The Traveler’s Addendum
To all the Wanderers this Summer,
One doesn’t simply galavant into their local library and park their caffeine-filled corpse in front of the Philosophy section. No, you must first maneuver past a gauntlet of snoring retirees hosting NASCAR magazines in their laps; a coterie of former union men who possess a unique, telekinetic language for casting judgment on all those who journey through their couchdom.
Expect your tapered joggers act as an arrow, directing the men’s attention to a pair of discount Timberland’s that draw their silent chorus of “not a chance in hell those things are steel-toed.” Scurry past the elder tribesmen, and fear not their insults, only your disproportionately rude response. And considering that it would be one fueled by half an Americano and a handful of Munchkins, haste is evermore important.
Therefore, you must master the art of the pull-and-tuck. Like a shopping-mall thief, be agile and unassuming, nonchalantly breeze past the Philosophy section and snatch one of its inhabitants without pausing. Once secured, tuck it between stacks of decoy books, breathe relief, and know that not one of those fogies saw you, thereby eliminating any chance of them casting unspoken aspersion.
For me, this maneuver happens so quickly that I often have no idea which book I have selected. Will I be demoralized by Sartre or Kant? Perhaps an ancient thinker like Plato? And while Philosophy can create confused countenances, fate has a way of making men smile. A couple years ago it was responsible for one particular, quizzical grin.
I had never heard of George Santayana. After graduating from Harvard, Santayana went on to become a member of the university's Philosophy department, helping usher in what is known as the school’s Golden Age for that particular field. A worldly man, the Madrid native spent time living in the States, Italy, Paris and Oxford. Perhaps publishing an essay on travel was an inevitability for him.
Although he’s best known for penning the quote, “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Santayana’s most famous aphorism does little to underscore his literary brilliance. His words slide into the soul like butter on grandma’s snow-day waffles, crawling into every crevice and leaving a treat in each passage. Reading him was familiar, like reading what I imagined the limits of my own writing to be. But ever the egoist, even I could not have envisioned producing a piece of work that rivals Santayana. More appropriately put, Santayana wrote as though he had direct access to the container of my spirit and shook out every last word before arranging them in a way that brought the assuredness of calm.
There are other quotes, however, more applicable to this essay. Consider, “The earth has music for those who listen.” Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, this Santayana quote has been whistling throughout my thoughts, urging me to read and reread his essay The Philosophy of Travel, a tidy gem of literary work which details the soulful import of human beings and their ability to move.
After questioning why a philosophy of travel had yet to be written, Santayana suggested that it is “locomotion,” which serves as the “privilege of animals,” even going so far as to tender it as the “key to intelligence.” In the race for cognitive (and perhaps spiritual) dominance, what separates the Human from its genetic peers is the ability to wander great distances simply because they have chosen to do so. Unlike plants, Humans are not rooted to an ancestral home of nourishment which they did not have the agency to select. Plants, according to Santayana, are quite the opposite of humans: “There is something dull in the beauty of flowers, something sad in their lasciviousness; they do not crave, they do not pursue, they wait in a prolonged expectation of they know not what.”
At the risk of sounding too much like a mid-90s rap lyric, flowers have sex brought to them. Yet it is never upon demand. Pursuing our desires, whether they be sexually atavistic, soulfully divine, or materially driven, may not only be one of humanhood’s greatest perks, but one that is strictly unique to our species.
And yet even that point is surely debatable. Elephants travel to hold funerals for their lost. Spend enough time around an octopus, and they might grab you by the hand for an ocean-floor romp. But this examination of Santayana’s message—an inquisition to determine if traveling for an autonomously determined pleasure, one
free from the constraints of an instinctual drive to exist, is a solely human trait—only serves to muddy the philosopher’s main point.
The human impetus for travel is a luxury most species cannot experience, one which unquestionably enriches both brain and body. And yet while fulfilling a singular desire, it concurrently cleanses the spirit of detrimental, unbecoming ones. After all, “a man who knows the world cannot covet the world.”
Santayana’s essay lists a handful of different types of travelers, ranging from the explorer or wanderer to the merchant or tourist. No doubt, his own experience as a traveler birthed these thoughts and led to their manifestation as an essay; one which Santayana concluded by clarifying the beauty of travel: “the last thing a man wishes who really tastes the savour of anything and understands its roots is to generalise or to transplant it; and the more arts and manners a good traveller has assimilated, the more depth and pleasantness he will see in the manners and arts of his own home.”
Both briefly and tantalizingly, Santayana discussed the interconnectivity between origin and destination that travelers often unwittingly foster. But he left me wanting more. And in my unendurable desire to satisfy a curiosity, no matter how big or how small, I attempted to unearth my own ending to Santayana’s essay. In a postscript of sorts, I have attempted to expand upon one of the most gifted philosophers of our time (and will likely have only succeeded in proving how foolhardy I am.)
Traveling is every bit of a departure as it is an arrival, yet that is hardly reflected in our language. College seniors cannot locate the city they’re traveling to on a map, but they can tell you what part of I-95 their Uber was on when they shouted, “We’re going to Cancun!” the morning of their Spring Break. Despite looking through dozens of vintage MTV Spring Break VHS tapes, I did not find one instance of a frat brother yelling, “We’re leaving Northwest Ohio!”
This is natural and not deserving of criticism. Oftentimes, the chance to be someone you have never been is disguised in the promise of being somewhere you have never been. For college students, Cancun is the eternal resting place for the soul unrestrained, a sexiful cemetery of inhibition. Goaded by a combination of rum punch, hormones and beachside attire, American youth terrorize oceanfront motels in what is their greatest and traditionally final celebration of hedonism.
But this last hurrah is not to be mistaken as an exorcism, a transition where early-twenty-something-year-olds exchange self-indulgence for a briefcase and billable hours. Like reintroducing a captive animal to the wilderness, humans will travel to uncage a spirit that is beckoning to be free, if even for one alcohol-laden week. Truth be told, Cancun could be anywhere for them. It could be Miami, Austin, or the Bahamas (like it was for me). The call to unshackle our wildest pleasures is impulsive and borderline animalistic. It is where we are risky. It is where we are risqué. Most importantly, it is where we are unabashedly us. Human. Therefore, it may be more appropriate to cast aside the usual “we’re going to Cancun!” for a more ritualistic— albeit awkward-sounding—“we’re being in Cancun.”
This isn’t a phenomenon that belongs strictly to college students. Upon anniversaries, married couples flock to the places of their honeymoons and rekindle feelings of love’s unyielding bond. To once more experience the sensation of being newlywed, they must embed themselves in the surroundings where these original feelings were born, where these cherished memories were forged. Perhaps it is too obvious to state that there is something living in the places we feel most alive, in those Amalfi steps, pulsing, however faint, or in those snowy Aspen lodges where body and fire keep us warm. It is so humanly poetic to know that the dearest foundations we walk upon weren’t merely built by us, they were built with us, from us and are sustained by currents of energy both past and present alike.
This is what Santayana never expounded upon. The difference between a place and a destination is a desire to be there, making it imperative to unearth what fuels that very urge. Formerly a swampy village, a charming European city can aid in this endeavor. Although their staffers subsist on cigarettes and baguettes, Parisian hotels are sustained by an inexpungible combination of lust, French Reds, and whispered sweet-nothings. The mistake in wondering what those walls would say if they could talk is assuming that they are incapable of any communication at all. Indeed, they are expressive and awfully noisy. They are anticipatory of newcomers, emitting an amorous energy that suggests love will be both found and made in this storied city.
Paris is known for love because humans built it to be so. Not with bricks and iron, but with romance and vivacity. Is it foolish to imagine human emotion alive like coral? Alive like the nuclear residue at Chernobyl? Despite lacking matter, our memories have energy; they are a power plant of sensation that emits remnants of not necessarily times well-spent, but times well-lived.
Suggesting the emotive soul of humans to be animate property is tautological. Of course it has liveness. Without memory, spirit and consciousness, we are a bone-filled skinsack of regulating organs, drifting droidlike towards death. When asked what it feels like to be a living being, nobody describes the sensation of air filling their nostrils. Of blood traveling upstream through veins. Of a heart’s singular pump. Quite literally, I could not describe to you the feeling of being physically non-dead, and that is because I have no idea what that even feels like. I’ve never felt Life; I have only felt alive.
Too frequently is livelihood defined by some association to corporeality. Philosophers have overlooked the chance that what we feel can not only be palpably real but something that leaves imprints as well. In a most ironic sense, perhaps these dedicated descendants of the Enlightenment have been shackled by logic, reason and rationale—the very epistemological principles that were supposed to free humankind. But it is obvious, isn’t it? That the very things which give us life are alive. That in the air between two kissing youths, an iota of their shared sensation floats out into the ether to hang there in perpetuity, a sensation that only human consciousness has the acuity to detect and, if lucky, replenish through its own experience
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If used properly, Philosophy is a tool, one whose sharpened edges help the human mind achieve meaningful edification. Santayana was aware of this. Both the flowery style and nature of his writing suggests that he understood Philosophy’s utility lies outside of its most commonly used deployment; an instrument for helping humans comprehend how we know what we know. The best thinkers embody Philosophy’s guiding principle of education. They collect Life’s endless peculiarities in a net stitched by the fabric of their experiences. So while Kantian PhD.’s were filling their university towers with cigar smoke and discussing which slacks best match their jackets’ elbow pads, Santayana was traversing our planet. His exploits in Europe are well documented, but never disclosed were his own thoughts about what he had to offer to the places he traveled to; his imprint. Surely, Santayana took advantage of Roman espresso and customary, midday Mediterranean leisure to explore the many philosophical subjects that captivated him. And while those ruminations are surely revered by thinkers far and wide, Santayana brought life to the places he visited, and those contributions are just as mighty as any one of his essays.
Inside New England bookshelves, awaiting Ivy League legacies, Santayana left literary wedges of his intellect. But inside coastal European cafes, while he awaited biscotti from the waitstaff, Santayana offered friendship, discussion and human connection. Travel is symbiotic in this way. It is the freedom to be us somewhere else; to take back pieces of others in exchange for sprinkling them with the tiny treasures of ourselves. The noblest of exports, traveling inherently demands the trafficking of human intangibles: spirits, ways of life and customs. If done in earnest, it pays in a currency of memories created.
When I travel, when I ponder the philosophy of travel, I think of my Old Man. Like many among the departed, he was called home too soon, but not before his New Haven eyes witnessed Abbey Road, Pompeii’s Vesuvius and the Pyramids of Cairo. He was a Gumpian opportunist whose glimmering residue left a trail for me to follow, but only in the hopes that by trail’s end I had realized my purpose was to begin blazing one of my own. Therein lies The Explorer’s Paradox: do our footprints reveal where we are going or where we have been? Who we are going to become or who we already are?
I’ll see your paradox and in response, raise you another: I am where I have gone. I am being where I have been. And just as importantly, where I have been has gracefully accepted the remnants of me. With any luck, these remnants have made hearth and home where I have most experienced Life, and added to the energy sustained there.
This is my addendum to Santayana’s under-discussed essay. He was wise to compare humans and plants, and to use the latter’s immobility to demonstrate why travel is so precious to the former. I would simply add that travelers do more than sustain Life. They bring it. They spread it. They exchange it. In every corner of the world, they cultivate Life’s unique traditions by engaging in them. They are the pollinators of Australian easiness, Khoisan community, and Italian intimacy. We travelers are the unwitting conduits for Life’s eccentricities. And as we carry these diversities back and forth between destination and home, we would do well to remember that this is an exchange. Hosts need virgin eyes to bathe in all they have to offer, or the liveliness of their culture risks growing stagnant and unappreciated. What’s more, it is the visitor who happily surrenders a currency of smiles, photographs, hand-mimed discussions, and wine glasses refilled for a temporary stay in this foreign land; a form of restorative payment soaked directly into the re-energized soul of local gatekeepers. Yes, travel is transactional, and quite beautifully so.
Perhaps Santayana understood the ways in which travel elicits kinship among strangers. Ironically, the germination of two different ways of life disintegrates their separateness and leads to a singular sense of humanhood. This gives worth to individuals, as every human has some unique goodness to share with another. It affirms that we deserve to be on this Earth and provides purpose. After all, in the everlasting words of Santayana, we are “not in reality a guest in this world but a small yet integral part of it.”
Yours Still,
Spo