After a list of the cool stuff B.
the narrator has seen in his travels, comes this moment of longing: “but mostly
travel is missing, by a narrow margin, / things desired.” He lists with a
friend the places in India which they did not visit, and “together we made the
whole subcontinent sigh.” That’s what desire brings. Well sure: Go to a place,
reckon what you’ve missed by not going to the places where you almost went, and
you get the rest of the place looming there in absentia. There’s always more of
it than what you’ve seen because the world is incomprehensibly larger than the
radius of our awareness could ever cover. Thoreau didn’t have a lot of patience
for travel for this reason. He wrote in his journal, “The further off, the
nearer the surface. The nearer home, the deeper.” He’s probably right, but it
doesn’t keep me from travelling. I know Cincinnati better than Paris or
Budapest, both places I spent some half a year each in. But Cincinnati, a
modest town, has depths that after almost 35+ years here, on and off, I haven’t
yet begun to plumb. And it changes, which complicates things further, because
the life of a place is dependent on location and on time. The street I lived on
in college is no longer the same place. In fact, the movement of it through
time makes it feel even more unfamiliar than if I were visiting for the first
time. When I visit the university corner where I lived and belonged for so many years, I’m a stranger now. It’s not home any
more. I’m a tourist.
In Hungary, I used to have what I
called “out of body experiences,” when things were so crazy, so beyond my
experience or even my ability to comprehend that I would mentally back out and
up and away, and just watch it all from a safe distance even though I was
sitting right in the middle of the action. “What is this?” My small-town relatives lived in a little country village
still maintaining its Old World character because the old people were still alive,
still struggling like Hungarian peasants have always struggled, and because
Communism had sheltered it from the breakneck progress into the future that the
West endured. They butchered one of their hogs in my honor, returned family
member as I was, an old Hungarian custom. I got up at 5:00 in the morning,
started drinking wine, was wasted by 6:00, watched the pig die and started helping
to cut it up into bacon and ham, grind it into sausage, all that good stuff.
Some of the women had collected a gallon or so of the pig’s blood, which they
let coagulate, then they fried it with garlic and onions, and we had that for
breakfast along with the liver. The blood was the color of anthracite coal with
the consistency of Jello. It tasted like salt and iron. Yikes! Not so familiar
on my Yankee palate, maybe, but I wasn’t about to turn it down. The old peasant
ladies—my aunts and cousins—wearing scarves on their heads, deep-lined faces, heavy
boots, wearing more than one skirt at the same time, it seemed, were forking
down this friend blood as fast as they could, laughing and happy as an American
kid at a ballpark with a fresh cloud of cotton candy, and they were talking
Hungarian at me a hundred miles an hour, and someone else was singing these
plaintive old Magyar folk songs, and I couldn’t accommodate it all and just
lifted out of my body and sort of hung there a foot or two off the ceiling,
watching. It’s a disconcerting moment, but this is when you’ve taken a first
step into being part of the place, and your experience begins to localize and
deepen. Albert, a lovely man, took me alone down into the wine cellar that
evening. I knew enough Hungarian to communicate on a basic level. He took the
bung out of a barrel, dipped out two glasses of a fresh, lovely rosé, and
toasted, with an amazing fervor—utterly without irony, totally serious: “Magyar emberek vagyunk!” “We are
Hungarian men!” So yeah, I drank to that, as moved and proud as I’ve ever felt
about anything in my life, knowing that while my grandparents were born up the
road about a hundred yards and were married in the village church, I wasn’t
Hungarian, I was American. But such realizations matter strictly in reflection.
For that moment, I was Hungarian. I was home. I wasn’t travelling any longer.
I’ll always be grateful to Albert for that moment. He helped me down off the
ceiling and showed me a spot where I could plant my feet for a moment.
It makes me realize that Thoreau
is right, in a way. I love travel, and I think it’s as worthy a way to spend
one’s money and time as I can think of, but I grant that it’s shallow. There’s
nothing particularly wrong with spreading oneself out a bit; there’s nothing
wrong with being a tourist as long as you don’t overdo it with the acquisitive
collecting of experience for the sake of greed. It gets both voyeuristic and
consumerist that way. But a modicum of tourism is appropriately broadening. The
real value of travel, though, is when you meet a person and that person makes you feel at home and welcomes you
home. It happened to me in France, too. A part of me stayed behind in Le
Vesinet and I’ve never recovered it because it was the piece of my heart that I
offered as a parting gift to my hosts. But Hungary—the sound of the language,
the smells of the cooking, the personality of the people—Budapest, and Terpes, Hungary
are places I settle into without effort. Small, distant members of the limited
but deepening collection of places I could ever, even if just for a moment, call home.
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