Closing argument.

"Searching for patterns in static,
They start to make sense
The longer I'm at it." - Death Cab for Cutie

"This is me with the world on the tip of my tongue." - Taking Back Sunday

"They say they never really miss you 'til you dead or you gone,
So on that note I'm leaving after this song." - Jay-Z


There is a shot from the BBC series Planet Earth of a hurricane raging above America's Gulf Coast. It is especially memorable to the viewer because the camera that captured it was in space, high above the carnage on the ground, where the true scope and scale of the hurricane itself can be observed rather than the individual winds that comprise it. With our feet on the ground we normally measure the hurricane's effects, the devastation left in places like the Lower Ninth Ward or Galveston. We listen to interviews of those whose lives have been forever changed by circumstance, if we bother to listen at all. We pay little attention to the hurricane itself, to all the ignored miles of ocean that it encompasses. We break it down to the parts that we can quantify and comprehend, the Saffir-Simpson scale, property damages in the hundreds of millions. This approach casts the hurricane as something random, incomprehensible. That shot reminds us that there is a poetry to its grandeur.

The most beautiful quality of traveling for so long is that you see more than a list of cities, or an enumeration of monuments. The phrase "see the world" is used pretty casually, has lost basically all its meaning. But because I was in so many different countries, I saw more than similarities between a few of them. For this small period of time in my life, I really feel like I saw the world. Its true scope, its true scale. Not merely similarities or parallels between one city and another, but how these parallels themselves were part of something greater. More than lines on a map. Something closer to the lines of sheet music.

It started with Rembrandt. Going to museums nearly every day, in every new city, I was seeing a large number of his ninety-some self-portraits. The Louvre and Musee d'Orsay in Paris, the National Galleries of London and Edinburgh, Rijkmuseum in Amsterdam, the Uffizi in Florence. Even when this began, I didn't just walk up to his portrait and move on. Early on I was struck by the differences between them. The darker shading creeping in at the ages when he was poorer, more depressed. The fluctuating number of lines in his face, whether or not his eyes held a glint or its more-telling absence. I remember one of the portraits I saw towards the latter part of my time in Europe was bittersweet. In it Rembrandt was young, proud and self-assured. I felt oddly happy to see him like this, the simple joy as when you visit an old friend you have been out of contact with for a while, one who is doing better than expected. But I grew somewhat mournful because I had already seen what he could not- the pain that he would go through later in his life, the darker pigments that would inch closer from the edges of the canvas.

At the British Museum in London, I saw an exhibit on dogu, small carved figures from ancient Japan. When I visited Tokyo three months later, the same traveling exhibit was about to open at its National Museum in Ueno Park. The Tokyo Tower is modeled after the Eiffel in Paris, more colorful, far more utilitarian, but the resemblance is clear. I walked by restaurants in Estonia and Cambodia that share names. At the Sony headquarters in Tokyo's Ginza district, there are large Lego sculptures of the Coliseum in Rome, the floating torii at Miyajima, and Angkor Wat. I couldn't help but beam at the sight. I had not only been to each of them; I'd been to each within the past two months.

This pattern and repetition goes beyond arts and sights. When less specific, it grows more acute. I've been attracted to street art for years, but in Europe it became something more, especially after Berlin. Leaving Europe for the Middle East and then Southeast Asia, the street art doesn't just change. For the most part it disappears altogether. I can't remember seeing any at all in India or Cambodia. Because graffiti is an indication of disposable income. If people are doing everything they can just to afford food, the idea of purchasing spray paint merely for self-expression is absurd. This holds true for smoking as well. In my two weeks in India and Cambodia, I saw two locals smoking on the streets. And weirdly enough, they both had the exact same unnerving posture: crouched low to the ground, like a gargoyle, their bent knees at eye level, hunched shoulders and arms inside of these. Two people of different nationalities that will never meet, almost assuredly don't have the money to ever leave the borders of their own country, yet identical in that telling stance. After watching the first one in India for a few minutes, I knew what I would see in the second on the streets of Battambang. They were both silently aggressive, not towards me but others, both native and foreign, who walked by. A belligerence that was inappropriate given their situation. Something like prey trying desperately to be a predator.

It started with Rembrandt. It continued with us all. The main park in Riga, Latvia contains a small bridge covered in locks with the names of couples. On their wedding day, these lovers clasp the lock around the wrought iron and throw the key in to the river below. Eternal love manifest. Similar sunken keys can be found hundreds of miles away at the bottom of the Arno River in Florence, Italy, beneath the picturesque Ponte Vecchio. Here the same tradition is carried out. It's not important which came first. Chronology is inconsequential; commonality alone is essential. A few kilometers away from the Ponte Vecchio, on a side street I came across graffiti of a potted flower, its stem making up the last "i" of the accompanying word "imagini." I'd seen this a month and a half earlier in Barcelona, on another side street nowhere near any of the tourist attractions. Comparing the pictures on my laptop, I saw that the flowers and the penmanship were different. It was not the same artist, but the same concept, the same emotion. My emotion. Our emotion.

In these twenty-one weeks that have just come to a close, I have been privileged to have the perspective of that camera watching the hurricane rage. I've seen life on the ground, as we all do, but I have managed to also see life from above. In this time, I have watched the Earth swirl, and I have watched the Earth dance. And I have seen the symmetry in the choreography. The intrinsic rhythms we follow, unknowingly, movements merging into the one grand symphony.

That I enjoyed this perspective deeply might make it sound like I have a God complex. I don't think that's true. What I do have is a Prodigal Son complex. What I do have is the desire to leave, experience, and return. I know that I am not the same person that left five months ago, but I also don't think I'm a different one. Hopefully just deeper. Hopefully my change is due to growth. Roots stretching lower, firmer, from the lessons that have come by watching those winds, by listening to their melody. On this trip there is only one lesson left to share. The one that helped me the most on my travels.

Florence. Piazza Di Santa Croce. Still part of that makeshift study abroad phase I wrote about earlier. I have no idea why this lesson came here specifically, and it wasn't inspired by anything that happened to me or that I observed. Maybe when you're in the city of Dante and in the square that holds his majestic statue, you're prone for hyperbole. But I don't think that's what this is. It's a sentence that just arrived in my head, too curious to let go. Like a truth so simple you're positive you can disprove it, but you can't.... you know, like that no word rhymes with "silver" or "month."

You are immortal every day of your life except for one.

Immortal. Not invulnerable, we still must suffer the same pains, the same frailties. But there's only one morning you will see that won't be followed by a night. Maybe this is closer to that God complex, but I still would disagree. It's just the definition of being human. I think we live down to our expectations so much, we forget our limitations are a little bit elastic. We are capable of so much more. We can go a little farther, accomplish a little bit more than we did yesterday. And we can let those yesterdays add up for the rest of our lives. When I woke up in the morning, in Doha, in Wadi Musa, in Chiang-Mai, in Phnom Penh, in Pakse, in Kyoto, in Los Angeles, in Linesville, Pennsylvania, and a few weeks from now in Brooklyn, this thought was, is, and will be somewhere on my mind. It's the thought that got me out of danger in Egypt, through the severe stomach pains and solitude in Istanbul, and pushed me farther on the rock trails of Petra, the pounding rains of the Kyoto streets, the one in my head every time I took the stairs instead of the escalator, when I went running today for the first time since July, snow cascading down from a 22 degree white sky.

It is the thought on my mind as I officially end this journey.

And it will be the thought on my mind when I begin my next one.

___________________________

(post-script) Thank you so much for reading this, whether it is your first post, or you've been with me the whole way. In some ways this was a lifeline to everyone back home, and your support has been phenomenal. This will be the last post I write on this blog..... for now. I'm sure that that Prodigal Son complex will kick in again, even if it's just for a week or two, and when that happens, I'll probably be spilling my brains out about it here. As for the time til then, I've fallen back in love with writing, but I'm still unsure if this will translate into an actual separate blog. There was something very special about these last 5 months of my life, and I don't want to water that down. We'll see.

Thank you again for the company.

Joshua