Let’s get out of this country

This essay was originally written in September 2009.

It had been a conviction of mine not to leave America. I suppose it is still a conviction of mine, only now a broken one—and the integrity of a conviction is not actually hurt so much by being broken. My protests against American neglect and crude internationalism still stand, held up on a dual-strand cable of stubbornness and sincere belief. All of this ideological noise interferes only superficially with the material fact that I have arrived now in the international terminal of Logan Airport, passport in hand, an hour and a half earlier than I had planned, to flee the country for the better part of nine months.

To flee—to fly—to travel by airplane: the variations in meaning are negligible. It is really a miracle of technology that, on little more than a whim and a few weeks’ wage, abody can be whisked away to any part of the earth and start a new life as a fisherman, huntsman, or critic, just as he has a mind. Evacuating an unwanted life in past centuries was hard work. Your old comrades could follow you, no problem. Feet, horses, stagecoaches, and even railroads are poor methods for abandoning a failed marriage or a defaulted business or an unflattering newspaper photograph. Mercifully we are free of those barbaric, unsympathetic times.

Nowadays if things get really bad the black arts of Bernoulli and Goddard can get you far away, fast. The fact that nobody actually does this is besides the point. What’s important is that we have, in every capital city and in most others besides, an escape hatch, assuming that our papers are in reasonable order. In the same way that knowing that the plastic houses can be swept off the board at any time is the only thing which makes Monopoly tolerable, our perceived ability to flee—fly—at a moment’s notice makes life tolerable. International travel is a kind of social suicide with low stakes.

Unfortunately the development of communications is rapidly eroding this advantage. These two technological contestants—Transportation and Communication—are bitter rivals. People running away by stagecoach were soon caught by the pony express. The railroad was invented in response, which in turn produced the telegraph. Fugitives had a brief heyday with the automobile, but suffered a decided setback with onset of the long-distance telephone. For a long time the jet airplane seemed to settle the balance once-and-for-all in favor of Transportation, but now satellites and the Internet are throwing a knockout punch for Communication. We partisans of Transportation can only hope that some hail-Mary victory in the shape of deep-sea submersibles or rocket ships is near at hand.

I think the hearts of the world’s vagabonds must be most at ease when the scoreboard is reading in favor of Transportation. Communication holds people accountable, keeps them bound to balance-sheets and five-paragraph essays and progress reports. Transportation, by contrast, drops people off at whatever station they please and cares little of what happens afterwards. Communication takes its victories in the ether; transportation in the flesh. Communication is Notes on the State of Virginia; Transportation is the land of Virginia. I count Thoreau, Magellan, and Neil Armstrong on the side of Transportation. Communication may have Bill Gates, William Randolph Hearst, and Matt Drudge—I do not much want them anyhow.

× × ×

For all this talk of running away, I should be honest enough to admit that I really have nothing to run away from, and in casting my lots with the fugitives I am engaging in a game of significant pretense. Certainly I am trying to forestall the oncoming enormity of my own internal boredom and its inflationary habits. But this is a stupid fear; a suburban, college-graduate’s fear; a fear borne of privilege; the kind of fear that has been the subject of a number of recent novels which critics have praised and I have loathed.

Indeed, there is a good deal in New England that I would rather not leave. But it so happens that Harvard offers no fellowship money to cut timber in Maine. So off I go.