Lonesome Traveler

Son 1 had some summer reading to do before he went back to school last weekend, and in classic fashion he put it all off till the last minute.  But finally I really had to ask, What are you supposed to be reading? Because it is high time to get your ass in gear.

Turns out he was supposed to read On the Road.  We went to the library and found a Library of America volume containing five novels and selections from Jack Kerouac’s journals.  Son 1’s reading was desultory, as he didn’t much care for On the Road.  But I picked up the book in a few spare hours and began to thumb through it.

Somehow I’m fifty years old and I had never read any Kerouac before this month.  But it’s great stuff.  I didn’t feel ambitious enough to start one of the novels, but I have been poking around in the sketches that make up Lonesome Traveler, and I find them captivating for the same reason that I love Bruce Chatwin’s very different book The Songlines.  They both speak, in concrete and profound ways, of the urge to get up and GO! … to travel … to leave the dull, daily round behind and go somewhere that you can see the world afresh.

I understand the urge.  When I was little, we moved every single year up until I was seven, and it still feels strange to me that I have now lived in the very same house – a house that I own, for God’s sake! – for eighteen years.  I love to travel, not that I have ever admitted as much to Wife.  And I am looking forward, hoping against hope, to the time when my divorce is final and I can start exploring whether my company could transfer me to an office in Samarkand or Timbuktu.

The fantasy is nothing new for me, and you’ve had to put up with it more and more often lately (including quite recently, for example).  In a sense I suppose it is of a piece with my feeling chronically an outsider, and so I haven’t thought about it a lot even as I have wallowed contentedly in the daydream. 

On the other hand, if travel and movement and permanent strangerhood are things I enjoy, what the hell am I doing here?  Why am I married, with children, owning a house in the suburbs and working in a highly stationary career?  How did this happen?  Often when I ask myself that I’ll blame my shyness – or, if I’m feeling especially bitter at the time, my lassitude and cowardice.  And doubtless that’s part of it.  Another part is that it can take me shockingly long to come to understand what I really want, and until then I just kind of drift along with what people expect of me.  But can that be all?  Maybe so, but sometimes it seems to me that I am forcing a couple of small facts to shoulder an awful lot of the burden of explanation.  Is there really nothing more?

And then a couple of days ago it hit me.  I realized exactly why I chose to come to this place in my life.

I’m here as a tourist.

OK, I realize it sounds crazy, but suddenly all sorts of little things began to fall into place.

• When I first began to meet Wife’s family – Poor White Trash all of them, with all the virtues and faults (mostly faults) that that implies – it never bothered me that these people were about to become my in-laws.  I never really thought that they had anything to do with me, and so I could be courteous to them in a way that Wife (who felt their connection viscerally) never could. 
• When Wife’s mother would do things that were crazy or dishonest or destructive, of course I was sorry for how her actions hurt Wife; but I never felt personally engaged, I never felt that she reflected on me or on the kind of people I came from or associated with.  Instead, I observed her as if I were a tourist or an anthropologist – or perhaps an entomologist – and she were a particularly colorful and remarkable specimen. 
• And I can’t count the times I have been mowing our lawn over the years, when I have smiled to myself and reflected, Now I am carrying out my time-honored cultural duties as a male head-of-household. What an interesting role I am playing! And what quaint, curious customs this tribe has! It’s really quite exotic if you look at it right … 

Even when I was convinced that the marriage had to be permanent, even when I believed that divorce was unthinkable, I never really believed that the marriage had made the two of us into One in any kind of permanent way, or that – on a metaphysical level – I was doing anything here more than just visiting.  Now, I don’t suppose I put this explicitly into words for myself, or at least not usually.  The only logical way to make room simultaneously for the belief that our marriage was indissoluble and also the belief that in some sense it was not truly permanent would be to accept a clear doctrine about life after death, whether through reincarnation or bodily resurrection or something like that.  And for all such doctrines I have to return a verdict of Not Proven, at any rate if I approach the question sober and in daylight.  But at an emotional level I remained somehow persuaded that whatever happened in my marriage or among my in-laws didn’t really relate to me.  Because all along I have been here just as a tourist.

It’s an interesting perspective.

It also tells me – once again, as if I didn’t already know – that divorce was probably always inevitable.