Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Back to Italy: The Roaring Nineties
M
ore than twenty years elapsed from that first taste of Italy in 1968 until circumstances
were ripe for an extended trip to Tuscany in the summer of 1991. In the interim I dropped
out of college, tried on several careers for size, met my wife, returned to grad school, and
discovered the meaning of life. For those of you who are anxious to get on to the stuff about
living in Italy, I won't be insulted if you skip ahead to the next chapter. Otherwise, here's a
quick summary of what transpired during the twenty-three years between visits:
I nearly made it through a doctoral program at the University of Toronto but dropped out
before completing my dissertation on the burning question of why the great French poet,
Charles Baudelaire, devoted most of his published work to translations of the minor Amer-
ican writer, Edgar Allan Poe. I believed that I understood what it was about Poe's work that
had captivated Baudelaire. On good days I could convince myself that such things mattered,
but eventually I lost the battle. I started hanging out with the wrong crowd, i.e., people who
were serious travelers. So, I took a “leave of absence,” shipped the topic back to the States
and started traveling.
I went to Spain to see the fabled cities of Andalusia, then on to Morocco, then set out for
Egypt to travel up the Nile. I made it from Aswan to Wadi Halfa by boat, then to Khartoum
by train, and then by steamboat through the Sudan during a lull in the civil war, all the way
to Juba in the south, and finally to Murchison Falls in Uganda in the heyday of Idi Amin.
Traveling third class it was possible to make the whole trip from Cairo to Kampala for about
$100. Afterwards, I explored East Africa for a few weeks and then flew to Israel to spend
the summer working on a Kibbutz and studying Hebrew.
When I returned to the States, I went out to Mendocino County in California to visit a friend
from Brandeis who had stopped writing his dissertation on Schleiermacher's hermeneutics
and had begun making Japanese bamboo flutes that he sold on the streets of Berkeley. Like
my Brandeis friend, I never returned to the East Coast or the world of the university. In the
jargon of the day, we had “dropped out”. But to me it always seemed more like “stepping
out” than dropping anything. Having wandered outside the groves of academe, I had the
sense of having discovered a wider world beyond its borders. I had stepped out of a limiting
framework that had little sense of its own limitations. I had found Life In The Real World,
all in caps. It was both exhilarating and terrifying, and I was about as ill-equipped for it as a
man could be.
In the early days I homesteaded on land that belonged to a friend of a friend; we cooked
over a fire, drew water from a creek, and fixed up the ramshackle cabins of an abandoned
Search WWH ::
Custom Search