Travel

In the past when I've lived outside of the U.S. for longish periods of time (for the most part over six years ago), Internet connections were slow and the amount of stuff in my life online was minimal. I'd check in with email every couple of days, but I was still always surrounded by Stockholm or Prague or Paris 24/7, more or less out of touch.

Since then I've gotten used to spending eight hours or so a day working in some capacity on the Internet, to the point where the amount of information I process that way constitutes in some sense its own "country", which I can navigate well, and where I know I can always find the familiar. And while that reassurance of the familiar is nice, I've been wondering over the past few weeks (as I work toward the end of my stay here), whether it's kept me from really challenging myself to interact as deeply with the culture.

I recently came across an essay in Salon from 2000 by Pico Iyer (whose writing I've always liked), in which he tries to explain some of what motivates us to leave home and head to other parts of the world in the first place. He quotes philosopher George Santayana, who wrote that we "need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."

While I don't think I travel in search of "hardship" per se, I do know what he means about needing to intermittently "sharpen the edge of life", and this idea of "being compelled to work desperately for a moment" has been a lot of the impetus for this trip; a desire to break apart my routines and comfort level, and start noticing details better; to be confronted with things I can't fit into the ever-hardening framework that I've developed to understand the world around me. But with the Internet available pretty much everywhere, I find I'm never really jumping out into oblivion. Even when I'm off in outer space wandering through the streets here, a few minutes later I can be caught up on whatever's on the Huffington Post or somesuch.

Anyway, this is an unfinished thought. But I wonder whether the otherworldly isolation people used to feel in the past when they were traveling (which of course helped them believe even more in the romance of their journey) is at all possible now that we know we can always be in touch.