Ok that’s a puzzler: What does T.S. Eliot mean by that?
As an Eliot-besotted English major back in the day, I analyzed the original poem where this quote is from and it’s not about travel, unless you mean travel to the inner recesses of your soul or a search for the meaning of existence. (If you like poetry, it’s a masterpiece worth musing over: Little Gidding)
Despite that, I don’t think Eliot would mind that so many preachers, therapists, life coaches, and travellers find this quote motivational. In the larger work, Eliot challenges us to consider how all beginnings and endings on our life journeys transform us in meaningful ways, even journeys of loss and destruction. At the time he wrote the poem, Eliot was in Little Gidding, England, under bombing threat from the Nazis. So beginnings and endings were very much on his mind at the time.
Eliot may have been talking about our souls, but it’s true about travel as well. We depart as one person, and by the time we arrive home we’re someone else all together, due to what we learned and experienced abroad.
Americans, especially, learn that not everyone lives in sprawling suburban homes with two (or three!) cars in the garage. Or even owns a car. In Denmark, I kept wandering into bike lanes, thinking they were sidewalks. Took me awhile to understand that everyone bikes to work there, I swear. Everyone.
And not everyone in the world bolts down lunch in twenty minutes, like I always did as a teacher. Good luck if you try that in Italy. Meals are lengthy affairs there, focused on conversation and delicious food. That takes time, and it’s absolutely wonderful. I miss Italy just writing this.
Long ago we helped lead student tours to Europe, and marveled as students transformed right before our eyes, starting out as cloistered American teenagers and ending up as savvy world travellers – in two weeks, no less! Those kids didn’t know what they didn’t know until they saw Europe for themselves, and once their eyes opened to the big wide world out there, I’m sure they were never the same. None of us are.
Travel helps us learn empathy, because it’s easy to demonize others if you’ve never met them. We can’t help but let go of preconceived notions about countries we’ve only read about or seen on TV, once we walk the streets and talk with real people who live there. It reminds me of what Atticus said to his daughter Scout in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird, when he was giving her advice on how to get along with people better: “You never really know a man until you understand things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
If more of the world’s inhabitants could walk in each other’s shoes once in awhile, maybe someday we’d actually have a shot at world peace. I mean, who knows? In the meantime, that’s reason enough to travel right there, and worth the price of any ticket.