Wanderlust, Wanderdisgust

Do you, too, crave the oyster of perceptiveness? (Carstian Luyckx, Pronkstilleven, ca. 1650, via Public Domain Review)

Not long ago, a job interviewer scanned my resume and skeptically pointed out that I seemed to have a bit of wanderlust. The implication was that I wouldn’t take the job, or stay long, because I wouldn’t know how to handle the settled life of the office worker. I was immensely annoyed. I told him that all my hopping around was a result of circumstance. All I wanted was to stop hopping. And it’s true: I hate travel. I hate moving. All the most miserable periods in my life have immediately followed or preceded a move. How frustrating, to be accused of chronic unsettledness, when I wanted so badly to settle!

I was annoyed above all by his use of the term “wanderlust,” which I have always associated with idiots. It’s a word used by people who think they are better and more interesting than others because they have disposable income for traveling, U.S. passports that grant them freedom of movement, safe homes guaranteeing that their wandering would only ever come from lust rather than from need. The word rankled.

I assured the interviewer that I had no wanderlust. I got the job. I went to the office every day. After a few months I was forced to admit that I, an American passport holder with freedom of movement and a stable place to which I could return, had wanderlust. Because “lust” is the right word for it—though I had previously, privately, thought about my longing for new places in terms of cravings. It’s the same metaphor: food in one case and sex in the other, but in both cases the longing is a physical, bodily one that surpasses both rationality and my own emotional intelligence.

When I feel an urge to pick up my life and move it somewhere else, the urge is sensory and pre-rational. Usually the urge has to do with light, although I don’t usually think of myself as a very visually oriented person. Today I keep thinking about the wet wind on London’s South Bank, the blue dark at 4:30 PM in late winter, picking up my things from a museum coat check. The heavy fabric of my coat slipping over my long sleeves. Stopping for a coffee before getting on the tube, the dark surface of the coffee, the dark outside. It doesn’t matter that I actually hate the cold and the dark. I can know this intellectually, but the wish is a bodily wish, circumventing what I know about myself, just like you can lust for someone who is bad for you, or crave a food that gives you diarrhea. People talk about “catching the travel bug.” This is also annoying. And this, too, I reluctantly identify with: the analogy frames movement as a transmissible ailment, something that belongs to the territory of the body.

I’ve learned from long experience what I didn’t understand when I was younger—the cravings aren’t some course correction, guiding me from an incorrect place to a better one. They are not, god forbid, my “gut” suggesting to me that I might sort my life out if I just lived it on another landmass, like an intuitive eater trying to follow their cravings to nutritional peace. I suspect that my own snobbery prevented me from understanding this. I didn’t want to be a wanderluster. Surely my impulses were more consequential and serious than those of the mere tourist. But getting older is a process of understanding that you’re pretty much like everybody else. Now I understand that there is no destination. Like the person who gets a bigger kick out of seduction than sex, my lust is for the act of movement itself rather than for any specific place.

The act of movement is what I crave, but it’s also exactly what I detest. I wasn’t lying to the job interviewer. I believed every word I said. I do hate travel, for the same reasons that I love and crave it. I do want to be settled. I’m writing this in an airport. I’m only going on a short trip. The trip is to a familiar place. I’m visiting some family for a few days and then coming back home. Still, on the drive to the airport—looking out the car window at some nonbeautiful stretches of student housing I’ve passed probably tens of thousands of times in my life—I was gripped by the melancholy of departure.

In fact, I am always horribly sad on the ride to and from the airport. When I moved to London, I suffered from what I can only describe as a full-on, multiday breakdown, prompted by a vicious hurricane hitting home precisely at the moment I set off. My meltdown started in the Houston airport (there weren’t any direct flights from New Orleans, and in any case they would have been cancelled, what with the hurricane). I recall, vividly, weeping into a glass of wine while a few snacking nuns peered dispassionately from within their habits. On my interminable climb out of this meltdown, burrowed in bed in my strange new apartment in my strange new city, I made my husband promise me that we’d stay in London for at least a few years. I had never been so unhappy. But I was at least self-aware enough to know that I shouldn’t try and fix it by turning around and leaving right away. London was not the problem. The movement was the problem. The draw, but also, undeniably, the problem. Leaving, getting a move on all over again, would only prompt another round of meltdown.

“The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diaries. I always feel that my emotions about and impressions of a place can only fully expand when I am not there. Perfume enthusiasts talk about going “nose blind.” When you wear one perfume a lot, you lose the ability to smell it on yourself. You might even start to overspray it, needing more and more to get your fix. You can hardly smell it on yourself, but the people around you are choking and coughing on your fumes. When you are in one city for too long, you go place-blind. Even as you get more immersed, develop more commitments and obligations and attachments, you stop noticing your surroundings. After a couple of days I am just a person in space, and the Place has faded to irrelevance. It applies to smell as well, an urban version of nose blindness. Eastern European cities smell overwhelmingly like bonfires and diesel, but only when you’ve first arrived, and you only remember it when you get the heavy gasoline whiff in some incongruous American spot years later. You can only smell your house’s unique smell after you come home from a trip, and only for a few minutes.

When the nose blindness happens, I begin to crave a change of scene. It’s easy to mistake the nature of this craving and think that you are craving some especial place, but that’s not the case. Rather, you are missing Place, writ large. I want to experience scent, light, weather, color, texture—period. The grass is always greener on the other side, not in the sense of “better” but in the sense of literally greener. Places have more being, more sensory weight, on the edges: the moments when you are about to leave them behind, or else have only just left them behind, or else are newly-arriving in them.

Right now, writing this essay, I only really want to speak about London, because of all the cities I really love it’s the one from which I now feel the greatest distance. It has had the most space to expand, to breathe and become, in Woolf’s parlance, “realized.” I have written a lot about New Orleans, but I have mostly written about New Orleans when I am elsewhere. When I go from London to New York I always initially feel that New York is somehow more raw, sharper, colder, and brighter, as though a gauzy film covers everything in London and has been suddenly ripped off. But the impression lasts only a few days. So, conversely, does the impression of roundedness and sheen and layered diaphanousness I always have when I first arrive in London.

I am not an observant person. People around me are often shocked when they realize how little I’ve picked up about the spaces around me: “How do you not know your way around this hotel we’ve stayed in for five days?” My default state is one of sensory inattention. If you ask me to close my eyes and tell you the color of my next-door-neighbor’s house, or describe the rug in my living room, I won’t be able to. I tell people that I have a bad sense of direction or poor spatial reasoning skills, but it’s worse—an unwriterly lack of interest in my environment. Maybe this immense personality flaw makes me susceptible to wanderlust. An observant person can mine their surroundings for amusement and intrigue, can find the beauty in the everyday, etc. I don’t know how to do this and so I demand novelty on a grand scale like an ungrateful child throwing a new doll aside on Christmas afternoon and tearing open another toy.

Maybe that explains the lust, but why the disproportional disgust and sadness? Why the melancholy on the way to the airport for a weekend trip? I think it’s that, while I drive to the airport or train station, I begin to see the place I’m leaving from a distance, as though I am already far-off. An urban landscape that has died off into the background comes back to life in my rearview mirror, and looks all of a sudden, once again, like a specific and conspicuous place. I notice again the color of the neighbor’s house, the particular quality of the light in that place at that time of day. I have a real sense (one, I imagine, that a more intelligent or empathetic person-a more rooted person, a superior writer-might have all the time) that each of the houses I pass is inhabited by real people, with entire lives of their own.

As Woolf writes in the essay Street Haunting, describing a more micro form of travel and return (arriving home after an evening wander) “The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” Woolf is right: movement grants you keener perception, but it’s inextricable from vulnerability and exposure.

When I head out from someplace and break open my soul’s shell and become an enormous blinking exposed eye, I am overwhelmed by regret. I am departing a place precisely at the moment it has come alive—become “realized,”— to me. If only I could stay put. This time around, I’d be able to really see it! If only I had one more chance! This is why it’s such an uncanny and wonderful thing to have a flight get suddenly delayed, so that you’re forced to spend one extra night at home, or at your sister’s after Thanksgiving, or on vacation, even a vacation you weren’t enjoying. Since you aren’t supposed to be there, you are granted supernatural powers of observation. The objects and sounds of the world shimmer with presence as though you have microdosed shrooms or as if you are a very small child. You’ve found a loophole in the rules of perception, and here the grass is greener, and for once you’re on the green side. You tell yourself that you’ll hold on to these capacities. If you were allowed to stay a little longer, you think, you’d continue to see things in their full presence. But it isn’t really possible. The loophole lasts maybe twenty-four uncanny hours, and then habit grows back. Place atrophies. And you know, too, landing in a new city, that its exquisite here-ness will decay after a little time, curling up and back like the lips of a dead thing.

People talk about travel as a way to expand your life within the limits of mortality, a trick to squeeze in more experiences. Personally, traveling makes me think about how I am going to die. I become depressed, sometimes desperately, by the realization that the conditions of my life are totally contingent. The things that seem so massively important in one place are in fact revealed as games and shams when your plane touches down in another. Visiting a city where you used to live is the worst of all. Nothing makes you think about your own death like looking for somewhere to crash in a city that used to be home. You understand ghosts with their little protests: knocking around vases and slamming doors in their old houses. How can it be, that someone else is living in your house, where you vomited and threw parties and chopped onions? How can it be that you’d be a trespasser there? You become like the archetypal young adult returning to their childhood home and finding their room has been turned into a gym. You are made suddenly aware that the world will carry on when you are dead. You think about this ungratefully, even while your friends make you tea, clear their schedules, inflate their air mattresses for you. Every time I visit New York or London, I think I have to move back here—not because I’m having a good time visiting but because I’m having an utterly terrible time visiting, and never want to do so again.

Is there something wrong with me? I ask. Actually, that isn’t true. I say: Is there something wrong with us? Because I’m asking my husband, and whatever is wrong with me is wrong with him too. We sometimes joke that we’re both unable to commit to anything, except to one another.

Lots of young women think of their lives as a binary between commitment and experience. Marriage and hoeing out, love and independence, whatever. The week of my high school graduation, when I knew little writing and even less about men, I swore to myself with teenage melodrama that I’d never let a man get in the way of my writing. I remember squeezing my eyes shut to recite the promise in my head, committing it to memory. I was going to go to college and write, be independent, be brilliant, sleep around, and finally, when I least needed or expected it, fall hopelessly in love. The promise worked, in the sense that I did indeed fall in love when I least needed or expected it. I didn’t even last until college orientation. Just to my summer job as a camp counselor. Jonah was going into his sophomore year, at the same college I was due to move into come August.

If you believe in God, this was a divine lesson to teach me about hubris, or maybe about irony. Just because I was smitten doesn’t mean I forgot my promise. Quite the opposite. Jonah and I had all kinds of tortured conversations, in his twin-XL bed, about how on earth to deal with the menacing reality that we liked one another. Possibly, horrifically, we even loved one another. We struck a deal that we would only spend time together when I had absolutely no potential social plans, so that I wouldn’t be prioritizing our relationship over my glorious new grownup life. This promise was obviously absurd, since, in college, one always has at least potential social plans.

I got married before I even managed to graduate from college. This was somewhat humiliating, but at least we didn’t do it for love (though we did love each other a lot): we did it so Jonah could get a visa and move to a tiny town in a rapidly-shrinking Eastern European country with me. If you want a metaphor for “compromise between love and adventure,” this does the trick pretty well. We went to city hall, and I wore my best friend’s navy blue jumpsuit. It was too small. After college we moved five times in as many years, lived in three different countries, even slept around a little. The love/independence commitment/experience binary, I thought (pitying my eighteen-year-old self, so paranoid over nothing) was a false one. Find the right person and they don’t reign you in: they spur you on, or give you the refuge required in order to feel you can go off into the world securely.

Only now I’m not sure. Sometimes people talk about the fear of a Y2K collapse as a stupid panic. They always get corrected by someone else who says no, you’ve got it backwards: the only reason it wasn’t a disaster was that people worried, and then panicked, and then prepared. I think this might have happened to us, in a way. We were so spooked by our own early-onset romance, so afraid of sinking into the ease of long-term commitment, that we overcompensated, forcing ourselves into movement and adventure and a near-comical level of constant change. So successfully did we compensate that our fears of settled coupledom seem, in retrospect, faintly insane. An old friend told me recently that I was “the only woman she knew who hadn’t gotten any less fun in a relationship with a man.” She’s prone to a certain loving hyperbole, but frankly, Jonah and I often do get told that we’re “fun to hang out with as a couple,” that we don’t make it awkward for the third wheels, etc. If it’s true, it didn’t come naturally. It was the product of many years’ neurotic overcompensation.

When I was eighteen, I looked over my shoulder constantly for some other, single, more-independent, better-feminist doll of myself. This alternate life loomed like a threat, or like a golden-child sibling: why can’t you be more like her? I no longer look for that doll. But I do see other alternate selves, ghosts of people I could have but didn’t become, in places I could have but didn’t settle down in. I see myself in that 4:30 PM late winter blue on the South Bank, and in the pricking brightness of a New York summer morning before the heat gets bad, and in every other kind of light. But in all of these alternate lives and all of these alternate lights, I’m with Jonah. In all the wildest imaginations of my wanderlust, we’re together. Isn’t that the cliche of every bad pop ballad and romance novel? I’d Choose You In Every Lifetime. I’d Still Love You If You Were A Worm. In Sickness And In Health, for Richer Or For Poorer: all the ands and all the ors covered for good measure.

You get only one fraction of one lifetime with the love of your life, even if you meet young, even if you meet embarrassingly young. Meeting young, to a degree, just puts a finer point on how finite it all is. In imagining all your unlived lives together, you loan yourself some escape from that finiteness, while at the same time poking at the wound. The horror of traveling (the sense that you have failed to see your surroundings, the dull realization that your life is small and contingent and that all the spaces you fill can easily be filled in by somebody else) is the same as the horror of being in love: namely, you have to face the fact that you are going to die, and that you are going to die while having mostly failed to be attentive, mostly failed to remain alive to the thing before you—which in this case is not a city or country or street, but a wonderfully strange human being, an unplumbable, infinitely bizarre assemblage of nerve and blood and neuron. You are going to die without really getting it, even though It is right there, in your house, in your bed, in the garden. Even during the course of your already-short time together, you will manage to take this person for granted. You will fail to see them for what they are, and will often, instead, allow a kind of mental model, a shorthand symbolic avatar cobbled from memory and preconception and projection, to substitute for the real live conscious human being.

In an era of easy Botox and cosmetic surgery, some women talk about aging as a privilege. Life is a process of amassing wrinkles and sags and stretch marks, which only show that you have been subject to gravity and emotion. I have begun to think about all my alternate places and alternate lives in the same way. Growing up is a process of collecting unlived lives, which accumulate whether you stay put or madly dash around, submitting to the craving. It’s a privilege to amass these ghostly selves, waking up and padding to the kitchen to make coffee in a terraced Victorian in North London, a shoebox in New York, an old Soviet-style block in the Eastern European city we always longed for a stint in, a lushly creaking shotgun in New Orleans. It is a privilege to mostly and devastatingly fail to see the other: the other city, the other person, the other person walking beside you and getting slowly sunburned in a city that has started to smell like nothing at all.