“Seeing” on the road

Cairo, Egypt

Most of us travel with eyes capable of absorbing the scenes around us. Part of why we travel is to see.

We travel to see the incredible landscape of the planet — the sunrise at Mount Everest, perhaps, which leaves you in awe, or, lower to the ground, the simple peacock standing in a field as your Indian train speeds past at dusk.

We travel also to see things that are not easy to see. The Egyptian man in Alexandria, for example, who walks past your cafe table selling kleenexes, his skeletal frame so disfigured that he walks with his torso almost parallel to the ground. His eyes meet yours and you exchange a smile, suddenly conscious of the dollar’s worth of lemon juice in your hand and the relatively great health along your own spine. Your eyes follow him down the block, where with each step he clutches his left knee with his left hand to manhandle that leg forward. And as he hauls himself across the street (unmarried and unlikely to marry, you imagine), your eyes watch vehicles swerve or stop around him, those damned kleenex packets hanging from his right hand.

We travel too to see the monuments and museums nations build to reflect their history, or their leader’s vanity (can anyone say Turkmenbashi?). We travel to see memorials to the dead — and to remember the depths of cruelty we are capable of — in places such as Auschwitz, Choeung Ek, and Hellfire Pass.

We travel to see a mother love her child in China, a father and daughter watch the sunset on the Mediterranean coast, and a girl hold her two-year-old brother’s hand as he pees into a rice field in the Mekong Delta. We travel to watch as tens of thousands of Muslims kneel together in prayer on city streets before sunrise, and to watch others pray in colonial churches, Buddhist temples, and elsewhere.

We travel to see the crumbling ruins of empires past, to view firsthand how things which once were are no more. We travel to see the glistening towers in today’s ever-expanding megacities, as well as the people who build and populate them.

And sometimes we may even travel to catch our own reflection in a cracked and dirty mirror, not entirely sure for a moment what it is — or rather who it is — that we’re looking at. And perhaps later in the day, when we see our reflection not in glass but in the eyes and faces of our neighbors, we will have a moment of clarity about what and who we are.

We travel, I suppose, for many reasons, both conscious and unconscious. And we travel with eyes which often see only dimly and will never the see the whole, but which will always be a key vehicle through which we better come to know and love the world.