Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

  Whenever I leave Dallas—during summers, on sabbaticals, or even for shorter periods—I do not see it in color, only in black and white or sepia, in my mind’s eye; in spite of glaring sun and primary colors, it never comes clear within my imaginative faculties the way that Venice, Paris, London, New York, Boston, and Philadelphia do. It has been reduced, minimized. Perhaps, incredulous, I have not really accepted the fact that Dallas has been my home for most of my life. Why do those cities I have visited on vacation, or inhabited in the ever-receding past, loom larger in my dreams? How can this be? Is it the result of weather, architecture, topography, distance from family and other loved ones, of a preference for gray New England chill or the Old World of stone, great-rooted blossoming chestnut trees, and urban squares with children playing near fountains? A deep fondness for a land with four distinct seasons or—in New England at least—five of them, with “mud season” sandwiched between winter and spring? The absence of pedestrian life in Dallas, the omnipresence of the automobile and of what Robert Lowell called the “savage servility [that] slides by on grease”? Some strong sympathy with the poet Frank O’Hara, who claimed that he was always made a little nervous when he could not have a subway sign clearly in view? The inevitable recurrence to scenes of childhood, to native soil that holds anyone’s roots?

  All of the above?

  For all the clichés about southern friendliness and New York brusqueness or Bostonian chill, it seems to me that any city in which people bump up against one another on the streets is ipso facto more humane than one in which they merely see one another waiting in air-conditioned cars at stoplights.

  In the nineteenth century, during the late high-water years of the British Empire, soldiers, clergymen, administrators, doctors, scientists, businessmen, and other adventurers, some with families, went to India to serve the Raj. If they did not die there, go native, or otherwise take leave of their senses, they often returned to England, to live out the remainder of their days obscurely in quiet seaside towns, the kind you read about in Trollope novels, retired from the distant place that was, in most cases, the strangest and most memorable they had ever seen. Often they felt entirely out of place when they came back to their nominal home. Their destination did not match their point of origin, even though it was technically the same. Or perhaps they were not the same people they had been when they had embarked years before.

  It took at least three decades for me to learn how to answer the question “Where are you from?”

  “I’m from Philadelphia,” I now say, “but I live in Dallas.” Later, I awoke one morning with the right metaphor for my life: I am stationed here. A person who is stationed somewhere really belongs nowhere. Or perhaps he belongs everywhere. A mild sense of alienation hardly distinguishes my case from that of countless contemporaries. Intellectuals, artists, and academics probably belong nowhere to begin with. We are quasi- if not genuine expatriates, with a tendency to look inward to the worlds of literature and thought. Universities, wherever they are, are all self-contained microcosms that resemble one another more than any other kind of community. My academic department houses many New Yorkers and other northeasterners, but only one native Texan. We came to Dallas from somewhere else.

  My academic tour of duty will end soon. I shall probably return to my equivalent of the Englishman’s seaside retirement home, cohabiting with my partner of four decades, from whom I have been separated for reasons of employment for much of the time. Perhaps we’ll marry. We don’t want to rush into anything.

  Will I return “home”? What does this mean? Elizabeth Bishop makes an existential point at the end of the title poem of her 1965 volume, Questions of Travel. Her traveler—herself, really—jots down three, far from rhetorical, questions in a notebook:

  “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

  to imagined places, not just stay at home?

  Or could Pascal have been not entirely right

  about just sitting quietly in one’s room?

  Continent, city, country, society:

  the choice is never wide and never free.

  And here, or there … No. Should we have stayed at home,

  wherever that may be?”

  Blaise Pascal felt dread at what he called the eternal silence of infinite spaces, a dread that Robert Frost calls up in his grimly chatty poem “Desert Places.” The French philosopher also implied that most people have a fear of sitting quietly in a room. The American poet remarks that he has it in himself “so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.” Between cosmic traumas and domestic itchiness hovers the urge to travel, to see the world, to move away, to get out of oneself. Peace abides, with contentment, always out of sight, elsewhere, not here. Bishop, who experienced domestic pleasures in direct proportion to deeper anxieties, understood that neither home nor abroad, neither the life upon native terrain nor that in “imagined” or actual foreign places, can exist without a doubled sense of life’s transience and of intense, specifically local charms. Wherever one finds oneself, one is always at sea, because something seems missing. We belong nowhere, and therefore everywhere. Horace’s “coelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt” (those who race across the ocean are changing their skies, not their souls) means, as does Bishop’s final question above, that “here” and “there” are equally real and equally fictive ideas.

  Life, wherever and however we may lead it, is a pilgrimage lived in the present. When the literary scholar Hugh Kenner left a teaching post at the University of California in Santa Barbara, having worked there for two decades, he decamped for another position, on the East Coast. A solicitous friend asked him, “How does it feel leaving Santa Barbara?” To which the eminent man quickly replied, “Like checking out of a motel.” He had not felt at home. Perhaps he never felt at home anywhere. Home, “wherever that may be,” as Bishop sums it up, is neither where we came from nor where we are going but an image we carry with us. Always, we remain unmoored.

  I have never felt so unmoored, unconnected yet exhilarated, and so fully myself, as when I went to Japan.

  JAPAN

  When I went to Japan, my biggest worry was neither jet lag nor culture shock, not food poisoning, not the fear of getting lost. After all, at a certain age one doesn’t sleep well to begin with, so a twelve-hour flight will wreak little somatic havoc. Unlike China and India, Japan is modern, compact, and civilized, regimented and industrialized in a way that makes it seem the most American of Asian cultures. All appliances work there. Most of ours have been made there. Sushi and tempura, not to mention green teas, tofu, soba, and udon, have become staples of our Western diet, so I knew that nothing terrible, or even surprising, was going to slide down my throat. It’s a small country, and I was going to be in only two cities. I knew that I wasn’t going to be stranded.

  It was the language that kept me up at night.

  I have always been a proud polyglot. Perfectly useless Latin and Greek, schoolboy German, opera-and-menu-and-Dante-inflected Italian, and more than passable French have seen me through. Spanish, the language that would be most practical—both at home and internationally—somehow passed me by. (In junior high school when we started signing up for language study, the unwritten rule was that the best students learned Latin, the least talented Spanish. I was a snob.) Still, with a kind of Romance Esperanto at my disposal, and with a combination of facility, enthusiasm, and the unself-conscious ability to blurt things out without thinking about correctness, I have stumbled through Spain and Portugal, as well as Germany, France, and Italy, managing jokes in languages I knew poorly, like the one about W. C. Fields and his reason for not drinking water.

  And in Bayreuth one October afternoon, an hour after arriving, and following a grueling transatlantic flight followed by a long train ride, I walked around the small town and, when approached by two middle-aged German women asking for directions to the Old Castle, answered correctly in their native tongue. I had just looked at the map to gain my bearings,
and some vestigial words from German 101 miraculously came out of my mouth. Delighted and self-congratulating, I then took myself out for a beer.

  But I had never gone to a country where I would be unable to speak, read, or understand a single word. In a literary academic like me, this prospect instilled both fear and a sense of challenge. My idea of adventure has never included trekking through the Sahara, scaling high mountains, freezing in the Arctic, or shooting into outer space. My body takes care of itself in temperate climes well enough, and I can take my exercise in modest, unthreatening ways. Excitement has always meant getting along in a different culture with enough language for everyday transactions.

  Learning Japanese was something for which I was entirely unprepared. Now I understand why we call such things foreign languages. I looked at phrase books. Not a cognate to be found anywhere; nothing mnemonic to lead me through the meanings of the words. No clue as to which part of a sentence was the verb and which the subject. I have—or rather had, age having begun to take its inevitable mental as well as physical toll—a gift for languages. I used to be able to review irregular verbs—moods, tenses, and all—on a long plane ride from one side of the pond to the other.

  Not this time. I have always shuddered when hearing my countrymen abroad begin, without an “excuse me” or a “by your leave,” to speak English to everyone, on the presumption that they will be understood. (That presumption is of course often accurate.) I always tell my students that wherever they travel, they should learn to say “Good morning,” “Good evening,” “I do not speak [here fill in the relevant language],” “Do you speak English?” and “Where is the bathroom?” These five will get you through almost any situation, and the last one I have always found particularly useful. “Please,” “Thank you,” and “Excuse me” add the necessary note of deferential politesse.

  With the help of Japanese-speaking American friends and a phrase book, I finally mastered them all. “Sumimasen, nihongo dekimasen; eigo ga hanasemasu ka?” became my password, my talisman, my open sesame every step of the way. “Excuse me, I do not speak Japanese; do you speak English?” I felt simultaneously humbled and inspired. On the one hand, most of the people I encountered were academics or worked in the service industry, in hotels, restaurants, shops, museums, and shrines. They either had some English or could direct me to a nearby colleague or coworker who did. On the other, and more important, hand, the very fact of making oneself helpless, childlike, and passive, and having to depend on the assistance of others, meant that I became, even more than in a “foreign” country like England where the bond of a common language eases cultural exchanges, entirely on the qui vive, alert to everything and everyone in the surround.

  My linguistic deficiencies in Japanese came with attendant disappointments as well as pleasing surprises. My primary, or at least nominal, reason for going to Japan in the first place was to deliver academic lectures, before three university audiences, on the subject of American poetry. Two of these were in the form of seminars for graduate students. Once I surveyed the scene and realized that their comprehension was not quite total, I simply slowed the pace, improvised, gesticulated, and tried to amuse them. But because the Japanese seem to equate professionalism with tedium and expect their teachers to maintain a pomposity appropriate to their venerability, I am not sure how far I got with light, bright Anglo-American sparkle.

  For my final engagement, at Tokyo Women’s University, which thinks of itself as the Wellesley of Japan, my host had asked me to talk about the origins of modern American poetry in Dickinson, Poe, and Whitman before an audience of 140 third-year female English students. This would not be a problem, I assured her. But it became clear after two minutes that the majority of the audience probably understood little of what I was saying. Readjusting quickly, I decided upon a slower pace. I eliminated all of my prepared remarks. Many of the young women had turned on their recording devices. By the end, many were busy on their cell phones, either taking notes or, more likely, texting their girlfriends. Some were dozing, others chatting. I later asked another professor what the point of my exercise had been. She replied, helpfully, “It’s always important for the students to hear English, especially poetry, read clearly and beautifully.” An American reading out loud: that was my role. A recording would have served as well, but I managed to get through my allotted time with minimal embarrassment.

  “Wait,” I asked myself, “how different are these kids from American students who really do understand their native language but who often are not giving full notice to what their professor is saying?” “Plus ça change,” in other words, or “mutatis mutandis,” or whatever one might say in Japanese, students are pretty much the same the world over. Such was my thought not so much at the time as afterward.

  The most compelling revelations always come to travelers in the most ordinary situations. Every transaction in a foreign country becomes an adventure: “Oh, this is how to buy a train ticket.” “Now I can make a phone call.” “They drive on the left? Who knew?” Elizabeth Bishop put it well in a charming poem, “Arrival at Santos,” about a visit to Brazil that led her into a period of expatriation she had never anticipated. (An allergic reaction forced her into a hospital. She met a woman who became her lover, and stayed for almost two decades.) Everything seems unexpected and mundane simultaneously:

  So that’s the flag. I never saw it before.

  I somehow never thought of there being a flag,

  but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,

  and paper money; they remain to be seen.

  One’s eyes are open in ways they seldom are at home.

  Years ago, with a colleague from my university’s art history department, I led a score of well-heeled, worldly, sophisticated middle-aged travelers on what we billed as an art-and-culture week in London. Midwinter meant a slow, post–New Year’s tourist season, easy-to-get tickets for operas, concerts, and plays, and reasonable rates at the Russell, a faded dowager of a Bloomsbury hotel from the Edwardian era. What many of our adult campers most remembered about their trip upon their return Stateside was that—regardless of how many times they had been to Britain previously—this was the first time that they had actually ridden the Tube. Previously pampered by drivers and tour guides, or too timid to take the subway on their own, these Texans happily became, if only for a holiday, ordinary people. And ordinariness is what we experience when we travel.

  Japan opened my ears, eyes, and mind in more dramatic but also more subtle ways. Banality has a lot to recommend it. As in all travel, everything boils down to sameness and difference: the recognition that they and their world resemble us and ours, and also do not. Because language comes at us through both eye and ear, through what we see and what we hear, linguistic retrieval and experience become more allied with general sensuous vigilance abroad than at home. Everything is to be read. Everything is to be heard. Every phenomenon, in the country Roland Barthes called an “empire of signs,” demands unpacking.

  Not only an empire: an elaborate display, which the attentive, or even the casual, tourist cannot help thinking is intentional, even though it may not be. Here come some sumo wrestlers, like so many French geese or ducks, force-fed so their livers will fatten and stuffed to the bursting point. The big guys cannot really walk, only waddle and shuffle through lines of photograph-snapping sidewalk crowds into the stadium for their brief afternoon matches. What do they mean? How does one read them? Like everyone else in Tokyo, they seem to be on parade. And it’s not just the wrestlers but also their diametrical opposites, the geishas, arriving at sunset for their appointed assignations, modest but at the same time aware that all eyes are on them. Or the swans of Ginza, gorgeous Japanese Audrey Hepburn look-alikes, thin, long-necked, elegant, coiffed, and pearled, going to work or to shop. And the kids in Takeshita Street, like punks the world over, sensitive to fashions different from the ones I know: the popular look when I visited was part goth, part Barbie doll, part Alice in Wonderland.
These stapled and pierced teenagers seemed to slouch to a different drummer.

  In Japan, fashion looks more serious than it does at home, either because it really is or merely because a tourist watches more carefully things he might ignore on native ground. He knows the signs better at home and therefore internalizes or forgets them. What we do not understand, what we cannot read: this is what strikes us abroad. A kimono, for example: What does it mean in the twenty-first century? I saw some ladies, all of a certain age, walking down the street in traditional garb. Perhaps they worked in some industry that demanded the costume. Perhaps they were going to a special event. In Kyoto, geishas wear the kimono but expose the rear of their necks, a traditional erotic spot. In my Tokyo hotel, I saw half a dozen weekend wedding celebrations: some of the older women wore kimonos, but the rest, including all of the younger ones, were garbed in high European chic. Every department store was filled with Armani, Burberry, Ralph Lauren, and other Western boutiques. Banana Republic outlets lined the streets. The culture of 1966, when Barthes made his trip, has been almost entirely transformed. We might have been on Madison Avenue, Rue St.-Honoré, or the Via Tornabuoni. Shopping makes the whole world kin.

  The culture of food, in the hotels at least, was equally international. On my first morning in Tokyo, I came down to the dining room eager to try the Japanese breakfast specialties, the nori, miso soup, pickled fish, some unknown gelatinous things, plus accompaniments like the takuan and umeboshi pickles, and the raw eggs beaten and poured over rice to make golden tamago kake gohan. When I looked around, I saw that most of the Japanese guests had chowed down on bacon and eggs or cornflakes and fresh fruit.

  Even more daunting than food is the problem of trying to figure out where you are and how to go elsewhere. Tokyo is notorious—like Venice—for the absence or the inscrutability of addresses. Numbers do not move consecutively along a street. Streets often lack signage in either English or Japanese; maps are equally unhelpful. Still, things are better marked than they were fifty years ago when Barthes visited and when he discovered that in order to move from one place to another, he often needed an improvised picture—jotted down by a friend on a piece of paper—with buildings and landmarks drawn in. To reach a certain popular restaurant, a Japanese friend of mine had to tell the taxi driver to head to a specific corner (“Go to the Atré Department Store in Shinjuku and then go one block farther”). Even the locals sometimes cannot figure out directions or know how to get from one place to another.