May 14, 2025
Got no time for spreadin' roots/ The time has come to be gone
A friend told you he was going to Rome. He was back in town and you both were at a bar and he said he’d be there over the summer and that you should join. The next day you saw a few clips from The Talented Mr. Ripley, a film you never really cared for, for reasons you don’t really know, despite the fact that it’s beautiful to look at. Although the story largely takes place in the fictional coastal town of Mongibello, it prompted you to read up on Rome, but you just went on YouTube instead and listened to Italian songs, the very few Italian songs you know, most of which are from The Sopranos.
(Imagine a taxi skimming over cobble stone streets and puddles in potholes. It’d been raining and there were still drops rolling down the windows and shining with the streetlights at 2 AM. Think of the cover of Numero Zero, and the book itself. The driver hasn’t said anything, but the radio is on, and you both are taking in the moment, the vacuum in the car.)
Batting first in the RECOMMENDED was good ol’ Rick Steves. You got to know him while searching for travel guides to take backpacking— you settled for a Lonely Planet guide that was too big to fit in your bag anyway. On his Wikipedia page, Steves is quoted from a New York Times article saying:
"There's regrets. [A career in travel] has not been good for my family. I got divorced. It's not been great for relationships with loved ones. I would love to be the person I was before I was a travel writer. I would have had a very, very beautiful life being a piano teacher, coming home every night for dinner and mowing the lawn, and joining clubs, and, you know, being regular and reliable. But I've chosen a different path, and this is a path that is — it's a mission for me. I've calculated it. And I've got an opportunity to be what I consider extremely productive ... helping people travel in a constructive way. And I choose that knowing it's not gonna be without a cost. Yeah, I'm aware of that. And I'm in a way, I'm sad about it. But, again, you have to make a choice.”
There’s something very poetic in that, the idea of this humble and down to earth piano teacher afflicted with a tremendous yearning for the world, an anguish expressed through music, paired with the need to have it all: a family, a home, a life with them.
But sometimes a life for yourself and a life with others blend like oil and water and you’re left straddling the dividing line where they touch. How much are you supposed to take and do for yourself and how much should you leave for others? Is being considerate innate to a full life? Not that one should go around thinking about how to live their life or how to build the ideal life. A good cautionary tale is that of Nate Fisher from Six Feet Under, who often wrestled with this very question. He spent too much time figuring out how to do things the right way instead of just doing them; making a mess and constantly chasing. “It’s the wanting,” at the end of the day, deep desire like hunger pains, which should be acknowledged if not adequately appeased, but to satisfy each craving every time would leave us bloated yet empty.
Wanderlust can be a disease, something you just can’t shake. It can be a kind of obsession, a deep-rooted restlessness. Though it abates, but the urge to travel, to see and experience, to consume, never goes away.
(You’ve been thinking a lot about the way you are, why you think how you think and do the things you do. What am you looking for in the places that you want to see, to live in? Why do you want to leave so bad? Distance is a way to measure success, sure. It’s not the only way, but an important metric nonetheless. The world and history is made up almost entirely of stories of people who crossed borders and approached frontiers, who have given it all up to start somewhere new, both by choice and by circumstance. The journey forges one’s mettle, and vice versa.)
A few weeks later you picked up a copy of Rimbaud’s collected works, one you bought almost on a whim, finding it on your desk. When or why you took it off the shelf you don’t know. His pull towards other place is evident from the get, it practically bleeds off the page. Rimbaud’s wanderings were a search for meaning as well as an escape. Even after retiring from literature at the age of twenty, leaving behind over the span of three years what most people dream of producing throughout an entire life, his restlessness never left him. He ended up dying in his home country after years living in East Africa and Arabia, of cancer at 37.
What is there to search for in places, what do they have or what do we think they have that they can give us, or change within us? What does a new place bring you, what does it make you think? Ultimately it expands your thinking, shifts your focus to a different spot through a wider lens given the necessity to adapt to culture, to language. What does that offer us, in terms of self discovery? Perhaps access to another part of ourselves, who we can be.
Wanderlust is a nymph who wafts and caresses but has a fixed grip on your head, pointing it in both one and every direction, all the while whispering, like the wind in your ear, not where to go but where she’s been.
She tells you she ran away to California when she was sixteen. You can’t imagine her running away from anything. She’s so solid, a constant spirit.
She’s not just some phase, she gets in your clothes like smoke, lingering like the part of you wants to stay in your hometown, buy one of those houses you love in the neighborhood on the water across from where you went to high school and be based out here and travel everywhere, everyone needs a place to hang their hat, and there’s nothing wrong with making it one’s own country, despite how removed it feels from the rest of the world, from experience and culture.
But lately you’ve dreamt of a California soaked with sunset, that pink-blue-black charred sky, a Los Angeles with Bukowskis on every corner and houses from the Jetsons or the Incredibles, sky scrapers by the sea, (think Rising Sun and Die Hard), jazz and rock playing from the clouds and hip-hop from cars, the bass humming through the streets; San Francisco of galloping hills like wrinkled sheets and the streetcars like bedbugs over them; a San Diego always ablaze in sunset, speeding convertibles under palm trees.