If Knowledge Hangs Around Your Neck like Pearls Instead of Chains...

I wrote the following in various planes and trains with no wifi. I made it to England.

I came home to the sort of chokehold-style winter that I haven’t seen since my childhood when snow meant magic evenings spent sledding rather than grey days of shoveling, ruined boots and late trains.

 This is the way to my parents’ back door, shortly after being shoveled. 

It was good see my family and my cat and sleep in a big western bed and eat crunchy, heavily flavored western food. I did get to do a bit of hiking and there the snow was beautiful. I had been missing my own dear beautiful Northeast woods so much, it was wonderful to be among familiar trees, familiar mountains, familiar sky. I went to Philadelphia three times to see my gentleman-friend and my friends, and how calm and peaceful and static that city is compared to Tokyo! Every time I go back, it seems smaller. 

Frozen Schuylkill! New one on me.

And New York City is, at least as far as I could tell, unchanged— and my view of it is surprisingly unchanged. It was a bit of a shock to see how dirty everything is and how averse to following rules everyone is, but it’s refreshing. The first time a homeless guy dropped some filthy plastic bags on me in the subway I smiled like a doofus. There is a crackly sense of possibility here that I did not sense in Tokyo, or indeed anywhere else. 

From the top of the New Museum

I think one of the reasons my time in Japan seems like a hazy, pearl-edged fantasy is that I never really cracked the surface of the place. I spent most of my time among Anglophone foreigners, and my own status as a foreigner was inescapable. No one was going to open up to me about the joys and anxieties of the place, and why should they? My American lack of reserve, my relentless desire to let everyone know what I think about everything is less universal than I thought. I made a conscious effort to observe as sensitively as I could and not ask rude direct questions all the time, but I suppose it was not enough. That’s why I had to keep running off into the mountains where things were accessible and it didn’t matter that I was a great big rude westerner breaking social taboos all the time. 

Continuing the snow theme, Mt Takao

The above isn’t to say people weren’t kind— I met some of the most civilized, generous and courtly people of my life there. But I never once forgot I was far from home and out of place, and, while welcomed, not entirely welcome. 

And tomorrow I am off to London with two wheelies and a bicycle in a case and a civilian mess bag that I really hope I can pass off as a ‘small personal item’. I have the vaguest notion of what to expect in England, since all the things I know and love, from the pre-Raphaelites to the Clash, are just a bit outdated. I expect everyone to sit in pubs reciting Keats and smashing guitars all the time, but that can’t be right. Word is that the classes at RCA are rigorous and great, which they had better be. And I had better meet at least one pale aesthete strolling down Picadilly with a poppy or a lily in his mid-a-e-vil hand.

Everyone definitely looks like this all the time. 

In a way, it’s a lot less stressful to go away this time. It’s for fewer months, and the great weight of language ineptitude will be lifted. In fact, I expect that for the first time in my life I will be among people who are more verbose than I am. It will be springtime soon, and since I am bringing my touring bike along I should be able to enjoy the countryside a bit. 

I want to see and know everything and I think it is a very specific brand of American entitlement that makes me expect a country’s secrets to be laid out at my feet for inspection. Having grown up on a steady diet of British everything (everything up to about 1985, anyway) I know that I am in for a shock. Living in Japan made me appreciate America far more than I ever had before; we shall see how well I respond to an England that cannot possibly live up to my romantic notions. 

This is me

We shall see, we shall see, we shall see! I think I will promote myself to a Flaneur. 

-Isis