Somewhere Else

There are people everywhere who form a Fourth World, or a diaspora of their own.  They are the lordly ones!  They come in all colours.  They can be Christians or Hindus or Muslims or Jews or pagans or atheists.  They can be young or old, men or women, soldiers or pacifists, rich or poor.   They may be patriots, but they are never chauvinists.   They share with each other, across all the nations, common values of humour and understanding.  When you are among them you know you will not be mocked or resented, because they will not care about your race, your faith, your sex or your nationality, and they suffer fools if not gladly, at least sympathetically.  They laugh easily.  They are easily grateful.  They are never mean.  They are not inhibited by fashion, public opinion or political correctness.  They are exiles in their own communities, because they are always in a minority, but they form a mighty nation, if they only knew it.   It is the nation of nowhere, and I have come to think that its natural capital is Trieste.

—Jan Morris, 2001

Usually when I read a paragraph more than once it is because I find that I am sleeping through it and don’t remember what I just read, but this one— from Jan Morris’s Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere—  I read repeatedly because to me it may as well be a prayer.

The first time I read it I imagined her Fourth World as the nation of travellers, and I thought Morris painted an exquisite picture of the people I have come to know through travel.   I recognized myself in the description, as well as so many others.   But then, reading it over, I thought her Fourth World described instead the nation of the expatriate, something I am not and unless Trump is elected president, something I am likely to never be.

The third time I read it I felt exposed– pleasantly lost and found at the same time.   It was as though I was wandering the meandering streets of an ancient city knowing I had no idea where I was in relation to anywhere else, but confident that soon I will spill out onto a known boulevard, exactly where I should be.

I have often wondered why I love to travel, what is the spark that motivates me.   I often just want to go someplace, and have as long as I could remember.   I imagine myself happy when I travel, but that is not exactly how it feels.   A couple of years ago my wife reminded me that the emails I send her while I am sitting alone in some skanky hotel room reveal deep loneliness and longing.   It is true, and my recollections of most of those cities whose ports of entry stamps bloat my passport—Tallinn, Helsinki, London, Paris, Hanoi, Manila, Yerevan, Budapest, Berlin, Tbilisi— would never warrant an adjective even close to happy.

I am happy, though, when I am with people who I meet, be they locals or expats, because happiness I suppose for me dwells in the texture of relationships with people and not place.   But there is something else, something other than happiness, that pulls me to place.   Given how often I have read over Morris’ paragraph above, I suspect it has something to do with her idea of a fourth world, that world she calls Nowhere.

Perhaps in my own version of Morris’ musings, I might prefer to call that fourth world Elsewhere, because for me, the magic that resides in travel is that I am not in the comfort of my own nest–  my warm, loving, familiar, and nurturing nest.  I am Somewhere Else, a place that isn’t so safe, a place that challenges my ability to communicate with others, to find a glass of water or a bathroom, or to figure out how to use a squat toilet.

Home is indeed as it should be—a place of safety and nurturance, but one cannot live on safety alone because that is a stagnation of its own sort.   I don’t know if you engage in this silly game, but I do more often than I would like to admit:  when I wake up in the middle of the night, or after I turn all the lights off and my wife has already gone to bed, and it is now pitch black, I am forced to navigate my way around the house blindly.    I bruise easily, and if I move too quickly I might even meet a wall or corner forcefully enough to nearly knock me out.   So while I am temporarily blind I imagine I have lost my eyesight altogether and am destined to navigate my way through touch and memory alone.  I take minor perverse delight in succeeding, although I do welcome my irises eventually adjusting and the gray visual world coming back on line.

Navigating blindly is uncomfortable, but it is easy to do in the familiarity and comfort of home, where you have a solid map of where the bed should be.   Home is the somewhere you know, the somewhere familiar.    And while the phrase “familiarity leads to contempt” is usually reserved for people interacting with other people, it may be equally as true for people interacting with the places they inhabit.

So it may well be that I do this traveling thing not to be happy, but to be uncomfortable, not to be familiar, but to be unfamiliar—not to be somewhere but instead to be elsewhere, or, in its ultimate form, to be nowhere at all.   And perhaps those of us who do the same find ourselves inhabiting a fourth nation, a nation with no singular passport to stamp, but a nation whose inhabitants have a deeper understanding of what it means to be confidently lost.  We laugh easily, we are easily grateful, we are never mean.

 

 

4 thoughts on “Somewhere Else

  1. hey ira, it was said that many of Raymond Carver’s books were bought for as much as their title as also to the contents. much the same could be said of the titles to your wonderful essays. some of my favourites, ‘time of useful consciousness’ ‘why I read accident reports’ ‘raven over our shoulders’ ‘secondary gain’ and the latest and one of your best ‘somewhere else’. I’m still thinking about it. it’s touched something in me, not sure what? but home humanity comfortably lost in other places, all interesting notions. I’m having memories of William Morris and Hugh Kenner who wrote about the elsewhere community. jan Morris’s work Ive not read, know of her, must address that. keep enjoying Trieste and look forward to your next essay and continued good health….kind regards to you and all. Daniel

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