The Necessary Pain of Travel

In 1869 the American Publishing Company started printing and sending out copies of Mark Twain’s newest book, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress, which chronicled Twain’s travel adventures through Europe and the Holy Land aboard the USS Quaker City. Contained within the humorous tome of nearly 700 pages is a line that continues to inspire men and women to pack their bags and hit the road. “Travel,” he wrote, “is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness...” Eleven years later, Twain published another book that featured an essay entitled, “The Awful German Language,” which comically criticizes a language spoken by tens of millions of people for its nonsensical structure and then proceeds to make recommendations on how best the language can be improved. While there is little doubt that Twain’s essay on the difficulty of learning a new language was written in a tongue-in-cheek manner, the dichotomy of his musings nevertheless brings to light a pain that is endured by many expatriates and seasoned travelers. That pain comes in the physical act of expanding the scope of one’s worldview by traveling and exposing oneself to cultural difference. Perhaps if I frame what I am trying to say in more personal terms, I will be able to convey my point more clearly.

Lisa and I have now lived in Europe for three months and four days. Since our arrival we’ve seen many splendid things. We see the stunning bouquet of Paris’s lights blossom whenever the rain slicks the cobblestone streets and the gentle red glow of each streetlamp is reflected in such a way that you feel like you’re living in an Impressionist painting. We’ve seen Medieval castles and wine vineyards in the Loire Valley and Chateaus situated in perfect pastoral landscapes in the northern French countryside. We’ve seen narrow canals spanned by 15^th century footbridges resting in the shadows of towering belfries in Bruges and we’ve seen the flat-stoned beaches of Nice where the green piedmont of the Alps gives way to blue majesty of the Mediterranean. In the last three months Lisa and I have seen many beautiful things that we will never forget. But perhaps more impactful to our lives is the pain we’ve endure in order to see those beautiful sights.

Believe it or not there is pain in travel and much more pain in living abroad. There is physical pain, the kind one’s back experiences from the unnatural act of being over 30 years old and sleeping on a futon mattress, and there is psychological pain. The psychological pain outweighs the physical pain every time because it can afflict one’s ego as well as one’s cognitive mind. Being a stranger in a strange land means this type of pain will spring up in the most unlikely places. Places such as a French bank. Merely entering into a bank here for the first time challenges a foreigner’s faculties and can assault their ego with the elaborate sequence of buttons, intercoms, and doors one must navigate in order to reach the teller. If you think of all the booby-traps the Goonies had to disarm before reaching the pirate ship you’ll get a more or less accurate understanding of the difficulty level of entering a French bank. Just as in the movie, the last challenge is the hardest. You’re confronted with a set of glass doors separated by a small room only big enough for one person. You press the intercom button for the teller to unlock the first door and when you hear the buzz you enter the small room and hear the door lock behind you. Seeing another intercom button next to the second door you press it and wait once again for the buzz to unlock the door. The buzz never comes. Giving dagger-eyes to the teller who is assisting a customer but could easily buzz you in, you commence to press the intercom button relentlessly assuming that they are ignoring you. While you are cursing the French and straining your brain to figure out how and why you’re locked into this glass coffin in the middle of the bank, the crushing blow to the ego comes. Fed up, you aggressively push on the second door only to realize that it was unlocked the whole time and the intercom was not actually signaling the teller at all.

While many of you out there might be tempted to reduced the pain of these types of mishaps to mere “pains in the ass” and leave it at that, I contend that I was compensated for the pain my ego and mind suffered the day I stood for a long three minutes inside the glass security box at the bank. I contend that my pain was compensated with knowledge. For that day I learned not to automatically assume the worst of people. I assumed that it was the teller’s sick sense of humor that locked me in that box when really it was my own ignorance…although, I should go on record here and say that I think that the security sequences to reach a teller at a French bank are absolutely insane. But how metaphoric is that glass box for a life without travel? You observe people from afar and make assumptions about their morality without ever meeting them face to face. That is the “prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness” that Twain wrote was killed by travel.

Killing one’s own prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness with travel is painful. It’s painful to the mind, the ego, and, at times, one’s back. Sometimes the traveler laments the pain with a little tongue-in-cheek humor the way Twain did with “The Awful German Language” or the way a lot of expats I know talk about the French. But while cultural differences and even entire languages are sometimes the butt of a traveler’s joke, a tinge of both love and pain can always be detected when they utter it. And when a traveler returns home to native soil and looks back on all the pain they endured while abroad, they know that the pain was the necessary pain of growth.