The Measure of Movement

Cletus had a hot temper. I realized this one day when I saw him marching up the street of the language school in Prague where we both taught English. The school was called California Sun School, but this Irishman had anything but a sunny disposition. Cletus wasn’t his real name—I actually can’t remember it—but I just like the idea of calling someone Cletus. I want to say this was in late 1995—and so I will—about six or so years after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of nearly 40-plus years of Russian domination in Central and Eastern Europe.

I was hanging out in front of the building between lessons and when he got to me, Cletus unloaded. He told me that he had just come from the main railway station and because no one there spoke English, he was unable to buy a train ticket to Berlin for the weekend.

The building that housed the California Sun School. Photo by David Farley.

“Worst of all,” said Cletus, “all the signs in the railway station are in three languages, none in English. And want to know what those languages are?”

I could have accurately guessed but I let Cletus tell me anyway.

“Czech, German, and—you won’t believe this—ancient fucking Greek!” he screamed.

He was right: I didn’t believe him. “But Cletus,” I said, “Don’t you think given the recent history of this part of Europe, the language is probably Russian.”

“Nope,” Cletus barked back. “It’s ancient fucking Greek. Do you know how far Greece is from here?!” he yelled, extending his left arm and index finger in a general southernly direction.

“Okay,” I said, “But let’s say you’re right, don’t you at least think it would be Greek and not ancient—…”

“It was ancient fucking Greek!” he barked. “I can’t believe this country. No wonder it gave birth to Kafka.”

Cletus stormed off and I sighed. I always thought it was Americans who were ignorant of geography and other countries’ histories. It’s a good thing they let me out of the house. This is why I travel: to broaden my mind.

John Waters thumbing it. Photo by David Farley

I once went hitchhiking with American film director John Waters. After we were picked up down the street from his Baltimore home, he looked back at me from the front seat and smiled and gave me a quick nod, as if it say, See, isn’t this fun? And then, perhaps to justify his proclivity for thumbing it, he said, “I think it’s dangerous to stay home. Never going out and seeing the world and meeting new and interesting people? Now that’s dangerous.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. I’ve done some things that might appear questionable to people who don’t get out much. I’ve hiked across small European countries. I spent two weeks hanging with guys who cremate bodies on the banks of the holy Ganges River in Varanasi hoping to glean some secrets about life and death. I’ve eaten a still-beating snake heart in Vietnam. I’ve gone in search for a strange holy relic in Italy, placing me face-to-face with not-so-thrilled Vatican officials. I’ve even eaten at the Olive Garden!

I did these things under the guise of “travel writing,” but I do it simply because it gets me out of the house, onto an airplane, and to parts of a place I’d never normally wander. It’s a hokey term and I try to avoid using it as much as possible, but I’ve really become transformed because of all this.

I’m not suggesting that everyone has to hop on an airplane and swallow a freshly extracted snake heart. But what it really comes down to is this: how do we measure our travels? By counting the stamps in our passports? There are things that some of us count throughout our lives: our age, social media followers, the number of sexual partners we’ve had. And apparently countries. Those who tally their passport stamps are as shy about telling you their number as Cletus was about showing off his ignorance to linguistics and recent history. Sometimes these country-counters don’t even wait to be asked. These arithmomaniacs with backpacks just offer up their number the way a guy might boast of his height on his Tinder profile.

Somewhere in the Republic of Georgia. Photo by David Farley

Sometimes travel bloggers and influencers will ingratiate themselves to me via DM on Instagram. “I’ve traveled to 24 countries and 3 continents,” a guy wrote to me the other day on Instagram. I know a guy whose big claim to fame is that, according to him, he was the youngest person to visit every country on earth (at the time). What does it mean that you’ve been to all 195 countries? Or even 24? That you’re smart? Privileged? That you can discern the difference between the Russian and Greek alphabets?

Counting the countries we’ve visited is an illusion of a number because there is no way to measure travel. René Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher, was an early proponent of travel as a mind-expanding vehicle for change and self-improvement. As a youngster he abandoned school to travel in “the great book of the world.” And by doing so, he realized that “those with a view quite contrary to ours are not on that account barbarians or savages, but that many of them make use of reason as much or more than we do.” As a result, the young Descartes’ travels inspired him to begin questioning everything, including the nature of reality. Cartesian skepticism. As Emily Thomas writes in her fascinating book The Meaning of Travel, Descartes’ “claims about what travel can show are true: people with views contrary to ours are worth listening to.”

There’s so much talk about how travel changes people, social media often broadcasting that oft-quoted Mark Twain line about how travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and all those other traits that get us canceled. But perhaps Dublin-born Cletus is an argument that maybe it’s better for some of us to just stay home.

Is it Greek or Russian? Photo by David Farley

We move from place to place, from point A to point B, with the idea that just this very movement, this very act of getting out of our daily routine, will bring us more contentment in life, a temporary reprieve from the ennui of our daily routines, or even add points to our IQ. But travel only changes us if we are open to being changed by it. It only makes us more educated if we let it. It only lets discern the difference from the (ancient) Greek and the Russian alphabets if we allow ourselves to be open to change and curiosity.

As British author Alan de Botton wrote in his book The Art of Travel: “We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little advice on why or how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, ‘human flourishing.’”

One quote that I often let guide me when I’m traveling is from George Bernard Shaw: “I dislike feeling at home when I’m abroad.” Globalization has made the world less distinct, meaning we have to try harder to wade through the familiar sights, such as the multi-national shops and stores that are now fixtures in nearly every city center around the planet. If you want to see something unique to the place, we now have to push the boundaries more than we used to. And spending one night in, say, Dubai so that you can add another notch to your all-important country compendium is a vapid existence.

Rather than an increasing number, many of us hop on airplanes and trains to distant lands because we want to have an authentic experience. That doesn’t necessarily mean spending an evening watching local folk dancing (shoot me now). It could mean something as mundane as an unplanned encounter with a local person doing whatever the local people do in that destination. And the reward might be an interesting story to tell when you get back home. When your friends ask how your trip was, you might say, “The most amazing thing happened one night…”

Sort of like that autumn day in Prague. When I met some friends at a pub after work that day, I said, “You won’t believe the experience I had with this Irish guy today….” I wonder now if Cletus was a country counter. And if “ancient fucking Greece” is one of the stamps on his passport.