My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 17: Reflections

                                       Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on,                                                                     deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

                                                        --  Miriam Beard, Realism in Romantic Japan (1930)

                                        You are not the same people who left that station
                                        Or who will arrive at any terminus, 
                                        While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
                                         . . .
                                        You are not those who saw the harbour

                                        Receding, or those who will disembark.

                                                       -- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” (1941)

                                        How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm                                                                                                                            After they've seen Paree?

                                                      -- Words by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young; music by Walter Donaldson (1919)

When responding to the stories about my 1966 Europe trip over the past few months, some readers have asked what effect the trip had on my life.  The same question occurred to me many times during the writing.  So here's my lengthy attempt at an answer.

First, some context . . .

I began Chapter 1 of this memoir with a quote from Martin Buber:

             All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. 

The “secret destination,” of course, is not a place, but a state of mind, a Weltanschauung that evolves through experience and reflection.  Sixty years later I have the luxury of being able to look back, try to remember how I viewed the world at age 16, and perhaps only now be able to perceive the “secret destination” of how the trip to Europe enlarged and enriched my worldview.

I should say at the outset that for me the trip to Europe was not like Dorothy Gale being transported in a tornado from the black-and-white world of Kansas (or, in my case, Oklahoma) to the Technicolor world of Oz . . . although there were a few “We’re not in Kansas anymore” moments along the way:  see Chapter 5, “On to Paris”; Chapter 7, “Milan to Venice”; and Chapter 13, “Dachau.”  Nor upon return did the trip immediately change how I behaved during my senior year in high school or how others treated me there.  Most of my peers never knew I had been gone over the summer, and I don't think I was vibrating with the pulse of transformation running through my veins.

Thanks to family vacations, by the time I was 16 I had traveled quite widely in the U.S., visiting museums and battlefields, cities and cemeteries, casinos and national parks in 22 states (counting Oklahoma), plus Washington, DC, and very brief forays across the borders into Mexico and Canada.  Seeing new places and people, learning about their history, eating local cuisine – all of that was in the realm of “normal” for me.

But Europe was more than an order of magnitude different in so many ways:  historically, culturally, gastronomically, linguistically, geographically.  I had, in my 16 years, developed a modest mental framework for interpreting all those things domestically, but the sheer volume of new experiences in Europe was exhilarating and occasionally overwhelming – the classic “drinking from a firehose” experience.  I look back now and realize how much I learned from that trip about the world and history beyond the United States . . . and how much I failed to perceive due to youthful inexperience and lack of preparation.

So with all that in mind, now I'll answer the question that prompted this post in the first place.  The trip to Europe affected my life primarily in two ways:

(1) In the short term, it reinforced what my parents and all those family vacations had been preparing me for all my life:  getting out of Oklahoma.  The trip to Europe confirmed that there was a world out there so much larger than the world I was living in, a world with energy, history, education and cultural resources, and I knew I wanted more of that.  A year after returning from Europe, I left Oklahoma – family, community, and a girlfriend -- for college in Atlanta (Georgia Tech), and aside from various family gatherings, a few high school reunions, and one miserable summer job after my sophomore year in college, I never went back.

(2) In the long term, my worldview was enlarged exponentially. I gained an expanded awareness – but at the time only a limited understanding – of how complex and diverse, old (very old) and rapidly changing, huge and small, rich and horrible the world is.  Over time, however, that awareness and the concomitant quest for understanding have grown to inform what ultimately became my liberal politics and social consciousness.

How that all played out over the past 60 years is a story – actually, lots of stories – for another time.  For now, I’ll just conclude with another passage from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets which perhaps sums up best how my life was affected by my Excellent European Adventure:

                                    We shall not cease from exploration                                                                                                                  And the end of all our exploring                                                                                                                          Will be to arrive where we started                                                                                                                      And know the place for the first time.

Thanks for being part of my life's journey!