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Reader, excuse me for a moment. I am having a fit.
… I MISS MY BOOKS.
As you may be aware, I am currently in the middle of another in a series of temporary living experiences: “home,” whatever that means at this stage, is somewhere in the American Northeast. I, however, am not. I am in a tiny, minimally furnished, undecorated room in the south of England, with only the “necessities” (broadly defined) of an MA student’s life.
I and my books are not in the same place.
This is one of many symptoms of the temporariness of my life here, one that in many ways encapsulates the exilic feeling I have from time to time. My life is unstable, the world I’ve built here clearly defined by its inevitable end, its dissolution, at the end of the summer. I need stability. I need my books.
I miss my Eliot. I miss my Wallace Stevens. I miss my full collections of the works of Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov. I miss my Middlemarch. I miss my mammoth anthologies. I miss my non-book ephemera — my course readers from undergrad, drafts of my thesis with Professor Wry’s handwriting all over them, my course notes and their marginal observations on the state of my brain, my journals dating back to early high school.
After a long day of, largely, drudgery, I need the solace of a well-worn, over-read paperback. I need the Four Quartets, god damn it. There are perhaps three books in my bedroom that are not either products of the Renaissance or keystones of critical theory, and one of them is authored by Anne McCaffrey. My library quota has been filled with books on Shakespeare editorship, early British nationhood, the history of the book, and recusant poetics. Right now, I don’t need any of those things. I need a break from my intellectual world, and this just ain’t cutting it.
More than their content, though, I miss my books. I miss their comforting plenitude, voluminousness, ubiquity. The bedroom I lived in for years in my parents’ house is bursting with books. They, not the studs and drywall and insulation and wooden siding, are what sheltered me from the violences of the outside world. They are, in many ways, my home.
I have always thought of the true moment of growing up, the genuine moving-on, the real “on my own,” as being the moment when I move into a place and take all of my books with me. I will do this in September. I want it now.
I need something vaguely resembling stable domesticity. I need to go to a place, stay there for years, make it my own. And I need my fucking books.
Before I left for City by the Sea, I was terribly anxious. I didn’t really want to admit it, or face it, but I was terribly anxious. I was anxious because the last time I left to cross the ocean, things worked out terribly. I was miserable for months and came home feeling defeated. The anxiety that descended on me during the past year just never really got around to dissipating, only quelled for a while now and then.
But now, reader… now! It’s been nothing but bliss, nothing, nothing but bliss for ten days and I honestly foresee nothing but pure, genuine happiness from here on out. By “happiness,” I don’t mean that I believe that this elated, blissful state can endure — I mean, mostly, the feeling of rightness, of suitedness, of being exactly where I belong and making the most of it. Ask for me, for example, come term paper time, and you will almost certainly find me a grave woman. There will be desperate moments, stressful moments, and — I’m cringing already — embarassing moments. But I cannot imagine being anything but happy here.
There is the comforting fact that the grad students I’ve met all, to a one, enthusiastically confirm my suspicions that Brit Uni is a nurturing, collaborative, supportive, energizing, challenging place to be. I have yet to hear or see anything that gives me even the slightest doubt that this institution is exactly the place for me.
There is the further comforting fact of the welcoming kindness of the faculty I’ve met. They seem to – gasp – actually want to know me, and they seem to be glad I’m here. They are excited about their students and proud of them. It’s plain as day that they’re good teachers. (They also happen to do damned good work.)
There is the library’s splendid (especially given its size) collection of Old Stuff, which more than makes up for the not-so-splendid Bombshelter School architecture of the place.
And there is City by the Sea, this glorious place, so gloriously by the sea, filled with weirdos and poky corners and wonderfully alive. The best weather available in Britain. Sweet little tea shops. Organic food co-ops. A very active, very visible Radical Element. A critical mass of used book shops. Queers all over the damned place. An early music festival starting in October. The sea. The sea. The sea. I felt immediately at home here in a way that Toulouse never gave me, that New York is constantly dangling just beyond my reach.
Really, reader, a girl can’t ask for more than this.
This evening, reader, your mouse boards a plane bound for London, whence she will hie her sleepy, baggage-encumbered self off to BritCity on the Sea. A rousing chorus of Huzzahs is hereby in order.
I’ll stay with a friend-of-a-friend in a house that has its Very Own Name (so quaint! so English!). I’ll scuttle around for a while trying to stay awake, doing loose-endish stuff and trying not to offend my new friend. The flat-hunt will begin in earnest on Monday.
And next week, joy of joys, Brit Uni is hosting a fabulous conference on Early Modern Stuff and Things, where most of Uni’s e.m. faculty will be presenting and where your mouse will get to dive into her new academic environment, meet people, and feel for the first time in a year that she might actually belong exactly where she is, and have purpose and direction in her life.
And most importantly, she will all the while be eating more scones and clotted cream than you’ve ever thought one small lass could consume.
Catch ya on the flip side.
Reader, never mind that I am leaving for England/the United Kingdom/Britain/the burnt-off crust of Europe, or that I am doing so a mere twelve days from now. Never mind it, because we are not going to discuss it.
What we are going to discuss is this neophyte’s personal adage: “The key to loving a place is leaving it.”
Having left my little alma mater twice in the course of my time there, once by force and once by choice, I developed the original of this adage (“The key to loving the Petri Dish is leaving it”) as advice to people who were debating about going abroad, taking time off, doing a semester-long program somewhere else in the States, whathaveyou. GET OUT, I said, or you won’t ever figure out how to use this place, how to inhabit it in the best, most creative way you possibly can.
I have since discovered that this holds not only for crushingly-claustrophobic-unless-used-wisely liberal arts colleges, but also for nations of origin, beloved cities, regions known as “home,” family, and all sorts of other important locales.
The other day I was talking about how I feel about leaving, and realized that most of my American friends who are most down on the States, most likely to say things like “I hate this country” have never really left it. I remembered at that same moment something which I had entirely forgotten: I was an America-hater once, too. And it took the six months of Expatriacy, Round 1 – my semester in Paris – to stomp that out of me.
At this juncture I feel compelled to reassure you that this is not going to turn into a post about how I Wish You Crazy Idealists Wouls Understand That Everything Really Is So Much Better Here Because The American Dream Is Real, Our Freedoms Are Unique And Holy Because We Have Real Democracy, And Critiquing American Culture Is Selfish And Shows You Don’t Appreciate All The Great Things You Have.
What this is about is what it was like to feel, suddenly, the distinctly American identity taking on form and multiple dimensions throughout that first, entirely enchanted, habitation of la Douce France. It took Expatriacy, Round 2 – my more recent seven months in Toulouse – to really get me to enjoy that identity. No, I can’t identify exactly in what this identity consists, or what it means. But it is there, and I like it.
Now, to some extent recognizing this identity, recognizing it as American, and relishing it, makes me a nationalist. Not in the statist Might of the Race sense, but in the good old-fashioned Andersonian sense: because of the various cultural inputs my young brain has received throughout its life in the United States, I imagine that I belong to a community, and through this imagining both my belonging and that community become real.
Living abroad taught me to differentiate between my Americanness — the imagined belonging — and the nationalist-militarist rhetoric of Americanness spouted by the federal government, the religious right, the more general popular right, the liberal élite, and any number of other quaintly reductive categories whence ideological Americana seems to sprout fully formed.
This process of disarticuling my self from some kind of politico-cultural machine has redefined several key things for me. It has redefined my notions of what resistance means, of how acculturation works, of what it means to come from somewhere — the fundamentally historical idea that provenance is important and must be attended to, and sometimes even cherished. In order to come to this redefinition and this cherishing of my Americanness, I have had to leave behind the structures that gave birth to it. The simplest things — adopting the language and the gestures of a new culture, trying on the habits of a new lifestyle, electing to keep some and to discard some, have made clear to me how deeply fashioned I am, and how present and continuous the process of that fashioning is.
All this by way of saying that, yes, the key to loving this country is leaving it, and I am grateful for the opportunities that continue to allow me to do so.
1. A few weeks ago, my splendid friend from wayback, the Conscientious Orientalist, re-departed the United States for his adopted home in Cairo. We had the following exchange on his front porch:
Me: “Here are the 120 Egyptian pounds I’ve been carrying around since I was there in February.”
He: “Don’t you want dollars for them?”
Me: “Nah. Buy me a drink in Dubrovnik.”
Yesterday I bought a copy of Lonely Planet: Croatia and mapped out an itinerary that runs from Budapest through Sarajevo to Dubrovnik, up the Croat coast through Zagreb and back to Budapest. Later in the evening, the CO and I spent a while daydreaming about Dalmatia over Google chat and making our usual run of acidic jokes, projecting hilarious hours of learning Croat, pondering the insane prospect of the two of us hurtling through Bosnian country roads in some half-dead Fiat, already looking with warm nostalgia upon the old, drunk Balkan men with whom the CO will inevitably strike up conversations.
He is the only person in the universe with whom I could even begin to contemplate such a trip. Then he reminded me that I’ve promised to go to Beirut with him, and encouraged me by promising a trip overland through Syria and over the Syrian-Lebanese border (Mouse: “gulp!”), and further promising that should any thing go wrong (Mouse: “What could possibly go wrong…”), we could wait it out in great comfort, because there is (duh) a Dunkin’ Donuts on the Syrian-Lebanese border.
This sounded almost sane to me. Almost.
2. This evening, I reread this post. And then this one. And this one.
3. Today I finally managed to make the British consulate’s website understand that it really ought to give me a visa appointment. Wonder of Weberian Wonders, it fracking gave me an appointment! Take that, International Immigration Bureaucracy.
4. I am currently shopping for luggage. Bless you, L. L. Bean.
5. I’ve been listening to Emmylou Harris all day.
All of this by way of saying: I’ve got it again. The urge to go. That twitching, bouncy state — picture a young woman sitting on her heels on some dirty train station platform somewhere, smoking a cigarette, flipping her hair impatiently out of her eyes as she rocks on the balls of her feet tapping some rhythm on the cover of the novel in her hands, picture her looking over her shoulder and squinting down the long lines of diverging tracks, over and over, checking her watch, tap-tapping her book. The itching state of imminent, anxiously-awaited departure. The secret smile that comes when I think of something as banal as the distinctive look of a consular functionary. The way I can’t stop bouncing onto my tiptoes or clapping my hands every time I think of something I need to get, need to do, need to add to some list or remember to find. The state in which “I’m leaving” begins to sound like a declaration of triumph.
I’m leaving, reader. I’m really doing this. Again. Having done enough of it not to get blindsided, but not enough to be jaded, having had my misbegotten post-college adventure and ready to re-have it in a more sensible, thoughtful, structured way, I can dwell on the splendor and let the rest just wash on over.
It is incredibly strange to think that, just three weeks ago, I lived in France. I lived in France and I spoke French every day. I woke up every morning and scuttled downstairs to the magnificent boulangerie next door. I drank my coffee and scuttled back down to the magnificent market a short walk away and chatted with the cheese man and his wife, and at the local vegetable stand smiled broadly at Colline’s usual throaty “Bonjour, jeune fille, que prenez-vous alors?” I bought my cheese and my veg and scuttled off somewhere else to read the newspaper, in French, or a novel, in French.
It is almost impossible to believe that just three weeks ago I lived and breathed this language, de croire que cette langue qui ne sonne plus que de fausses notes, résonnait, brillait sur ma langue, montait doucement du fond de mon moi pour résonner, briller, dans l’éclatante lumière du…
False notes, yes, now. French to us is the language of pretention and, indeed, is no longer permitted.
It is the little senseless verbal stops I miss the most –
bon, bref.
alors…
dis donc,
effectivement…
oui, non, oui
… quand même.
écoute –
eh bien,
soit!
The breath, the pause for air, the gesture — les gestes qui vont avec. You see? Tu vois? Les deux en même temps, yes, still, oui, ça continue.
The return, too, has its vertiginous moments.
I’ve been avoiding posting here, since I know that the life of this blog is coming to a swift close, and besides am not feeling particularly thoughtful, reflective, or any of those other things that lead to thoughtful reflections on closure.
Also because the only thing I’ve done lately, aside from contracting a nasty cold, was go to Cairo. There is a lot I could say about that trip, but I have difficulty saying most of it.
Key points:
– Reinforcement of the idea that people who have not traveled outside their home countries really ought to. For one, and here I’m in agreement with Liam, frequently our liberal arts educations are not up to the task of interpreting these experiences for us. No amount of jargon can describe what it is like to be an unveiled white woman in cargo pants walking through the dirt-and-cobble streets of medieval Cairo, carrying a camera, meeting the eyes of the men sitting on their stoops, the men driving their donkey carts. No amount of jargon can help me to find a way of describing this that is not “stepping into another century”; nothing can explain this modernity to me; nothing in my course readers or scrawled class notes can close the gap between me and these men whose eyes I meet. I smile, that is all. I have so much to learn.
Furthermore, there is a delicacy with which a certain young, radical demographic treats not only the developing world but all the world that is not Anglo-America and Old Europe. This delicacy is frequently paired with acidic invective against Anglo-America and Old Europe. There are many problems here. Travel – conscientious, thoughtful travel – can solve some of them. This will be discussed at greater length elsewhere, when my head is not quite so stuffed.
– Re-realization of the strength of West-Colored Glasses. Can we ever take them off? Re-color them? Perhaps not. In any case, another reason to travel more frequently.
– A certain amount of irony is crucial to survival, especially when one is out of one’s native zone. It is a slippery slope from irony to disdain, from sardonic to patronizing, but as long as one remains conscious of this – as long as one is a conscientious traveller – laughter can be an excellent vehicle for experience.
– Perspective. Perspective, perspective, perspective. And the concrete realization that the problems with my life in Toulouse are not merely life-abroad problems, but the result of faulty planning. The notion that next time I will do this differently and do it well. Sudden thoughts of straying out of my Old Europe comfort zone (abbetted, of course, by Liam in his role as my rusty conscience): whatever happened to that oft-slighted dream of learning Russian and taking off for Moscow or Petersburg? I am only half-joking. Push me far enough in the right direction and I might just do it.
I’d post photos but teh internetz is putting up too much of a fight.
I promise thoughtfulness and reflection. Later.
“Expatriacy” is an extreme word. I prefer “dépaysement” — less literal, less political, more vertiginous, a state of mind more than a physical migration.
Either way, there’s the “ex-” and the “dé-” to worry about. You can’t “repatriate” except to the country you were born in, and you can’t be “paysé” at all. The shift from “home” to “elsewhere” creates some fundamental décalage, some unfillable hole, some dizzying imbalance.
No matter how familiar the “elsewhere” becomes, it will always be lived in relation to “home.” You will never lose your taste for certain items that you can’t find in your new, your other country. You will never lose your accent or your freckles or the native way you tie your hair. Your voice was trained on one language, one culture, one way of laughing, and will never wholly learn another. You look about you and before you see anything else you see stories to tell back home — and when you go home you will discover that you wish you could tell those stories in your new, your other language, with your funny accent and the new, other gestures you’ve adopted.
Home in its turn will become dizzying. You’ll find yourself drawn to those around you who know this vertigo, this swirl. With those who don’t, you will attempt expressions. It’s simple, you’ll try to explain, as simple as the open-air market. But we have markets here, too. No, no, it’s – the woman behind the fruit stall, or the woman next to me in line with her caddy and her little girl… What? What about them? They… or, well, for instance, crossing the river, on foot, and the wind… Or the newspapers… okay, let’s take the cafés instead.
You’ll resort to clichés, the lieux communs that will somehow bring your point across.
Mais comment dire? Surtout que tu le verras, tu l’entendras – tout cela, tout ce bourdonnement de ta nouvelle, ton autre vie – dans une langue, dans un langage qui ne te seront plus permis.
And that’s why – c’est bien pour ça (les deux te viennent en même temps, oui, c’est vertigineux) – that’s why you’ve done this. For the feeling of falling, the feeling of spinning, the daze, this incessant va-et-vient that’s brought you out of yourself and far from the earth to land you with a jolt back in your flesh, on the pavement, cigarette in hand, jaw dropped, spinning in circles à la recherche de tes repères que tu reperds aussitôt que tu les retrouves.
This morning in the bookshop café: you snap away from the computer screen where you read the New York Times to focus on a rapid French exchange beside you. And, jolted, you think: “that’s it – c’est bien ça” – en même temps, oui, there it is, voilà.
(This is from last night. Tomorrow, if I have the energy for it, there will be recounting of the – frustratingly hilarious – bureaucratic morass of getting my papers in order, containing vivid descriptions of my totally rad papercut scars.)
Today, I was asked how to get to the tourist office by an English-speaking non-American. I gave her efficient, accurate directions. She was delighted with my English. I passed her again on my way back into town, and she smiled and said hello and thanked me and told me my directions were perfect. I grinned like an idiot as I congratulated myself on that little rite of passage.
I was on my way to sign a lease. I did so. Then I moved into my apartment.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to have my own space. For the first time in a very long week-and-a-half, I:
– am no longer living out of my suitcases (I almost threw them out the window, before I realized how anticlimactic it would be that they should then land in the parking garage that serves as our courtyard, and that I will after all need them someday)
– did laundry (there’s no dryer, and I am now happily smelling my clean, clean clothes drying on the rack in the kitchen)
– went to the grocery store! And cooked my own dinner! No more bad ham sandwiches! No more ham, period.
– spread out my things knowing that they would stay put as long as I want them to
– snuggled into my very own linens (magenta, to go with the orange walls and pink curtains and to compensate for the lack of sunlight in my bedroom)
– curled up on a couch – a real couch, in a real living room, half of both of which belong to me for the next ten months
– listened to very loud music (nothing like Nerissa Nields to lift a girl’s spirits)
– made a phone call from a landline, half of which belongs to me for the next ten months
– threw away (with no small amount of glee) the plastic bags and miscellaneous found containers that have been vaguely organizing my life in suitcases for the past howeverlong
– washed dishes – I can’t tell you how much this delighted me
– stopped worrying at every moment about where my money, my passport, my various documents are located, whether I might lose them, and who might steal them
– rediscovered the photos and miscellany that I packed to put on my walls, blissfully sighed over them and sorted out where they’ll go once I’ve got gummy stuff to stick them up with
– knew my own (semi)permanent address by heart
– and felt (almost) at home in Toulouse for the first time.
My thus-far extremely fabulous roomie and I had a lovely conversation, before she left to spend the week with her boyfriend, in which she told me that she wanted to have “une étrangère” as a roommate because “it’s more interesting with two cultures.” I told her that while I agreed, I also don’t feel all that out of my element in Toulouse – of course, it’s France, I said, and France is not the United States (yikes), mais avant, je ne connaissais que Paris, et enfin je me sens beaucoup plus chez moi à Toulouse qu’à Paris.
Chez moi à Toulouse. It’s an overwhelming and wonderful, comfortable and warm sort of feeling to have. Part of it is the Petri Dish Effect – I feel I know the white hippies with dreadlocks at the tapas bar on the corner, and the (Frenchified) bike punks with their patches and stickers, and the vegan activist screaming at the crowd and brandishing gruesome slaughterhouse photos at the market around St Sernin (though I think I was the only one who took his leaflet, and that only out of mild curiosity regarding how, precisely, logistically, financially, and culturally, one can survive as a vegan in France)… But it is also that the city is so profoundly not alienating in the way that Paris or New York or Bordeaux or even London or Boston can be. I can’t put my finger on it – part of it is the niceness of your average Toulousain (had a fabulous conversation with a cabbie today, who loved the United States for its open spaces, has a daughter my age, and approves of national education, all in five minutes), and part of it is the sun and the pink brick. Part of it is the obvious lack of American and Continental tourists – what French and British tourism I’ve seen is apparently not enough to turn the entire city into a giant postcard. Part of it is feeling at the same time perfectly legible, transparent (my accent, something not-quite-European in my clothes and my shoes, my blatant youth) and comfortably inscrutable (the accent not easily identified – “et vous venez d’où, en fait? … mais de quelle origine?”, the nationality of the visible identity ambiguous, my youth clearly not that of a student). Part of it is that nobody speaks broken English to me and then expresses astonishment when I don’t understand a word. The caissières, the waiters, the people I meet in the street, the landlady, all accept me, more or less, as part of the landscape, nothing troublesome, and if out of the ordinary, then pleasantly and expectedly so.
The most accurate and astonishing thing I can say about all this: honestly, right now, I can’t see myself anywhere else.
