mills: In addition to posting some wonderful...

mills:

In addition to posting some wonderful photos, Erica wrote beautifully of her trip to Colombia, and in addition explored a phenomenon I’ve experienced after much experientially-dense travel: the surprising, bitter misanthropy that accompanies a return home. One feels it on the plane, in the airport, at one’s first meal in a hometown restaurant: a severe, critical hostility towards one’s fellows that makes inarticulate references to what one saw, felt, underwent abroad. Often, the anti-Americanism of a returning American is extraordinary.

This knot is complicated further when one sees one’s friends and family again, and at once wants to tell them everything and feels that no such telling is possible; I’ve often been morose, irritable, depressed at such times.

Erica writes that “If travel makes me a better version of myself, a better human and faith-holder and woman, coming home reverts me to a spoiled child.” I think the metaphor is apt because the experience is a pure instance of the mind’s frustration with change, loss, time; it detests them all, despises letting go, wants to transform an experience into something concrete or else live in it forever, neither of which it can do.

The degradation of moments into memory -which, even were it not a poor reproduction, deprived of all but the occasional random detail, lacking poignant and crucial elements, would still not approach the sensory experience of the present- is something to which one painfully acclimates in childhood. The longing one feels to live again in the present -as infants do, as animals do- was the strongest emotional sense I had when very young, and perhaps the return to ordinary, instantly-forgotten life from the overwhelming potency of travel, which squares one’s habituating mind on the depth and variety of the present, reopens the wound.