A glimpse into the past.

My previous post, in 2018 — which now seems a different era — was titled: “Why Travel?”

I observed:

In the PBS travel programs by Rick Steves, the opening introduction says that travel, like Public Television, enables us to develop a deeper understanding of our world.  And, at its best, travel changes us for the better. 

The implication is that travel propels us to experience great art, music, history, food, and people.   Our insights, like Rick’s, will enrich our lives.  

On Rick’s site:

“Travel is freedom… one of the last great sources of legal adventure. Travel is intensified living, with maximum thrills per minute. It’s recess, and we need it.”

Some thoughts for the present moment

For me, the past five years have been frightfully intense.  More “thrills per minute” than I needed as I watched medical science and political discourse implode.

In 2023, the year of  my 80^th birthday, as I sense the impending disintegration of the Anthropocene epoch, as I experience the long tail of the pandemic and frantic efforts to forestall The Sixth Extinction (published: 2015), the reasons for travel seem quite different. 

My comfortable home in the Atlanta area has great art, music, history, food, and many wonderful friends. The High Museum, a symphony, an opera company, the vivid history of a Southern city, and (finally, post-1996) the ethnic restaurants and markets of an international city.  

Although I’ve done some consulting since leaving a full-time job in 2008, much of retirement is recess — every day.  And, by supplementing the rich reality of a metropolitan area of more than 5 million people with a fiber-optic cable, the virtual world can stream into my home on many glowing rectangles.

As the pandemic fades, a catalyst inspires a return to Europe.

“My husband and I are moving to Portugal,” Clarissa said, “you’ll have to stay with us a while in Lisbon.”  

“Oh,” my wife said, “how wonderful.”

 Joy’s old friend was enthusiastic about a move to Europe.  She and her husband had spent time in the suburbs of Lisbon and had both found opportunities there to enhance their careers with employment in Portugal — a fascinating vocational bit of luck.  

“Ah ha,” my wife said, “Our favorite yoga instructor is offering a retreat in Portugal at the end of September — pure synchronicity.”  

“We can have an engaging vacation — a personal introduction to Lisbon and a moment of regeneration on the beach.”

“And, as long as we have purchased tickets to Europe, let’s see if there’s a tour of Spain in that time frame.”  (Spain has been on my bucket list for years: my second language (a distant second) is español.

Soon we had a plan.  Not cheap, but a trip to Europe to see much of Spain (2-week tour with Gate 1), a week in Lisbon (possibly with Clarissa and her husband), and a yoga retreat in Faro, Portugal.  A few days for our own exploration along the way.  

…

By the time we had booked the Gate 1 tour, the yoga retreat, and airline tickets to and from Madrid, our catalyst vanished: “We’ve decided not to move overseas,” Clarissa announced one afternoon.

One of the core beliefs of Buddhism is the impermanence of existence.  Change and flux are omnipresent.  Even if it’s not “old age, sickness, and death,” something is bound to happen.  Especially if you plan to enjoy Rick’s “maximum thrills per minute” travel approach.

And I did not see a box anywhere on the Travel Insurance Form — 

       Trip canceled because relatives wimped out.

So, we decided to craft our own 10-day tour of Spain and Portugal between structured activities.  Which cities to visit?  Why those?  How to travel from City-1 to City-2?  Where to stay?  What to see / experience / encounter?

Where would we find great art, music, history, food, and people to transform our drab lives into the thrilling, exhilarating adventure of a lifetime?  And what might be the cost of those transformative adventures?   

“Let’s make a list,” Joy enthusiastically opined.

If we had known a great travel agent with a deep knowledge of the Iberian Peninsula (do such people still exist?), and we had had a free afternoon, perhaps this would have been easy.  But we knew no such person.

Of course, we have computers and mobile phones…  How hard could this be?  

After many iterations, we had a plan — the summary document is 8 pages long — with entries like this:

Mon, 04 Sep 2023

Catalonia Atocha, Madrid, Spain 
Standard Room with Breakfast More Info

1 Double Room / 2 Nights

Tue, 05 Sep 2023

Toledo Tour More Info

2 Adults

dinner on your own… 

Wed, 06 Sep 2023

Hotel Valencia Center, Valencia, Spain 
Standard Room with Breakfast & Dinner More Info

1 Double Room / 1 Night

It included all three tours:

1. Gate 1 in Spain
2. Roll Your Own Hand-crafted Tour of Spain and Portugal 
3. Yoga Retreat in Portugal

The supporting documents are a thick stack of receipts — “Your stay is confirmed; reservation number: 2345678…”  “Show this QR-code at the train station…”   

You can guess how many hours, how many receipts, how many glasses of wine, how much money…  (Now, double your guesses.)

We are now done.  Well, we are done planning.  There are always the last-minute details, the packing, the photocopies of vital documents…  We finished paying for Travel Insurance…

But the question still lingers:
Why Are We Spending This Much Time and Money on Travel?

Will we really have the thrilling, transformative adventure of a lifetime?  Probably not.  Will I occasionally miss the peace and quiet of a lovely home where I can continue to work on a memoir?  Probably yes.  

But real life in a unique part of the world does (I must admit) create insights for the attentive observer.  Watching Rick Steves admire the sculptures of Michelangelo is quite different from an encounter with the works of a master artist in the galleries of Florence.  Skiing in the Rocky Mountains of Canada is quite different from appreciating pictures of snow-covered mountains.

And, trying to get biking directions from a small town in northern Italy to the next town (when no one speaks English) is an adventure.  (When we got lost, veteran riders of the Bicycle Adventure Club would occasionally observe that: “Adventure is our middle name…”)

For those of us with a somewhat lower level of tolerance for adventure, not all such events are enjoyable (in the moment).  But perhaps there is a Nietzsche-esque element to travel: “That which does not kill us outright, merely serves to strengthen us.”

I think he also said; “All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”

At 80, terrifying and monstrous are not my favorite perceptions, but I may learn something.

…

Preparations Beyond Packing and Crafting an Itinerary.

Does creating expectations help?  Yes and No.

Expectations can open the door to disappointment and frustration.  But anticipation can also prime the senses for how to absorb the newness of food with unique spices, wine with inimitable tannins, answers to questions about the flow of history, and a context for present-day events in the good ol’ U.S.A.

In my previous post I mentioned:

The audiobook version of The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt is “both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.”  [Amazon link]

The Amazon review includes:

“Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius—a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.”

The philosophical epic by Lucretius was “On the Nature of Things” (50 B.C.E), and the cannily alert man in his late 30s was Poggio Bracciolini.

In 2023, as I continue my inquiry into how the world is — and, how it might be — I once again encounter Poggio, as Greenblatt calls him.  This year I am reading Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope,” by Sarah Bakewell. [Amazon link]  

Bakewell, too, is exploring those dangerous ideas: the origins and core beliefs of secular humanism.  She traces the roots of open-minded inquiry to Poggio and his contemporaries: Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio.  Like Poggio, they were aware that their age was a degraded version of an unrivaled time.  They knew the history of Rome’s ascendency and collapse.  They knew that the underpinnings of civilization were — if possible — to be resurrected from the literature of the intellectual giants whose few remaining books were sequestered in obscure monasteries and private libraries.    

Did it work?  Did bringing back the dead (the moral and intellectual rigor of Lucretius and his ilk) enable the civilizing catalyst that was the foundation of the Renaissance?  Of our own modern era?

Did secular humanism bring forth not only forms of progress but also extremes of exploitation?  Which age should we use to assay our current trajectory?  Are we like Rome in its ascendency?  Or are the dark forces of social media about to devour any remnant of civil discourse?

As I do some homework in learning more about the history of Spain and Portugal, questions loom.  Will any of them be answered by a few weeks in the Iberian Peninsula?  Will I see a foreshadowing of Trump in the reign of Franco?  Will I see thoughtful introspection as people respond to my sassy questions about the tolerance of the Moors (flourishing Christian and Jewish communities) vs. intolerance after the Reconquista (“convert to Christianity or leave”).

Perhaps authentic insights will emerge not so much from the inspirational majesty of a Gothic cathedral or the heady buzz of a unique glass of Rioja wine, but from my homework and my constellation of questions.  Questions not unlike the ones that Poggio formulated as he scoured Europe for fragments of guidance from a more enlightened age.