The Shortest Path to Yourself Leads Around the World

In Richard Linklater’s 1995 film Before Sunrise, two strangers, Jesse and Céline, meet on a train and spend one night together in Vienna discussing love and the vagaries of human nature. In one striking scene, Jesse says to Céline:

… it’s myself that I wish I could get away from. Seriously, think about this. I have never been anywhere that I haven’t been. I’ve never had a kiss when I wasn’t one of the kissers. Y’know, I’ve never gone to the movies, when I wasn’t there in the audience. I’ve never been out bowling, if I wasn’t there, making some stupid joke. I think that’s why so many people hate themselves. Seriously, it’s just they are sick to death of being around themselves.

This is a modern equivalent of the Zen koan everywhere you go, there you are. Both ancient and modern versions have the lovely feature of being so obvious but still rather intriguing (to me, anyway).  It is true, I think, that our own internal monologues and feelings are the central inescapable features of our lives; no matter what we do, no matter where we go, we can never get away from our selves.  And if we are not happy with our selves, then Jesse’s lament is a serious one.  Blogger Tim Urban puts it starkly: You are the problem you cannot run away from.

But Jesse seems weary of things just because it’s him who does them, and he’s right that his presence is inescapable for him (as it is for us all). Does that mean that there’s no point in seeking out new experiences?  As a keen traveller, I have always been taken by St Augustine’s notion that the world is a book and those who do not travel know only one page. But Jesse’s point holds; it’s still me travelling the world, reading each page.  It’s still all through my lens, with (in my case) my rather tedious inner chatter and judgement that I cannot quell, no matter how hard I try.  So is Urban’s bleak point correct?

As soon as I put it like that, it seems to me that Urban is absolutely right in that we cannot run away from ourselves. But perhaps there’s more to it than that, even when the company is poor (as it will be from time to time for most of us) because the self is not a fixed thing. We may always be there, but we are not inevitably stuck in any given state – children obviously change, but adults too, just more slowly.  And so we can take steps to try to shape the ways and directions in which we change, and I think that’s where travel comes in.  So maybe it’s not about the futility of escaping the self  – it’s about developing the self, and travel is one way to do it.  In fact, anything that jolts us out of the usual self-absorbed routines of daily life is likely helpful.

Many readers here will know first hand that there are few things more jolting than relocating to a new culture, and so a study by Adam et al is perhaps unsurprising.  The study found that those who relocate to a new country tend to develop a better sense of self than those who don’t, and in particular that living abroad triggers self-discerning reflections in which people grapple with the different cultural values and norms of their home and host cultures.  In other words, meeting and joining other cultures can shape the lenses through which we understand our own cultures, and hence ourselves.

Jesse never does escape from himself that night – none of us ever do. But by the end he tells Céline that being with her has made him feel, for a while, like somebody else – not quite a different person, but perhaps the same one seen from a different angle. That is about as much as any of us can ask of a journey, I think, and a line to remember as we head into the long school vacation, and perhaps some travel. As Adam says quoting the philosopher Keyserling the shortest path to oneself leads around the world.