My family and travel
[I've been doing a lot of writing on paper recently because it's nicer sitting outside. That means this writing is all delayed. So I think I wrote this Saturday sometime. Edits to the original writing will be done in square brackets...]
I've been reading On The Road, and the ironies haven't escaped me.
My grandparents on my dad's side lived in England and were either senile or dead when I was young. I can never really say I met them.
On my mom's side, I knew my grandfather, but he died before I had any sort of understanding about life.
My last remaining grandparent is, well, Grandma. She has lived in only two places her entire life: the house she grew up in, and the house next door to it, which was given to her and my grandfather by her parents when she got married.
Wait...[I forgot something]. She also has vacationed in Cape Cod, where my grandfather managed to get some property, as seems to be the pattern of northeastern families in the Depression (no confidence in banks, so invest savings in real estate?)
Anyway, she has spent her entire life watching over her family from the home base. It [the family, her descendants] now spans, over two or three more generations, from ape Cod, through White Plains, NY, where she lives, down to Pennsylvania, where my long lost uncle went to, I think, escape creditors. He has a family there now. I haven't seen him in years.
I'm getting off topic though--I'm thinking about my grandparents because I'm engaged in what's probably a fallacy in that I'm trying to determine what wouldbe a satisfying life for me by looking to my ancestors. This follows naturally from nativist thinking, I guess, but there's something more primal, I feel, about this sort of analysis--before there were genes people obsessed about whose blood flowed through whom, and it mattered--blood spoke destiny. Maybe.
So of my relatives that have had an influence on my, there has been my Grandma, mentioned above, her brother--who I think lived with his parents his whole life except when he was in Europe for WWII--and my parents.
My mother has lived in Boston and D.C. and New York City, but settled in CT a half hour away or so from her parents.
And then there's my dad, whose parents lived in India when he was young. I know little about his childhood, but I think he was passed around with relatives and friends of the family as a kid. Then he spent a lot of his life living in boarding schools. Later, he became a consultant and traveled all over, living in Saudi Arabia for a while, for example. Eventually, he came to the U.S., met my mother, and he settled down, for at least 23 years now, in the house where I grew up and still [consider my permanent residence].
Why say all this? Because I'm thinking about Piotr, who has spent the summer backpacking through Europe, and Whitney Wood/Dave, who lived in Germany for a year and is very soon moving to spend a year in India. And I'm thinking of one of my flatmates this summer, who I think identifies herself partly by her travels. And I've been reading On The Road and thinking about road trips and hitchhiking and wondering about the logistics of independent travel while I sit in Providence.
I'm writing this (this text--I'll transfer it to computer later, when I get around to it), on August 20th, 5:18 pm on a bench down the hill a bit from campus. After reading some Kerouac, I defiantly set off down the road--to get out!--and landed in a random spot within the tiny section of riverside Providence that I'm comfortable with. And I the thinking things I wanted to remember or rather, things I wanted to say to other people, and I landed here, and am anchored.
God damn anchors.
So what am I saying? I'm saying that if my family's nurture is what counts, I should be a sedentary soul. But my grandfather (an orphan, if I remember) on my mother's side moved around a bit, I think, before getting drawn into the comforting folds of my Grandma's Italian family. And on my dad's side? They split to India. And my Dad--he moved across an ocean before he settled down.
So something in me is resonating with On The Road--some drive to get out and go somewhere. But I'm not sure where or why. And I think that the traveling that was natural for my ancestors was a giant leap, then a settling down, not a wandering-of-the-earth. On both sides, they valued the security of accreted progress too much to abandon things behind them, habitually (which is why, I suppose, I will never be a beatnik? [Who am I kidding. There are millions of reasons why you will never be a beatnik.])
So what should I do? Where should I go?
I've already decided, I think, to not study abroad as an undergraduate. I took too long to figure out what I needed to learn, and now the task is to get it--to really figure "it" out. You know. All of it.
But just for the moment I am impatient--I just want top forget it over with so that I can move on.
But of course I can't--it's not that easy, (Or hasn't been)
So I guess I'm going to continue to make sacrifices in on whichever altar it is I'm sacrificing to.
Although if something is done by habit, calling it a sacrifice is sort of a misnomer.
But here I am--I made it this far into Providence. And why not go farther?
Here's the concern--it may not be worth it to go, because, as somebody once said, "Wherever you go, there you are."
And I know quite a bit about how I work, and the lenses through which I see, and I think I know that wherever I go I will turn that place into what I've already known by virtue of my containing it within the rule-structures of my consciousness. Except, maybe, in truly desperate circumstances, I would end up, as I have done before and am doing now, sitting on a bench feeling so satisfied simply in the act of allowing the introspection to flow out of me at last. And maybe that's all I really need for the fulfilling life [it's funny how arguing and completely disagreeing with somebody will still cause you to think in the terms of your interlocutor...fulfilling life? Am I Piotr all-of-a-sudden?]--a life spent slightly disconnected from my own thoughts as the[y] push themselves out into the world in some act of creation--I miss doing art. I used to do a lot of it and was proud of the results. It was a[n] outlet of my other brain, the one that either doesn't speak or speaks with confidence but no sense or authority and so is preposterous when left unchecked....
I'm not sure if I can manage the dual life I mentioned earlier.--I may have to learn to unify, somehow. How?
I've been reading On The Road, and the ironies haven't escaped me.
My grandparents on my dad's side lived in England and were either senile or dead when I was young. I can never really say I met them.
On my mom's side, I knew my grandfather, but he died before I had any sort of understanding about life.
My last remaining grandparent is, well, Grandma. She has lived in only two places her entire life: the house she grew up in, and the house next door to it, which was given to her and my grandfather by her parents when she got married.
Wait...[I forgot something]. She also has vacationed in Cape Cod, where my grandfather managed to get some property, as seems to be the pattern of northeastern families in the Depression (no confidence in banks, so invest savings in real estate?)
Anyway, she has spent her entire life watching over her family from the home base. It [the family, her descendants] now spans, over two or three more generations, from ape Cod, through White Plains, NY, where she lives, down to Pennsylvania, where my long lost uncle went to, I think, escape creditors. He has a family there now. I haven't seen him in years.
I'm getting off topic though--I'm thinking about my grandparents because I'm engaged in what's probably a fallacy in that I'm trying to determine what wouldbe a satisfying life for me by looking to my ancestors. This follows naturally from nativist thinking, I guess, but there's something more primal, I feel, about this sort of analysis--before there were genes people obsessed about whose blood flowed through whom, and it mattered--blood spoke destiny. Maybe.
So of my relatives that have had an influence on my, there has been my Grandma, mentioned above, her brother--who I think lived with his parents his whole life except when he was in Europe for WWII--and my parents.
My mother has lived in Boston and D.C. and New York City, but settled in CT a half hour away or so from her parents.
And then there's my dad, whose parents lived in India when he was young. I know little about his childhood, but I think he was passed around with relatives and friends of the family as a kid. Then he spent a lot of his life living in boarding schools. Later, he became a consultant and traveled all over, living in Saudi Arabia for a while, for example. Eventually, he came to the U.S., met my mother, and he settled down, for at least 23 years now, in the house where I grew up and still [consider my permanent residence].
Why say all this? Because I'm thinking about Piotr, who has spent the summer backpacking through Europe, and Whitney Wood/Dave, who lived in Germany for a year and is very soon moving to spend a year in India. And I'm thinking of one of my flatmates this summer, who I think identifies herself partly by her travels. And I've been reading On The Road and thinking about road trips and hitchhiking and wondering about the logistics of independent travel while I sit in Providence.
I'm writing this (this text--I'll transfer it to computer later, when I get around to it), on August 20th, 5:18 pm on a bench down the hill a bit from campus. After reading some Kerouac, I defiantly set off down the road--to get out!--and landed in a random spot within the tiny section of riverside Providence that I'm comfortable with. And I the thinking things I wanted to remember or rather, things I wanted to say to other people, and I landed here, and am anchored.
God damn anchors.
So what am I saying? I'm saying that if my family's nurture is what counts, I should be a sedentary soul. But my grandfather (an orphan, if I remember) on my mother's side moved around a bit, I think, before getting drawn into the comforting folds of my Grandma's Italian family. And on my dad's side? They split to India. And my Dad--he moved across an ocean before he settled down.
So something in me is resonating with On The Road--some drive to get out and go somewhere. But I'm not sure where or why. And I think that the traveling that was natural for my ancestors was a giant leap, then a settling down, not a wandering-of-the-earth. On both sides, they valued the security of accreted progress too much to abandon things behind them, habitually (which is why, I suppose, I will never be a beatnik? [Who am I kidding. There are millions of reasons why you will never be a beatnik.])
So what should I do? Where should I go?
I've already decided, I think, to not study abroad as an undergraduate. I took too long to figure out what I needed to learn, and now the task is to get it--to really figure "it" out. You know. All of it.
But just for the moment I am impatient--I just want top forget it over with so that I can move on.
But of course I can't--it's not that easy, (Or hasn't been)
So I guess I'm going to continue to make sacrifices in on whichever altar it is I'm sacrificing to.
Although if something is done by habit, calling it a sacrifice is sort of a misnomer.
But here I am--I made it this far into Providence. And why not go farther?
Here's the concern--it may not be worth it to go, because, as somebody once said, "Wherever you go, there you are."
And I know quite a bit about how I work, and the lenses through which I see, and I think I know that wherever I go I will turn that place into what I've already known by virtue of my containing it within the rule-structures of my consciousness. Except, maybe, in truly desperate circumstances, I would end up, as I have done before and am doing now, sitting on a bench feeling so satisfied simply in the act of allowing the introspection to flow out of me at last. And maybe that's all I really need for the fulfilling life [it's funny how arguing and completely disagreeing with somebody will still cause you to think in the terms of your interlocutor...fulfilling life? Am I Piotr all-of-a-sudden?]--a life spent slightly disconnected from my own thoughts as the[y] push themselves out into the world in some act of creation--I miss doing art. I used to do a lot of it and was proud of the results. It was a[n] outlet of my other brain, the one that either doesn't speak or speaks with confidence but no sense or authority and so is preposterous when left unchecked....
I'm not sure if I can manage the dual life I mentioned earlier.--I may have to learn to unify, somehow. How?