Travels – Page 2 – Much That Is Fair

Monsters & Myths

“‘I’ve been over a good part of the world since I left it, Doctor Watson,’ said he; ‘but I have never seen a place to compare with it.’
‘I never saw a Devonshire man who did not swear by his country,’ I remarked.”
– Henry Baskerville & Dr. Watson, The Hound of the Baskervilles

Of all the places I planned to visit on this trip, only one was really completely inaccessible by train. The National Rail service is very good, of course, but they don’t go everywhere, and remote abandoned castles by the seashore are apparently on the list of places they assume most folks won’t want to bother with. For a moment, I considered taking that as a sign. But then I figured it wasn’t like I was going to have another opportunity coming along in the near future, and so off I went.

On (Anti) Heroes & Heroines

By far the most exciting thing I did in London this week, over and including seeing a very old friend for dinner, doing the actual research that will hopefully shore up my future career as a scholar, and visiting a number of excellent bookstores (recs below), was seeing David Tennant on the West End, where he is currently starring as Macbeth.

I have a perverse love for Macbeth. Probably it should not surprise anyone at this point that I prefer Shakespeare’s tragedies over the comedies (and the histories that end in tragedy, like Richard III, over the nominally happy ones, like Henry V). Maybe it’s the pessimist in me, which likes the reassurance on stage that in fact, sometimes things don’t work out. More likely, I think I’m drawn to the pronouncements on human nature and mortal life that Shakespeare’s tragedies produce, and the gift he had for making you pity even the most awful of people (Richard III is a good example) in the hands of the right actor. I like to think that this puts me in a long line of amateur Shakespeare fans, those of us too poorly-read to know any better but fond of Shakespeare all the same. The most famous of these (of course) is Abraham Lincoln, who once declared in a letter to a Shakespearean actor, “I think nothing equals Macbeth—It is wonderful.” Lincoln was famously obsessed with the idea of ambition, being himself an extraordinarily ambitious man, and he was drawn to Macbeth’s story as a kind of cautionary tale. But when his letter about his own ideas of Shakespeare went public, he was broadly ridiculed in the press. Amateurs are amateurs, even if they are the President.

Lest We Forget

This September, on a flight from Seattle to Chicago, I met a man who lived in Michigan and was flying home to surprise his wife. Flights into O’Hare, for anyone who has not had the unique misery of heading there themselves, often land early and then sit stranded out on the runway for half an hour. This one took a full hour, and he grew increasingly worried that he wouldn’t make his connecting flight to get home in time. I asked what he would do. “I’ll just rent a car and drive,” he told me. If he did that, he would still get there by the time she woke up.

I could make a statistical guess based on various demographic details about how he voted last Tuesday. I could probably make similar guesses about other strangers I have met in my endless trips around the country: about a retired Army colonel who lives in North Carolina and paid for me to go on a historical tour because he heard I was a student; about the man who stopped my father and me when we were out canvassing in Wisconsin a week ago to warn us that without a flashlight on, we risked getting hit by a car; about a group of women who took me out to lunch in rural Wyoming just because I had driven up to visit their town. I could, but I won’t, because I remember them as decent people, and because we must see our fellow Americans as human beings first, whatever they are to us second.

In Search of a Usable Past

I have never bothered to conduct a survey, but I suspect that if you did, less than ten percent of the American population could reliably distinguish between the origins of Memorial Day and Veterans Day, rolled as they have been into one commemorative space. This is not your average American’s fault, really: maybe Memorial Day is a little more exciting, with the guaranteed three-day weekend and day off, but we have not marked them as distinct in any meaningful way for a long time now.

They are, however, quite distinct. Memorial Day is the older of the two, although it was once celebrated primarily on May 30, moving through the week like Veterans Day does. It was also reliably celebrated in only half the country until, at the very least, World War I, and in some places not until the 1990s. When it was known as Decoration Day, Memorial Day was a holiday to honor Union soldiers; states of the former Confederacy, in a rarely successful display of their commitment to states’ rights, selected different dates by state for Confederate Memorial Day. The death of Stonewall Jackson, May 10, was popular; so was the date of the Confederate surrender to William Tecumseh Sherman (April 26). Strangely, given their consummate fixation on defeat, no one selected April 9: the date of the surrender at Appomattox.

Je Me Souviens

One of the curses of being a graduate student is that you are completely unbound from the normal tethers that anchor people to reality, like working hours and HR offices and regular, reliable wages. It is a challenge that has both professional and personal ramifications – is well documented, these days, the kinds of abuses that graduate students are vulnerable in the academy, but it is quite possible to drive yourself mad in a world without deadlines, job prospects, or any clear sense of what you’re doing most of the time. To finish in one piece, you must find your own way of handling the constant uncertainty.

I have coped with this pressure, for better or worse, by leaning into it, which gives me the (mostly false) illusion that I have some control over what I’m doing and what will happen to me when I graduate. Most recently, this led me north, all the way to our Canadian neighbors, where I spent a brief period this winter visiting Quebec City and their Winter Carnaval while working on writing a dissertation chapter.