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Grand Tours and Grand Plans
November 23, 2004, 12:36 a.m. My plan was always do honours next year, take a year off to work, earn enough money for my PhD, get my PhD. That’s the plan I left the house with at a quarter to five this evening. When I arrived home at ten forty, the plan was significantly changed. Salome and I have conspired, and although I will be doing my honours thesis next year and will be working for a year after that (hopefully in some cushy office job where I don’t have to stand up all day and am separated from annoying customers by a phone line), at the end of those two years I shall be taking my Grand Tour with her, and sojourning to England and Europe. I think I shall be thoroughly sick of academia by the time I am finished with my thesis, so much so that while a year of work may bore me immensely, drowning myself in books again shall not help. To carry on the Lady of Shallot reference from the last entry, I want to stop looking at the world through reflection, and look at it with mine own eyes. I want to wander the retired gravel walk in Bath that Anne and Captain Wentworth wandered; I want to visit Chartres where music, mathematics and architecture first commingled; I want to go to the steps of the Capital in Rome and recite Shakespeare at the bemused Italians. I’m too safe here. I have parents willing to support me in everything – I want to be thoroughly lost in Paris; wear out the phrase for “do you speak English?” in Cologne; cry down the phone-line for homesickness in London, but stay there anyway. My father is highly suspicious of my desire to go to the Olde Worlde and not America. It’s very retro, for him. In his day, all the young hip things went to America, because to go to England was to subscribe to their colonialist project, to seek acceptance and approval from the Mother Country. To go to America was to bite your thumb at them. He wants me to make a “considered decision” about where I’m going, but that would be like making a considered decision about which gender I’m attracted to – it’s not something you decide, it’s something you know. I know I want to go to England and Europe. America is too brash and new and safe. It’s got nothing we haven’t got here already. Its history is too short – only four hundred years or so. I want thousands of years, names I can’t pronounce and a culture I could never truly understand. I want out of my comfort zone. (And yet I still mourn the fact that there’s no one I know in any of the countries I desire to visit, and so therefore no one to stay with)
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