How Much Beauty Can a Person Bear?

Talking travel and proof of life

About two months ago, M and I traveled to Italy for the first time. Her brother was getting married, and just two nights before the wedding some vague and incapacitating illness came over me. We were in Florence, and the next morning had to make a multi-leg journey to the wedding venue: a castle outside of the relatively nearby town of Siena. Picture me careening through the heat-soaked Tuscan countryside in a packed-to-the-gills rental car with a 100 degree fever. We made it, because of course I boss up when I need to, but after arriving I collapsed into the bed of our room with two standing fans aimed directly on my head and rested for as long as I could. I noticed the walls were yellow, the ceilings were high, and almost nothing else. My eyes didn’t seem to be working right. Later that evening, I stood on a high hill—basically sleepwalking—and looked out at the rolling landscape punctuated by those thin, uniform trees one might recognize from the walls of Olive Garden, the whole of it bathed in the setting sun, and yes everything was so beautiful, but still I had the sense that I was missing some great swell of feeling on seeing the countryside like this for the first time. All that I was getting was the image itself. And then I began to wonder: what was I supposed to be feeling anyway? What would make the journey, the sickness I felt, worth it? 

It’s exhausting to see with intention, impossible to keep it up at all times. So when abroad, when everything is begging to be seen in the fullest sense, everything gleaming with the potential of improving you personally in some mysterious way if only you could just hold it in, but try as you might you just can’t do it, no, can’t hold it all—have you failed?  

Maybe one just reaches a limit, physically and mentally, when traveling and sightseeing for long enough. Right now I’m making my way through Louise Glück’s Poems: 1962-2020, and I keep thinking of the last part of the poem “Baskets”:

I take my basket to the brazen market,

to the gathering place.

I ask you, how much beauty

can a person bear? It is

heavier than ugliness, even the burden

of emptiness is nothing beside it.

Crates of eggs, papaya, sacks of yellow lemons—

I am not a strong woman. It isn't easy

to want so much, to walk

with such a heavy basket, either

bent reed, or willow.

Later that evening, shivering in bed, I started to get pessimistic about the whole travel thing. If it’s not realistic to expect some kind of great change, benefit, or gift from the experience of travel, then was it enough to just have seen? Are the sights alone, being made yours, worth it? Why do I feel this worth is important? (This last one I think is just a me problem, being someone who regrets easily and not feeling much consolation from “everything happens for a reason”, as what if this reason is just straight up bad? Anyways.) 

I got frustrated at the global travel machine, blaming the brutal puzzle that is getting from Point A to Point B, C, etc, and back to A. Booking an international flight to me feels like defusing a bomb, or rather, building a bomb, which will detonate at a date agreed upon by you and the airline. (Again maybe this is mostly my own fault, as I can’t shake a constant lean towards optimization, towards finding the best path, the most perfect performance) I guess there is adventure found in being confused and pressed for time in a crowded foreign terminal, but the lessons I seem to learn each time are ones of resilience, patience, and logistical prowess, which are some of the least satisfying lessons! ¹

There’s this feeling of always looking forward, devouring, that you seem to have to maintain to some degree at all times or else risk missing out / missing a train. There’s that nagging weight of keeping the body alive and happy. And when one doesn’t feel so good, this constant forward movement creates a grating friction. Never, then, is it more clear that the only way out is through. 

Travel is also a strangely depersonalizing experience. This begins at the airport, which is described on the podcast POOG² (the only podcast I can constantly listen to and enjoy, I really do think they are brilliant philosophers!) as being a rare liminal space where we become nothing but our true selves. Then the plane, the softly glowing lights, the curved ceiling panels like the vertebrae of some great beast, where the mind drifts away, and at some point in the long dark of the international flight we’re reduced to a body being transported through space. It’s here that one enters a dreamlike state, which is continued through the trip. You become a version of yourself that is separated from your life; your world is pared down to the dimensions of your body while the world seems to expand indefinitely, randomly generating itself around every corner.

You find yourself in situations you’d never imagine, not in a fantastical way, more like you wouldn’t really think to imagine yourself sitting alone in another yellow-walled room in the office of a mysterious Italian doctor—who has disappeared with your wife into a different room—reading a magazine interview with Cillian Murphy, and then when you do indeed find yourself sitting there in that waiting room, your thoughts gather to form a question mark. All those strange people and strange places (familiar people in strange places I find to be even weirder): you lose yourself a little bit, just a body moving and seeing, until you come home and step back into your life, left with a strange feeling and all these images of things seen by a you that is not you, now yours to carry around like stones in your pocket. 

So then, what do you do with these images of things that have no bearing over your life, that you have no relation to you other than being seen? Is it enough to have seen something, and nothing more? Maybe I’m just being ridiculous and unappreciative. I mean, at the end of Blade Runner, an android makes a case for his humanity just by talking of the unimaginable things he’s seen: 

This sort of “now what?” feeling of mine isn’t just related to international travel: it’s something that’s plagued me about photography for a long time. Its gift and curse as a medium is that it can be created very, very quickly, adding to an ever-growing collection. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way; film photography forces one to slow down a little as opposed to the obscene speed of digital (not to knock digital: I really have come to enjoy digital and my phone camera more as of late).³ It’s also unique in that even though you’re producing something, it has to begin with the consumption of seeing. And not just seeing mindlessly, taking nothing, but seeing with intention, with an aim to capture and take an image for yourself. The image goes in the collection, the mass of “things seen” increases. Going through my photo archives sometimes feels like watching Hoarders: the afflicted combing through his vast piles of junk, picking up an instruction manual for a toaster, and telling his worried children that he couldn’t possibly part with it, he could still have need for it one day.⁴

And look, I get that there’s value in photos for reminiscing purposes. See the tourist father with his monstrous camera, corralling his annoyed teenagers on the Niagara falls overlook, and years later, on an anniversary maybe, cracking open the scrapbook, shedding a tear, laughing at someone’s stupid hat. But say the scrapbook is enormous—he’s taken a thousand of these photos. And in fact, most of them aren’t even of the family: there’s dark facades of buildings, blurry motorcyclists, food under harsh flash, pixel-perfect portrait of a butterfly on the tip of a leaf, of which there are hundreds just like it on the butterfly conservatory Instagram, the same butterfly’s likeness captured over and over again in the photo albums of countless tourist fathers. What’s the use of these photos, created less with thought and more with some innate desire to see, yes, see more and more, to forever feast your eyes? 

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I felt a little better the day after the wedding, and I felt I could actually take in my surroundings. I realized then that besides the yellow walls and thick wooden beams, I hadn’t really noticed much about our room in my stupor. I then saw the strange painting over the couch, the pattern in the shower curtain, the portrait of Mary and Jesus hanging over the bed, watching me. I opened the windows and looked out at the view, hearing a dog barking far off, a baby crying in another part of the building. It was cooler that day, cloudy. I sat on the couch and read by the open window, the curtain drifting into the room and gently back to the window. Then the rain came, heavy and miraculous after so many days of heat. I went to the open window and watched it come down on the ancient tile roof, mist slowly covering my skin. And my sister called me on the phone, and ecstatically I told her about the rain first thing, just like I’m telling you now. I sat back down, listening to her tell me about her life, watching the curtain waving harder now in the storm, and I thought: what a thing it is to be alive in the world.

And these images, taken with both my eyes and camera, hopefully moved from my head to yours, exist as results, glittering detritus, evidence of being alive, having done something, putting my body and brain to use. Proof that I’d lived a different life than my own, a brief life of sensation and seeing. Bearing witness. Maybe that’s enough. 

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P.S. more Louise Glück:

1. Also so crazy to me that with the press of a few buttons, a certain door across the world will be unlocked to you

2. They also go on to talk about the underlying sexiness of the airport: the commands, the uniforms, etc.

3. NYC photographer Daniel Arnold mentioned in an interview once that he thinks of digital photography as a conversation with success, while film is a conversation with failure, and I think that’s so brilliant

4. One of my friends got into film photography a couple years ago; it took only two months before he told me that he was proud of the pictures he’d taken, but that he just didn’t know what to do with them. I basically told him: I know what you mean, plus it gets worse.