I think, perhaps, it is safe to say that there is one quality all true travelers have in common. We are searching for something. Even when we least know what this something is that calls to us, this siren song of nebulous longing, we are driven by hunger for it, by questioning, by irrepressible curiosity. Is it around the next bend? In the next city? The next state? In China? In England? In France? Against all reason we feel that in blind ignorance we can find it, that we will stumble upon it unknowing if we only go far enough. There is a lost piece of ourselves, a gaping emptiness that is unsatisfied. So we search the eyes of foreign visitors and the pages of foreign books, and the soul-hunger, the isolation gnaws and remains unsatisfied. Somewhere in the world It is, and when we find this unknown we will have fullness. Fullness, sereneness, and life. I think I've seen the essence of this seeking sense expressed most beautifully, most sensitively, throughout the works of C.S. Lewis.
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"We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness...""It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from."
"All joy...emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings."
He doesn't simply make me want to go to a place I have searched for and never found, he makes me believe that such a place exists. This is, for all of us who love Narnia, the crux of the matter. We are hungry for a world where we can be completely, as ourselves, knowing fully who we are, and being fully known. Lewis, in his own longing for this, had a magical gift for expressing it and evoking it in all his writings. One feels that there are worlds beyond worlds beyond worlds which travelers may find, and that the thing one seeks is waiting in them.But the doors leading from our world into the other worlds are rare and hard to find. And so, we wander into crowded cities in Asia, and fertile plains in Africa, and conical huts, and tree houses on stilts, and jungles and floodplains and coastal cliffs, and we look for the thing we do not know.If we are dedicated, we study the languages, and if we study and progress with enough talent and passion, we are at last able to express our wanting and our lacking in new and lilting tongues. But there is only disappointment to be found along this way. Because they answer us, and we find that there, on the other side of the ocean, they are failing in the same, wistful quest. We may learn from one another, but we cannot find the country we searched for, the country where everything is whole, where the scattered pieces of what we are come together, where beauty is a comprehended reality and not a glimpse that haunts and beckons. It does not exist in this world. Yet we are thirsty for membership in it.If we cannot find it, we will imagine it and pine for it. If it does not exist, we will die wanting it. It if has never been thought of, we will instinctively invent it. We will cling to the image, the idea of our true country against all probability and disappointment."I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."A conversation with a new friend in France drove this idea home to me last night. We were discussing, each, our dissatisfaction with our home countries, our desire to travel, to speak with people from around the world, to learn new languages and bury ourselves in new cultures. Home seemed hopelessly constrained, pedestrian, narrow-minded, and dull. But being foreign to each other, we were each fiercely curious about the other's country and culture. France is a riddle to me, a mystery fascinating and strange. For him, the U.S. is equally unfamiliar and fascinating. We're both 'enthousiastes' about China. He said:"I think it's an illusion, but ...I mean
our own country seeming boring must be an illusion
but I can't help feeling that ...
I'm a stranger to no one ... I meet somebody, he listens to me a few minuts and then is convinced he knows who I am ...
I've never felt this way with foreign people ...
i'm sure it's not the only thing I have in mind
- but although I'm trying
I can't express the rest
France is boring to me ...
And living here forever would eventually result in a total sadness ...
As I am dying, I would think that I haven't lived 1/1098070789796676 of what I could have lived ..."
I'll let you make your own interpretation of this. I think it can stand alone. But for we travelers, the journey becomes our identity. We are seeking a homeland that is not an illusion. We are seeking the new, and the strange, and beyond that, the familiar- the known, but not-known that our hearts cry out towards. We are seeking, driven to continue and continue seeking, to be understood. We want to be heard, and seen, and known, and so pant after this achievement across the world, never coming nearer to the understanding we desire. No two human beings can meet and comprehend each other in this way. No such completeness is waiting in exotic buildings, customs, and foods. It is a quixotic, sterile quest, true and lovely only in the sense that we are questing, as we were created to do."For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come" (Hebrews 13)Lewis chimes in again:"If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows...then we must starve eternally."In the end, then, the choice is our own. This hunger I feel will not be abated by France, nor will it be satisfied by China. My appetite must be developed to meet this truth, or for me, as for so many travelers, beauty will never be more than grief, and new beauties but the repetition of disappointment. The emptiness of my own homeland, and the rich opportunity of foreign life are equally illusions. But the illusion is not about these. The illusion is about myself. Until I am complete in the city that is to come, 'hidden with Christ in God', I am complete nowhere. And staying in this incompleteness forever, never loosing my stubborn pride and accepting the kingdom which has been found for me, is what will result in total sadness. Not life in the midwest, or in France, or in China. Everywhere, the world is infected with the same disease. A visa cannot carry you to the cure.
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