Tag: travel

One More Adventure – Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Odysseus, and Me

Daniel Defoe published the first volume of Robinson Crusoe at 59, close to the age of his hero when he finally returns from his island.  When Crusoe rejoins the civilized world, he is 61, and has spent 35 years marooned.  Neither Defoe nor Crusoe was through though; Defoe took the story into Crusoe’s old age in The Farther (sometimes printed Further) Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and subtitled: Being the Second and Last Part of His Life, And of the Strange Surprising Accounts of his Travels Round Three Parts of the Globe. 

Crusoe came home with the intention of settling down; he gets married and has children, but he finds it hard to be stable, to stay put.  The Farther Adventures starts with Crusoe’s acknowledgement that “That homely proverb, used on so many occasions in England, viz. ‘That what is bred in the bone will not go out of the flesh,’ was never more verified than in the story of my Life.”  He wants to roam some more, he wants to go back to his island, he wants to see new places.  Fortunately (for him) his wife dies and releases him for more adventures. And he has them.  Finally, at the end of the second volume, he is 72 and says he is ready to settle down:

And here, resolving to harass myself no more, I am preparing for a longer journey than all these, having lived 72 years a life of infinite variety, and learnt sufficiently to know the value of retirement, and the blessing of ending our days in peace.

We don’t believe him.

Defoe himself lived to be about 70, but published a variety of fiction and non-fiction books all through his 60s. Novels like Moll Flanders follow characters into their old age, but Defoe also wrote pamphlets and tracts about the treatment of the elderly; he outlines a system of old age and disability pensions and caretaking facilities (which don’t sound like pleasant places).  However, the interesting thing is that age alone is not a criterion for needing help – one must be old and disabled.  Defoe frames his project as a benefit for those that are “Lame, Aged, Bedrid, or by real Infirmity of the Body (the Pox excepted) are unable to Work;” nowhere is a given age sufficient proof of “inability to work.”

Robinson Crusoe is not disabled, but – at the end of the second set of adventures – he is looking for “the blessings of ending our days in peace.”

Just after Defoe wrote Crusoe, Jonathan Swift published his work about an older man who went on extensive travels and also had a hard time adjusting to home life.  Like Defoe, Swift created a character that was exactly the author’s age and had him embark on adventure after adventure. At the end of the book, Gulliver is fifty-nine, “a Man late in Life,” the same age that Swift was when he completed the work.  The Travels can be seen as a journey through time as well as space. As Gulliver travels and shares his discoveries, he ages.  Gulliver survives it all, but staying home after it was over was the hardest part. He finds human beings, even his family, nothing but a bunch of Yahoos.

One might also think of Odysseus/Ulysses, who comes back to Ithaca after twenty years, slays the suitors, sets out to rule his domain and enjoy his family, only to feel the lure of one last adventure.

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees… (from “Ulysses,” by Tennyson)

According to Tennyson, Ulysses goes to sea.  This is in accordance with Dante’s version of what happens to Ulysses; in Homer we get a prophecy that Ulysses will take a final land journey.  No matter where he goes; he is not content to stay at home in his old age.

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, . . .

I guess I am thinking about old age and adventures because at 75 and 73, my husband and I are headed for one more adventure – one that feels much more difficult than it should be.  We have decided to move closer to family; one last long-distance move – one more house to buy and one to sell.  We’ve done it several times, but it is so much harder now and I have often felt despair about whether we could pull it off.  In the middle of it all we got Covid for the first time, followed by pneumonia in my husband’s case.  And yet, we have plowed ahead.  But I do not have the energy or courage of Crusoe.  I am more than ready for some peace.  Soon.

 

Travel, Rituals, and Old Age

My husband and I just returned from a ten-day marathon in New England with all our relatives.  We are not used to hotel beds, restaurant food, and such a rich diet of forced socialization.  It was reassuring and comforting to see people we love, but we missed our rituals – from tea at 3PM to oatmeal on weekdays to the PBS News Hour on Wednesday nights (we can only stomach the news once a week).  We are home now and nestling back into our routines, and this has gotten me thinking about the value and meaning of ritual.  I am also thinking about it because I found myself trying to defend it on several occasions while we were gone.

Usually, I would say as I sat down at the restaurants our hosts had chosen, Thursday is the day we have fish.  Or, upon being asked if we eat oatmeal every morning (we bring our old-fashioned oats with us), I would reply that we ate oatmeal Monday through Friday, have pancakes on Saturday and eggs on Sunday.  Generally, our friends and relatives were appalled.  You know what you are going to be doing every day of the week? they exclaim.  What kind of life is that?

It is a sacred kind of life as far as I am concerned.  And a life that leaves much room for contemplation and creativity.  It may not work for everyone, but not worrying about what’s for breakfast or dinner, or what we are going to watch for our nightly hour/dose of daily television leaves room for the more intriguing parts of life.  It is not that our rituals are not important; it is that they are holy.  These moments in our days are like a religious Book of Hours, where we perform and say the duties of the day between work, play, thought, meditation.  I would never criticize someone who lived a spontaneous life in all respects, but such is a life of continual decisions and effort of which I am no longer capable – if I ever was.

Ritual also teaches us to appreciate the small wonders of life.  In one of my favorite books, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery writes “When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things.”  Back home after a major disruption in our routines, the blueberries on our oatmeal, my peanut butter and cracker afternoon snack, become luminescent in their beloved familiarity.  And this, in turn, reminds me to appreciate all life.

Routine makes for contentment rather than thrills, but who says that happiness is something to be “pursued”?  I would say that the pursuit of happiness is an oxymoron (with due deference to Jefferson).  Children love to hear the same bedtime story over and over again; they sleep the peace of the familiar.  Monasteries and convents are models of a scheduled life, and yet they fertilize the genius of a Thomas Merton, a Hildegarde, a Gregor Mendel.

And I think of Nietzsche, who raised the question of eternal return – is it possible to live our lives in such a manner that we would be happy to live them again and again?  Or would it become an eternal frustration, a Ground Hogs Day of confusion and regret? Routine, for me, makes parts of every day a blessing of eternal return– knowing that I will come back daily, hourly, weekly to these holy points, making the rest of life easier, fuller, and more open to adventures of another sort. 

One last note: rituals and habits are “near enemies” in Buddhist terminology.  Near enemies are two things that look the same on the surface – like equanimity and indifference – but are totally different in their intention.  It is true that rituals can become habitual, but something is lost.  And I would never call a bad habit a ritual.  One must be vigilant.

This week’s story, “Paradise on Earth,” is about habits (not rituals) that develop about how we treat each other, and what can happen when things change.

 

An Old Lady Returns from the Highlands

My husband and I just returned from Scotland – one of our favorite places in the world. But, on the long trip home, we admitted to each other that this might have been our last overseas trip. Scotland was gorgeous – we even lucked out and got an unheard-of two weeks of great weather, but was it worth it?

Air travel has become worse (if that is even possible), and we have become less resilient. Besides jet lag and the need to lift suitcases into overhead compartments, we have about a 50% infection rate – meaning at least half the time one or the other of us (or both) comes home with some kind of infection, presumably picked up on the plane. Sure enough, one of us is sick.

And it is not just our aging constitutions. Cognition is also not as sharp as it might once have been – in any case, driving on the left has not gotten any easier. Neither has deciphering maps or monetary conversion rates.

There is great pressure on the old to travel. In our rather aged community of many retirees, people travel far and often. There is much chatter about the best places to go and the best means to get there. Neighbors are often preparing to go somewhere or picking up the pieces when they come home to the unmown lawn.

Facebook accounts of our peers abound with selfies in exotic places, as the oldsters run through their bucket lists and their bank accounts. If one complains about the difficulties of travel, the solution is group tours, on which one can see foreign places while embedded with other Americans. No thanks. It is hard enough to get the flavor of a new place without seeing it through the lens of your peers and compatriots. One of the advantages of traveling on our own in Scotland was that we could avoid the places where the tour buses spilled out their tired clients. Plus (and most importantly), I am unsocial enough to find the possibility of being cooped up with a lot of strangers on a tour bus… terrifying. And, of course, we were in Heathrow earlier this week when pandemonium erupted as the biggest tour company in Great Britain went bankrupt and left hundreds of thousands of travelers stranded from Singapore to New Zealand.

And then there is this: while it is exciting to wait for an upcoming trip, can’t we all admit that after ten days or so we are simply pining for that flight home and wishing we had Dorothy’s ruby slippers? Don’t tell me it is otherwise. I know.

Of course, I may change my mind about travel. “Today you may write a chapter on the advantages of traveling, and tomorrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not traveling.” True enough, Henry. Talk to me in another six months, when I have recovered from jet lag and bills from the last trip have been paid off, and I may have another opinion.

Even now I will admit that there are two true values of travel. First, travel makes you appreciate your own bed, friends who know you, food you recognize, and surroundings that are both boring and comforting. What Bertrand Russell called a “fruitful monotony.” Monotony that leaves time and energy for reflection.

Second, absence and return allows us to see the familiar in a different light. Like Thoreau, I am measuring the possibilities of seeing home with the eyes of a traveler. “It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country, in his native village.” Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled widely giving lectures and garnering acclaim. He toured in Europe at least three times, seeing the sites and meeting the intellectual figures of his era. His friend Henry never left North America, and seldom ventured out of Concord – but what he saw every time he left his house was always new and always taught him something. Pick up his journals and open them anywhere.

The story for this post is “Again and Again and Again.” Some people dream of foreign places, but they are forced to swim in their own backyards. In HDT’s case, this was Walden Pond. “I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.” Thoreau reminds us that characters were engraved on the bathing tub of King Tching-thang to this effect: “‘Renew thyself completely each date; do it again, and again, and again.’” But it is, maybe, possible to do this without leaving home. At least that’s what Henry tells me and what I want to believe at the moment.