvertently creating a powerful vacuum and encouraging these images to rush in.
During the early months, I was corresponding with a young artist friend from the Netherlands who was taking advantage of the global pandemic stasis to visit his favorite, but now virtually abandoned, tourist destinations throughout Europe. He found himself alone in the Pantheon for much of an afternoon and alone again at the Vatican, where, except for a single guard, he had the Sistine Chapel to himself. At the same time a colleague of mine, the writer Calm Tóibín, described a similar experience in his essay "Alone in Venice," published in the London Review of Books on November 19—the title says it all. My heart started racing when I realized that people I knew were moving around the world as I once had but now could not.
This awareness triggered an old, insatiable, and too familiar travel envy in me, which the world's collective forced immobilization had quieted for a time. I had almost felt grateful for not being able to travel—free of the planning, the stress, the canceled flights. "Who needs all that?" I thought. But hearing about the adventures of others made me realize that I only had accepted not traveling so readily because I assumed no one else was traveling. Like most sequestered people, I had needed to adapt—to calm the desire for wandering by immersing myself in the particularities of the place I was in. To survive, I learned to make familiar topographies fascinating, and to transform the need to be physically in motion into a desire for internal progression, moving forward, exploring that terrain as if for the first time, going places within myself that I had never before dared to explore, taking risks. But when honest, I also had to admit that in effect I really had never stopped traveling. The random, unexpected mental scenarios I was reliving daily provided just enough travel stimulation to keep me from settling into the present completely. This phenomenon also was forcing me to rethink my relationship to the act of travelling, and the particularities of what needs it actually fulfills.
A DISTURBANCE OF MEMORY
In volume five of the complete set of Freud's Collected Papers (acquired at a Chicago garage sale some time ago), I had discovered an essay called "A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis." Freud wrote this essay in 1936 when he was eighty years old and unable to travel any longer because of ill health. The essay reveals the importance of travel to the psychoanalytic process of dislodging buried aspects of the self.
In 1904, while en route to Corfu for a short vacation, Freud and his brother visited a friend in Trieste. The friend encouraged them to change their plans and bypass Corfu, which he insisted would be too hot at that time of year, and instead to go directly to Athens. At first, the brothers outrightly dismissed this suggestion. They worried it would be too difficult to change their itinerary and expressed their reluctance to do so to each other, but they eventually went to the ticket office and discovered that the necessary changes were surprisingly easy to make. Soon they were on a boat headed for Athens.
Freud, often the subject of his own psychoanalysis, uses the example of this event to interrogate his original resistance to his friend's suggestion: Why had he at first rejected the idea of visiting Athens, a place he had longed to see since studying Ancient Greece in school? Why had he assumed the change of plans would be too difficult? In this essay, Freud speculates that his reluctance perhaps centered around his doubt that this ancient world, as envisioned, had ever really existed.
But probing deeper, Freud recognizes that something more complex was at the source of this dilemma: he had never believed that in his lifetime he would have the chance to journey so far from home or to experience a site as extraordinary as the Acropolis.
Finally, Freud came to understand that in allowing himself to pilgrimage to a place that had such meaning for him, he was transcending his father's experience, something II forbidden" at that time. Freud conceded to himself that his father probably would not have wanted to visit Athens, nor would he have been unsettled by his son's opportunity to do so. But in Freud's symbolic world, the trip to the Acropolis signified that he was better educated, more mobile, and blessed with greater financial resources than his father. He concluded that it was this unconscious guilt about metaphorically leaving his father behind that accounts for the II disturbance" aroused in him by the very suggestion that he visit Athens. The essay becomes a meditation on the convoluted way in which we unveil our fears and desires to ourselves—a process for which travel has always been a great catalyst.
Travel can open up the world inside us as much as it can open us to the world outside. When we travel, we dislocate ourselves from our home, which is familiar and secure, and relocate ourselves to situations that can feel unfamiliar and even precarious. Such journeys often unsettle and unveil parts of the self that might otherwise have remained hidden. Because travel disturbs the status quo in this way, it also allows us to imagine other versions of ourselves and our lives. It is therefore often easier to make important life decisions that require change when we are displaced from the day-to-day than when we are immersed in it.
Perhaps the "disturbance of memory" I had been experiencing, the reconstruction of past movements—mirages set off by a slant of light, a sound, a time of day, a smell or taste, like Proust's madeleine—demonstrate that those places I have visited and lived in, once outside me as desired locations, even beyond my grasp, are now inside me and available for me to revisit at any time. Perhaps I no longer even need to physically travel to experience them. I have internalized their essence sufficiently to conjure them, consciously and unconsciously, and have made the unfamiliar familiar, changing my understanding of the world and my life within it.
I also have recognized for some time that, in traveling to such diverse locations as I have done, I have not just fulfilled my own dreams but also those of my mother. She very much wanted to travel, but her financial circumstances were limited and opportunities to do so only became available to her later in life and then for just a short time. Like Freud's experience, my multifarious adventures could be understood symbolically as an indication of having surpassed my mother—and many of my family members—in both education and mobility. But I have never felt guilty. Rather, I have taken pride in knowing that in standing on the shoulders of previous generations, I have been able to achieve what they could not. In moving through the world as I have, I have fulfilled some of their aspirations as well as my own, certainly those of my mother who would have continued her education and traveled extensively had she been able to.
My grandparents immigrated from Russia and Poland to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, but their journey was not "travel" for education, adventure, or leisure as we think of it today. Their travels were migrations to escape difficult historical situations. Like the urgent travel of millions then and now, their immigration was an act of survival. The familiar had become hostile to them, and they needed to leave their homes, despite enormous risks. Their courage in making a journey to a country they did not know, to navigate life in a language they did not understand, and to work their entire lives just to have enough for themselves and their families, gave me the ability to study and to move through the world as I have done.
At the same time that my grandparents were immigrating to the United States out of necessity, when journeys on sea and land were arduous and long, carrying few belongings with them, wealthier people were traveling with trunks full of their clothes and possessions, taking the familiar with them into the unfamiliar. But today those who have the opportunity and privilege to travel for adventure ideally want to bring along as little as possible—only what will easily fit into a backpack or a carry-on. To the modern adventurer, travel conveys a sense of lightness—symbolically reducing the burden of everyday life, its demands and obligations. The weight of the reality principle is thus suspended just long enough to allow the lightness of the pleasure principle and the possibilities it offers to emerge.
For me, one of the great pleasures of travel has always been the way it mysteriously alters and expands time. Because of the intensity of the experience, a week traveling can seem like a month, a month a year, and a few days an eternity. While absorbing new visual and experiential information, the imagination is free to roam beyond the constraints of chronological time. Our longing to "see the world" may be an attempt to conflate space and time, to make our lives more expansive, more elastic, and, finally, infinite and eternal. Our deepest desire is often to step outside of time, to hold it still in order to savor the best moments, so that, rather than control us, wear us down, and move us closer to our mortal end, time can buoy us up. I especially feel this freedom when luxuriating in unstructured time, away from obligations and routines, breathing into an expanse of possibility that seems inexhaustible.
I clearly miss all these aspects of travel. And when this physical immobility ends, I surely will be on the go again. But I know that the experience of travel in all its complexities will be different. I hope that my need to be in motion will be less compulsive and that I will no longer take the ability to freely and safely move through the world for granted. Surely, I will be more spontaneous, less trusting that obsessive planning actually can control when and where I go.
Perhaps too the visual archive of recurring images that have haunted the past months will continue to grow, allowing new experiences to incorporate them selves within it. Or perhaps this cinematic diversion will disappear from view completely for a time, until my own forward momentum actually does cease. Then all these images may likely manifest again, as we are told they do, to replay themselves back to me for what will be the final viewing of my life's extended journey, one adventure at a time.