In the seventy-sixth episode of the celebrated HBO series The Sopranos (1999–2007), two New Jersey mob wives go on an expensive Paris boondoggle. Rosalie Aprile, the widow of the former boss of the DiMeo crime family, is a connoisseur of the near at hand. She wants to eat well, do some shopping, meet a younger man for recreational sex. Carmela Soprano, the wife of the current boss, is looking for spiritual renewal. She marches through the streets of the city in search of some wisdom or depth of feeling. “Think of all the people who have been here,” she tells Rosalie when they stumble upon a medieval ruin. “All those lives. It’s so sad.”
There is something admirable and touching in Carmela’s fumbling for transcendence. She is briefly lifted out of herself by the thought of her small place in the human story. The Paris trip is one instance among many in the series in which she tries to be or to seem a little better than the atavistic society of her husband and his associates. On the other hand, she lives in the ugly mansion their crimes built. And the experience she seeks in Paris cannot be had on a brief tour, no matter how much money she spends. In the final scene of the trip, as Carmela and Rosalie are leaving their overpriced hotel, Rosalie runs back up to the room they have just vacated to retrieve the “Toulouse-Lautrec placemats” she bought as a souvenir. All the women leave with in the end is kitsch.
When I graduated from college in the early 1990s, in the middle of a recession, several of my friends went on two-year Peace Corps missions. They worked on water desalinization projects and taught English in local schools. I moved to California to go to law school. I have always thought that people who go abroad to find themselves must expect to be pleased by what they will discover. At twenty-two, I had no such expectation. I believed I was moderately clever, without special talents, and in need of a vocation. Hence, law school.
I’ve always wondered whether I missed out on a definitive experience. Cosmopolitan Americans are given to saying that the two years they lived in Cairo or Kyoto changed them forever. I am skeptical of this claim, partly because we are always skeptical of romantic narratives, but also because their narrators rarely put convincing language to their purported transformation—and language is what I trust. At the same time, I think some of them must be telling the truth. I readily accept that a young person who leaves small-town Indiana or Pennsylvania for New York City will be changed by the experience. Perhaps travels abroad are simply manifestations of the same phenomenon.
Visiting Europe has always been an efficient way for Americans to signal their class status—their money, of course, but simultaneously their distance from the mercenary drives of American life. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and up to the outbreak of World War II, wealthy young Americans packed steamer trunks and took the “grand tour,” which typically began in London, traversed the Continent, and ended perhaps in Greece. Americans still travel to Europe in enormous numbers, but I suspect that so Eurocentric an itinerary would now be seen as morally naive. What’s really chic is to visit some secondary or tertiary nation of Asia or Africa, to live among indigenous people, perhaps to build a well or a sturdy schoolhouse. This activity still signals wealth; most young people must work. And traveling to that remote village in Sri Lanka or Madagascar where life is lived in sweet simplicity is often quite expensive. Beyond that, though, living abroad invokes the broad horizons of global citizenship. There will be plenty of time for film school later.
Most of us have to content ourselves with brief getaways, which often means traveling the well-worn paths. The six-day, five-night package tour is one of the signature hustles of modern life, like variable annuities and dietary supplements. It is a conspiracy between the travel company, which wants to sell you an experience as antiseptic and reproducible as mouthwash, and the host cities that want to keep you penned in like a head of beef cattle. The European tourists who wander Times Square dodging fake Disney characters on the make may ride back to JFK Airport after a week feeling that they have seen New York, but we natives know better. If this is the experience a putatively open society imposes on its visitors, what do we imagine we are getting when we visit Shanghai or Marrakesh?
The best travel writing has always captured the ambivalence and ennui of travel. “Travel,” Paul Theroux wrote, “is glamorous only in retrospect.” There is no dislocation, no despair, quite like that of being in a place where you cannot communicate effectively, especially if you are feeling lonely, or ill, or unloved. The false, just-so tales of revelation and renewal belong to the glossy magazines—sell those, as they say, to the tourists.
The author V.S. Naipaul (1932–2018) spent fifty years moving back and forth across Asia, Africa, the American South, and the Middle East, and his travels produced more than two dozen volumes of fiction, journalism, and memoir. He said that his travels were often dispiriting. The world, he concluded, was a hard place, and indifferent to human suffering. And he found that his avidity for the truth was not broadly shared. As for the effects of travel on his own character, it must be said that he was distinctly not a nice man.
It is often claimed that travel allows us to know ourselves, that by being taken out of our familiar environment we learn what is essential to our character and what is merely contingent. There must be some truth to this. If dislocation can be painful, it can also be clarifying. Local manners become more comprehensible—appear to us for the first time as manners—when we have something to contrast them with. (Hemingway wrote his breakthrough story, “Up in Michigan,” while sitting in a Paris café.) The circuit of understanding is complete, however, only when we come home—that is, when we return to our one true point of reference.
There is good reason to doubt the sincerity of Americans’ interest in “abroad.” We lag most developed nations in our study of languages not our own. We buy very little literature in translation, much less than our counterparts in Western Europe, for example. Our empire, in contrast to those of Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands, has involved not the intimacy of dominance and control but the remote suasion of “soft power.” All the more reason, one might think, to encourage people to leave the United States, that they might know better some of the people who feel the effects of our policies. But if, like Carmela, we really wanted to know France, wouldn’t we read some French literature, learn something of French history, perhaps even deign to learn the name of that nation’s president? We seem not to want to go to Europe so much as to have gone, not to seek understanding so much as possession, of whatever may be purchased for good value in a shop in a decent quartier.
Some Americans do succeed in cultivating a genuine connection with a foreign culture. My father has been visiting France for six decades, and its fascination for him has only grown. French culture has added a dimension to his life that otherwise would have been absent. Surely, though, the essential elements here are time and sustained attention. Once we have been visiting a place long enough to see it change, then perhaps we will have connected with something durable. No single trip, no matter how magical or fortuitous, can give you that. Of course, you cannot visit a place many times until you have been there for the first time. But we must suspend judgment long enough to get past the received ideas about a place, or later visits will add nothing to the first.
In glamorizing foreign travel, we sometimes neglect the near at hand. Some of the best-traveled Americans, it must be said, know their own country least. A single place known intimately, whether it be Tobacco Road or the West Village, must promote greater understanding of any other place we might encounter. I myself feel the lack of any single home in America more than I do the absence in my life of the great foreign cities (Vienna, Istanbul) that I hoped but have failed to visit. I learned more from watching Ken Burns’s documentary Country Music about songs born in places that are American but remote from my experience than from half a dozen trips to Europe. Self-knowledge, like charity, usually begins at home.
I still intend to visit Vienna, though. I am told that Freud’s consulting room at Berggasse 19 is maintained just as it was when he left in 1938. I am interested in the culture of psychoanalysis and hope that visiting the place where it began will be a spur to imagination. But is that really likely, given my age and temperament? I want the experience of being there, yet I also want to define and control that experience—in effect, to domesticate it, almost before I have gone. I believe that the father of psychoanalysis would have understood and perhaps sympathized with my ambivalence. Carmela Soprano, too.