Read Online Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change by Andrew Solomon - Free Book Online Page B

and I had children, we began taking them with us on trips as soon as they learned to walk, because we wanted them to have a sense of the world as a large and varied place overflowing with possibilities. Children are malleable for a short time only, and whatever limits you set soon become their norm. We wanted that norm to include what is surprising, enchanting, uncomfortable, glamorous, disorienting, exciting, and weird about travel. They can decide to be homebodies when they grow up, but at least they will know what they are setting aside.
    My daughter is eight and my son is six and a half, and both are already excellent travelers. When they were toddlers, people would say, “They’re far too young. They’ll never remember Spain.” But we don’t have current experiences only for the sake of future memories; adventures have their worth even if they are restricted to the present tense. While I anticipated that George and Blaine might not remember a particular place, I knew that I would remember taking them there, and that they would be shaped by the earliest possible understanding that people have varied customs and beliefs. When Blaine was three, I carried her outside a restaurant to see the sunset over the Place de la Concorde and told her about having seen the same sight with my own mother. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “I’m so happy right now.” A year later, we were on the floor playing with her dolls, and she announced, “Emma is hungry. She has to go get something to eat.”
    I said, “Well, where would Emma like to get something? Maybe from Central Market?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “Where, then?”
    “Paris.”
    My son George has shown a particular interest in maps. He studies them for hours on end, tracing where one country abuts another. A New York cabbie announced to us that he came from Senegal, caught the eye of then five-year-old George in the rearview mirror, and said, “I’ll bet you don’t know where that is, little boy.”
    George said, “South of Mauritania, next to Mali and Guinea.” The driver nearly crashed the taxi.
    A few months later, we asked George where he’d go if he could go anywhere in the world. He thought for a moment before responding, “Syria.”
    John and I were both alarmed. “Syria!” we said. “Why Syria?”
    George said patiently, using an expression that has some currency in our house, “Someone has to tell those people that what they’re doing is inappropriate behavior.”
    Traveling with my children offers three primary pleasures. First, their delight in new things kindles my own delight, returning freshness to a ride in a gondola, a Rocky Mountain vista, the Changing of the Guard. Many touristic clichés are overexposed because they are singular and spectacular, and children provide an excuse to enjoy them again. Second, the advantages of traveling make a worthy legacy: I am lucky that I was given the world so early. In passing that gift along, I rekindle my intimacy with my mother; taking my children to faraway places honors her memory. Finally, my children have returned a sense of purposefulness to my travel. I’ve been to so many places and seen so much, and sometimes it feels like a glut of sunsets and churches and monuments. My mind has been stretched by the world’s diversity, and may be approaching its elastic limits. In addressing the minds of my children, however, an urgent sense of purpose is renewed. I do not expect that George will settle the conflict with ISIL, but I think the knowledge he and Blaine and their half siblings Oliver and Lucy are accumulating will broaden their inherent kindness and thus increase the planet’s depleted stores of compassion.
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    I used to think that I was unusually reactive to the thinness of the air in a plane’s pressurized cabin. I cry on planes—at the movies Iwatch, the books I read, the letters and e-mails I attempt to answer. Those surges of emotion have a quality of abrupt intensity that is most