I often forget that my small life is not the entire world. Here in Minnesota, I forget that most people can’t tell a “you becha” from a “don’t chya know.” Life becomes comfortable and numb. Friends ask me, “How was your weekend?” and I have nothing to say. Mornings blur together until I arrive at work one day and don’t remember how I got there. When I can no longer see, when my routine is unchallenged, travelling somewhere else shakes up my head so that I can return home and really see my world again.

Travel opportunities frequently present themselves to me just as I reach the critical point. It’s not merely luck. When someone opens a door, I stick my foot in. I managed to slink through a unique door just before my thirtieth birthday. Ever since reading the English Romantic poets in high school, I’d been convinced that I would never make it to the age of thirty. By that age, most poets seemed to die or else stop writing, which seemed to me just as bad as dying. Thus the approach of my birthday had a different level of anxiety attached to it than it does for most people. A month before the Day of Doom, my boyfriend received an e-mail from a friend of his who was on an extended assignment in London. His company had rented him a house in the village of Aldbury, Hertfordshire (Pride and Prejudice country) for the duration of his stay: a house with a guest room. And Bob said he was never there. I took a leap. I decided to go alone to England, to travel alone for the first time and to see what I could see. The idea was scary but exciting.

I’d travelled before, a lot actually. My entire life had been spent moving around the country and even after my mother and I had settled down in one place for a few years we still took trips every year. Back and forth, across the continent, across the oceans, and hardly any of it ever affected me deeply. I had never particularly connected with the places beyond what could be preserved in a photograph. Even a college trip to the Soviet Union was little more than a blur of tourist bars and scenic buildings. My first trip to London and the National Gallery could best be summed up with something I once heard a white-haired British man say as he collapsed onto a bench there, “I’ve got visual fatigue.” I wandered the sites, looking at everything and seeing nothing, spending 15 seconds reading a label and 3 seconds looking at the painting. Itineraries and Fodor’s books and tour guides and restaurants – that’s what my trips usually degenerated into. Once I would return home, I usually needed a vacation from my vacation. Being a tourist is exhausting work.

I wanted to make sure that this trip to England would be, not a sight-seeing ordeal, but a real journey. A few weeks before the trip, while visiting the Cleveland Museum of Art, I’d seen the Cézanne painting The Brook and had been completely sucked in. Something about it seeped into me, the brushstrokes and the texture of the hundreds of shades of green. It showed what I had always meant to see in a brook. Cézanne's paint showed something beyond merely trees and water; it showed the life of the place. The painting changed the way I thought about painting, about art. I started to see those shimmering leaves as an expression of belief. This was the way Cézanne saw the world. Then a question bubbled up in me: What is world as I see it? Is my world like the shimmering light and leaves of Cézanne, or was it all velvety shadows and bark like a Courbet? Or was it something I had never seen in a paining at all. It was a mystery. How was I to figure it out, especially since I had been slowly realizing that I wasn’t completely sure who I was anymore. I felt sometimes like a kid, but here was thirty quickly approaching. I decided I would apply that quest to my trip to England. I would look at Cézanne paintings and I would think about how I viewed the world.  

The Looking at Paintings part of the trip turned out to be more of a challenge than I had imagined it would be. It’s hard to look at a painting for more than a minute or two, even one that you really love. A painting doesn't demand your attention. It spreads itself out before you and you always have the option to merely glance and walk on. In a gallery there are always so many other things to see. But I stood firm at the National Gallery, opposing the marathon tourists who scowled at me for upsetting the flow around the room. I think most of these tourists saw something like: Oranges, Trees, Mountains, People; they were seeing what the painting depicted and not what the painting was. That was the same way I had looked at paintings before. Jeanette Winterson in her essay about looking at art, “Art Objects,” puts it best when she says, “Art takes time,” and tourists don’t have time.

But I had time. I had nowhere to be but a Jacobean, timber-framed house called Beam Ends in Aldbury, a mile from the commuter train station at Tring. So I held firm against the tide of tourists who did not come to the National Gallery to love a Cézanne. I looked and looked and made myself overcome the awkwardness of standing in front of a painting for ten minutes. I was certain that the guards were going to call someone to come and take me away, “She’s been standing there all morning. I think she might be a bit funny in the head.” Luckily no one spoke to me, and I snarled at anyone who gave me a nasty “why aren’t you moving” look. Even so, with all that conviction and free time, I was still only able to manage an hour in front of the works. Looking at art can be like training for a marathon, you have to go a little further each time.

Cézanne pained the same subjects over and over. He painted fruit, men playing cards, bathers, self-portraits – repeating these images in scores of compositions. He painted the same Mountain in Provence fifty times over the course of his life. Every work was an attempt to go further, to get closer to the truth. Each was another answer to the question: What is the world as I see it? His paintings were often never completely finished and a lot of them have blank canvas showing through at the bottom. He would lay on color for the trees, mixing each shade separately and building them to get it to look just right. I stood and looked at the brushstrokes that made up the trees in Avenue at Chantilly and noticed that he’d painted the blue of the sky between the branches after he’d painted the leaves. The sky flickered back and forth, behind and in front of the leaves. Later riding the train home, I was looking out the window and another train passed us. The fields and sky flickered at me through the other train’s windows as it passed and I thought of Cézanne’s trees and his sky, the background lapping into the foreground. That vague idea stuck with me, like a half-remembered dream. The background and the foreground, back and forth, both bleeding over onto each other. Who is to say which is more important?

Because Aldbury was, as Bob put it, “way the Hell out in the country,” I only went into London twice that week to see the Cézannes. The paintings became background. The rest of the week, I spent thinking, either writing in the dining room of Beam Ends, or else walking the footpaths of the Chiltern Hills. I had been an urban walker back in Cleveland, but walking in England was completely different. Because of something called the Public Right of Way laws, landowners must provide pathways for people to walk across their land. Every time I crossed a sheep field I expected a shotgun to pop out at me and an angry voice to croak, “Get offa my land,” but it’s all perfectly legal to traipse across field and forest like that in England. Rarely did I even see another person on my walks. Once about a mile from the station, an exhausted American woman in high heels stopped me to ask, “How far is Tring?” She still had two miles to go. Mostly it was just me and livestock and birds—foreign birds, chirping their unfamiliar songs, giving my walks a peculiar soundtrack.

As I walked, I wasn’t consciously thinking, “Today I will ponder the events that have shaped me.” Most of the time I was thinking things like, “That’s a weird looking tree,” or “Is that west or north?” It was a three mile walk to the Tesco’s supermarket and those trips were filled with such world-shattering things as my troubling discovery that eggs are not refrigerated in England. Nothing could be taken for granted in Hertfordshire, even though, by British standards, Hertfordshire is bloody boring. The birds made a different sound, the trees were sometimes unidentifiable, and even the butter tasted different. A few years later, I met someone from Tring who, when I told him I’d spent time there, squinted at me and asked, “Whatever brought you, of all places, to Darkest Hertfordshire?” For me though, every journey outside of Beam Ends made me feel like a kid at the zoo. Unlike when I had visited the large cities of Europe, in Hertfordshire I could let my wonder take over without fearing that I might get robbed or accidentally stumble into the heroin quarter of town.

So often I have travelled with fear. On my first trip to the UK, I had been afraid to walk alone in a tiny village in Wales. What if someone tried to speak to me? They would know I was an American and they would do something awful to me. In a large city, you have to be cautious or you’ll end up walking lighter as your wallet walks off in the other direction, but this time, in the country, I realized that I was safe and I could relax, listen to the birds, wander the brambly paths. I could act as if I belonged there.

During the days I spent in the village of Aldbury, English life intruded upon my thoughts constantly. The house had no front yard, so the sidewalk and the road went directly past the dining room window. Even with the curtains drawn, the village couldn’t be shut out. Because there were a number of bridle trails through the nearby forest, every morning the horsey people would ride south past me and every afternoon they would ride back north, gossiping about their exclusive society. When school let out, the children would walk by, taunting each other with slang that I didn’t understand, but I easily got the basic meaning. Beam Ends was in the middle of a row of houses and so in the evenings I would hear the very proper father next door playing with his son, “Horsey goes NEIGH.” Every second I was there, I felt connected to life, even though I was alone most of the time and didn’t know anyone. At home I was surrounded by people I knew, yet I often felt no connection to them beyond what was absolutely necessary. In Aldbury, removed from situations where I was forced to connect with people, I was able to open up and receive whatever came my way. 

I worried about losing my Self in England, of going native. I am an American. As eccentric and cosmopolitan as I am, the fact of my origin remains. I cannot totally embrace another culture, obliterating my own. Another culture can certainly inform my world. Like Cézanne’s blue sky, it can be painted in between the leaves to fill up the canvas, but my American leaves are the important bits of me.

Emerson called travelling a fool’s paradise. I think he’s right in that you can’t go somewhere and hope to leave yourself behind, but I would argue that, by leaving a familiar world behind, you can sometimes see yourself more clearly. In a foreign land, nothing is certain and so everything can be an adventure. Sometimes just going to the bathroom can be an eye opening experience, as anyone who’s ever been confronted with a squatter can attest to. By letting go of the marathon sightseeing itinerary, I let the adventure of travel take me where I really wanted to go, back to myself.

In the quiet mornings at Beam Ends, I would sit at the dining room table eating my Spanish oranges and start with a question. Then I would write. A lot of the time I never directly answer my question, but I would talk around it until I ran out of thoughts:

What shall I bring home with me? *The journey to find the true voice; I must use my own voice. That’s really a journey that all of this sets me on—I’ve only just discovered the way into the forest, beating a path in. Men’s journeys are well plotted out by Joseph Campbell and the others, and that’s the model most stories are built upon. The Grail must be achieved, the king healed. It doesn’t matter what the grail is or why the king is maimed, it simply must be fixed. Another kind of journey is perhaps about discovering causes. *Discovering my true nature. Seeing past the deceptions that society litters the world with. *Quietness, a remembrance of walking up in Aldbury Common, no one else in sight or sound. *Appreciation of my Americanness. *The need to question myself. I get the feeling that most people live their lives stifling the questions within them, drowning out the sight of those flamboyant question marks, getting mired in meaningless jobs, entertainment. I remember for a while I never wrote question marks. It was as if putting that mark there demanded that I formulate an answer. The pressure was too great. I didn’t know how I could ever find answers that weren’t to be found in a published book.

Eventually I began to get a vague idea of what I really thought, of who I was. At the end of my stay, I was able to compile a sketch of the landscape I wanted to inhabit.

What was the world as I saw it? Before the first time I’d travelled abroad, someone had told me to be sure to write a journal because I’d be a different person when I got back. I don’t think I became a different person after Aldbury; I think I became more of myself. Letting myself feel genuine wonder managed to open up that corked-up part of me and when I got back to Cleveland, even though I put the cork back in its place and went back to my regular life, that cork still had a habit of popping out. Now when I catch myself walking in a trance from my car to my office, a peculiar thing will catch my eye and invoke that spirit of wonder. Obviously I didn’t die a Romantic death before that thirtieth birthday, but in some way I entered into a new life. I became a person who takes the time to see. I would say that the world I see is a world of flickering leaves, layers of colors built up over time to make a painting, and that painting always has something new that can be seen in it.