The Journey Defines the Place

Maybe it's because I was an English major in college and studying literature has deeply informed my worldview. But, for me, this world and this life that we bumble our way through is most enriched when populated with stories. I say "enriched," but maybe "enchanted" better captures what I'm going for. Because stories, as meaning-giving, hermeneutic devices, imbue our discrete experiences with what is often for me a sacred dimension. A bunch of mumbo-jumbo that is.

Here is what I mean. A couple of days ago, I drove thirty miles from my sister's house to the Snoqualmie Falls. As I am prone to do, I got lost along the way and took a detour, bringing the trip to something more like fifty miles. The detour was both worthwhile and frustrating. I got to see beautiful parts of the Pacific Northwest that I would not otherwise have gotten to see, but I was also obviously delayed from arriving at my ultimate destination, the Snoqualmie Falls. Finally, after asking for directions at a gas station, I found my way to a lookout point. I parked my car in the parking lot and walked all of ten yards to a gazebo from which I could enjoy a quite stunning view of the falls. An hour of driving, getting lost, asking for directions, and thirty short seconds of walking. And there it was, Snoqualmie Falls as though in a postcard picture.

The waterfall was impressive but very much a letdown. Gazing down from the gazebo platform, I remembered another similarly sized waterfall I went to see last year, El Paílón del Diablo in Baños, Ecuador. To get to that waterfall, I biked for an hour and then hiked twenty minutes before having the waterfall unveiled to me from behind formidable rock formations. I could hear the thunderous roar of the waterfall well before I saw it, and as I approached, anticipation built even as my body tired. Undoubtedly, the path to the waterfall had been paved in a very literal way to ease my journey, but still, I felt that my view of the waterfall had been in some way earned. Seeing El Paílón del Diablo was a qualitatively different experience than seeing the Snoqualmie Falls. Much more gratifying.

So the journey defines the place. And what else is a journey but a story? Another example. This one from Kerouac's On the Road:

The bus trip from Denver to Frisco was uneventful except that my whole soul leaped to it the nearer we got to Frisco. Cheyenne again, in the afternoon this time, and then west over the range; crossing the Divide at midnight at Creston, arriving at Salt Lake City at dawn--a city of sprinklers, the least likely place for Dean to have been born; then out to Nevada in the hot sun, Reno by nightfall, its twinkling Chinese streets; then up the Sierra Nevada, pines, stars, mountain lodges signifying Frisco romances--a little girl in the back seat, crying to her mother, "Mama when do we get home to Truckee?" And Truckee itself, homey Truckee, and then down the hill to the flats of Sacramento. I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air--air you can kiss--and palms. Along the storied Sacramento River on a superhighway; into the hills again; up, down; and suddenly the vast expanse of a bay (it was just before dawn) with the sleepy lights of Frisco festooned across. Over the Oakland Bay Bridge I slept soundly for the first time since Denver; so that I was rudely jolted in the bus station at Market and Fourth into the memory of the fact that I was three thousand two hundred miles from my aunt's house in Paterson, New Jersey. I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco--long, bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. (60)

Kerouac presents San Francisco in its physical context, in its geographic setting. For Kerouac, having hitchhiked, bused and driven three thousand miles from the East Coast, San Francisco is a physical destination in a way that it isn't for me. After reading this passage, it dawned on me that I arrived in San Francisco by being dropped from the sky. My experience of the city is as a result qualitatively different from Kerouac's. Lacking a substantive journey to precede arrival, emptied of history, stripped of meaning, a city is nothing more than a bunch of concrete and glass, an abstraction of industrial development.

It is in this light that I have begun to understand technology. Technology shortchanges the journey in order to deliver the place. Snoqualmie Falls delivered to me. San Francisco delivered to me. What energy did I expend personally to arrive at these places?

I think this is why I experience aversion to things like Facebook. Facebook has the power to deprive social interaction of journey. As far as maintaining a social network goes, Facebook is infinitely more convenient than having to go through the trouble of composing a thoughtful e-mail let alone scrupulously handwriting a letter. Convenience is Facebook's utility. But at the same time, its convenience shortchanges the usual journey that is required of keeping up a healthy interaction.

The same logic can be applied to food. What knowledge do we possess of the journey that the food we consume took in order to arrive on our dinner plates? Most often, nothing. This is the magic of industrial agriculture and technology. Food delivered to us. Unfortunately, the anonymous food that we consume, and our ignorance of its journey, deprives the food of any real meaning. There is little to no enchantment involved in scarfing down a BigMac. We enjoy it only in an abstract sense.

None of this is to say that I am a Luddite. Believe me you, I enjoy my BigMac or McPollo as much as the next guy.

Thoughts inspired by The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan on which I will write more...

Optimal Trajectory

I was in Ecuador sitting at Mister Bagel with my sister, who was on vacation and visiting me at the time. We engaged in desultory conversation. The kind that picks up effortlessly on old themes but also wanders to new places, the kind that includes long unsolicited pauses but is also punctuated by random bursts of energy.

My sister mentioned a script that she had recently read, a forgettable, mediocre piece with a single phrase that had caught her attention. Optimal Trajectory. The idea is that for every person, given his/her beginning circumstances and innate ability, there exists an ideal path for that person's life. Divergence from this ideal path could be caused either exogenously or endogenously, but the idea is that the path exists.

An acquaintance of mine from the school I taught at walked into Mister Bagel, said hi to me, ordered a coffee to go and promptly left. I explained to my sister that he worked in the copy room at school, had been educated in Ecuador but spoke very good English. "Take that guy for example," my sister mused, "what do you think his optimal trajectory is?"

I did not respond kindly to the question, or for that matter, to the idea of "optimal trajectory," which so captivated my sister's imagination. The question, in my mind, presumed limitations on the poor guy's life. That the infinite possibilities of his life could be succinctly captured in as crude a concept as optimal trajectory...the whole idea really rubbed me the wrong way. In my mind, I recoiled at the terminology, denounced it as dehumanizing and reductive. I told my sister as much. Surprised at this reaction, she prodded me to further explain.

When I hear the word "optimal," I think of calculus and optimization. When I hear the word "trajectory," I think of projectile motion and mechanical physics. Put together, the phrase "optimal trajectory," borrows from mathematical and physical models to describe human life. Human life! The irreducible beauty, the most precious of all things...human life! Reduced! Abstracted! Poor guy! (Needless to say, I received a liberal arts education.)

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Thuon, our Vietnamese guide from Hanoi on this family trip of ours, is 26 years old. By my calculation, that puts his birth in the year 1982, only six years after the conclusion of Vietnam's prolonged civil war. Only three years after the brief Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979. Thuon is college-educated and therefore among the elite in his country. By his estimate, about ten to twenty percent of all high school graduates continue onto higher education. At University, he studied tourism and English, but his English, while respectable, is rudimentary at best. I have to strain to understand his tour guide explanations, nodding only to be polite.

Occasionally, though, I ask him some questions in hopes of gaining the Vietnamese perspective on things. "What stereotypes do the Vietnamese have of Americans?" "Yaas," he replies. "No, no. I mean...hmm. Do the Vietnamese have bad feelings towards American tourists?" "Yaas."

I give up. Thuon is among the elite in his country, and yet in the frustrations of our communication, it dawns on me just how different my world of opportunities is from his. Here he is, with a university degree, catering to the whims of a Taiwanese family on vacation, making about $300 a month. Even were he transplanted to the United States and given citizenship, he would see such a different country from the one that I have called my own.

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Optimal trajectory? While I see in the phrase the unforgivable crime of dehumanization, my sister explains to me, she sees the world through the lens of policy, and the idea of optimal trajectory serves as a tool for thinking about policymaking. While the terminology might be imperfect, the unfortunate truth is that there are real limitations on the potential of individual lives.

Traveling over the last few weeks across the development gradient from the United States to Taiwan to Vietnam, I've realized just how unique and privileged my unique world of opportunities is, and I see the historical sacrifices that have been necessary to put me in this position. The feeling, more than ever, is not of guilt but of responsibility.