The Shock of Teapots

"...Travel returns us in just this way to sharpness of notice; and to be saturated in the sight of what is entirely new - the sun at an unaccustomed slope, stretched across the northland, separate from the infiltrating dusk that always seems about to fall through clear gray Stockholm - is to revisit the enigmatically lit puppet-stage outlines of childhood: those mental photographs and dreaming woodcuts or engravings that we retain from our earliest years. What we remember from childhood we remember forever - permanent ghosts, stamped, imprinted, eternally seen. Travelers regain this ghost-seizing brightness, eeriness, firstness.

     They regain it because they have cut themselves loose from their own society, from every society; they are, for a while, floating vagabonds, like astronauts out for a space walk on a long free line. They are subject to preternatural exhilarations, absurd horizons, unexpected forms and transmutations: the matter-of-fact (a battered old stoop, say, or the shape of a door) appears beautiful; or a stone that at home would not merit the blink of your eye here arrests you with its absolute particularity - just because it is what your hand already intimately knows. You think: a stone, a stone! They have stones here too! And you think: how uncannily the planet is girdled, as stone-speckled in Sweden as in New York. For the vagabond-voyeur (and for travelers voyeurism is irresistible), nothing is not for notice, nothing is banal, nothing is ordinary: not a rock, not the shoulder of a passer-by, not a teapot.

     ...This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock. Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting - far, far away - what you last met at home. Some say that travelers are informal anthropologists. But it is ontology - the investigation of the nature of being - that travelers do. Call it the flooding-in of the real...When travelers stare at heads and ears and necks and beards and mustaches, they are - in the encapsulated force of the selection - making art: portraits, voice sonatinas, the quick haiku of a strictly triangular nostril.

     Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by. Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers - and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye."

     -from "The Shock of Teapots," Cynthia Ozick

Just found out I will be traveling once again, in March I will be off to Stockholm, Sweden for the International Labor Process Conference! woo-hoo!