“I Don’t Care for Roving”

In life you occasionally come across someone who suggests travel is a necessary component of your education.  This person is usually someone who backpacked through Europe on a summer holiday, or more recently braved South America, in order to “find themselves.”  They’ll regale you with stories of a restaurant found on a narrow street, a kiss stolen from an exotic stranger, and the myriad of ways in which life is so different from the way it is here in Canada.

I used to hate coming across these people.  That was until I inadvertently became one.  Last year I had the opportunity to “live abroad” (I’m vomiting as I right that).  I now find myself peppering my conversations with useless facts about life in Italy as though my few months there impressed upon me a certain knowledge of the place, its people, and its character.  But no sooner do the words “when I was in Italy” leave my lips and I feel something in my soul turn sideways.  Am I that douchebag?

Despite my newfound “cultural capital” I feel really no different then when I left.  I may be marginally more engaging at poncy academic events, but I found no insight about the ways of the world or who I was. 

I was perhaps predisposed to feeling this way because I could never understand how seeing more of the world could make one any wiser than one who stayed put.  I would always cite Emily Dickinson as my example.  The woman barely left Amherst, and never left her house for the last twenty years of her life.  And yet her poetry displays the most brilliant insight about life.  Joy, sorrow, the natural world—no better travelled writer has written anything superior about these topics.

So while writers have been arguing for decades about the reason of her seclusion (Did she nurse a broken heart? Was she the victim of family cruelty?) I preferred to think of Dickinson as a brilliant recluse, who had all that one needed to know about life there in her home and in her orchard.

But last month Lyndall Gordon, Professor at Oxford and noted literary biographer, has suggested a new reason for Dickinson’s hermetic life: epilepsy.  Lives Like Loaded Guns details the relationship between Dickinson, her sister-in-law, Susan, and her editor, Mabel Loomis Todd (who was also the mistress of her brother).  Susan attempted to get Dickinson’s poems published.  But the Amherst homebody couldn’t convince New York publishers to do so.  Todd—worldly, and well-travelled—took to editing the poems herself and made Dickinson the household name she is today.  Score one for the peripatetic set?

Maybe not.  Emily may not have got around very much, but it is because of her poetry that she’s famous.  Perhaps the fact that she never travelled and wrote about the life around her made her poems that much more universal.  Todd just gave her some good PR.  It’s just too bad that Dickinson may not have been able to travel, even if she wanted to.

For those of us who have the option, however, travel doesn’t necessarily bring the delights that it promises.  I was thinking a lot about that while I was away and listening to Miranda Lambert’s album Revolution which came out just as I was leaving last September.  A recurring theme on the album is a sense of home.  The first verse of “Makin’ Plans,” for example, makes the case that travelling can change a person.

If I ever left this town
I’d never settle down
I’d just be wandering around
If I ever left this town

If I wasn’t by your side
I’d never be satisfied
Nothin’ would feel just right
If I wasn’t by your side

It’s a bit desperate, maybe.  Should one not travel out of fear?

One of the most emotional tracks on the album, “The House That Built Me,” presents the flip side of the coin.  While the house/life metaphor can be a bit shopworn, this song is so touching it works beautifully.  The singer returns to her childhood home because

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me

No wonder that it’s become the surprise hit of the album.  Who can’t relate to wanting to go back home?  Maybe Emily Dickinson.  But if she did venture out her front door, she might be disappointed by what she found.  “I don’t care for roving” she wrote her mentor Thomas Higginson in 1870.  Thank goodness.  Neither do I.