A curious thing happens to me between going through security and boarding a plane. No longer home and not yet at my destination, I become slightly unhinged. Not in my mind, mind you, but in habits of thinking about who I might be. In practical (and plain) terms, this means that I will buy magazines and books (and at a premium price imposed by the last bookstands before take-off too) I wouldn't allow myself to even look at on account of the image of myself as “serious” – reader or writer. And so it was on my last foray into the wider world, some 10 days ago when I went off to see my older son in Washington, DC. Which means that I finally got to read Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.
Sure, I raced through it, and without carrying the excess baggage of my reader's guilt over following Gilbert on a journey of self discovery made so public (not to mention handsomely profitable). Her style is deceptively breezy and balmy, making the read a pleasure of its own. Her prose sparkles and is soft and comfortable, like the leather seat in first class, making for a cushy journey into the exotic, but still pleasant, landscapes of worlds that are likely to be a lot more unglamorous, unconformable, and even inhospitable to travelers who lack the ease of making friends, with people or words. But I don't mean to belittle Gilbert's book. Below that ease and comfort she seems to possess with words, I see the mastery, the greasy, sweaty, and decidedly unglamorous work, of the writer who had to tame the amorphous (and, at times, dangerous) beast of the subject with the expert whip of language. While others reading this book may be dreaming of tracing Gilbert's spiritual unfolding in spaces that lure one with as much of the scared as they do with the sensual, I find myself more in the category of the pigs trained to sniff for truffles. Only what I am after is the morsel of morel that pushes through the loam of language. And which can make the meal of memoir, well (sorry for the string of alliterations) memorable.
While I trusted Gilbert as a writer, and gave myself readily over for transport by her language, I had a harder time with the spiritual landscapes of the journey. Gilbert, though she makes the point that the better part of spiritual enlightenment, like writing, is about showing up for the work, and then getting down to it, makes of transcendence (or even its attempt) into a chat over a perfectly brewed venti with God in the latest bucolic spiritual Starbucks outpost. Like a friend said in a recent tweet over the subject, there something too facile about Gilbert's spiritual experiences, at least as she presents them, because they tend to come across as “how EG got her groove back.” And, the way I see it, even if this has never been Gilbert's intention – not to mention, her actual spiritual experience – there is something of the aura of glib reproducibility of her experience by every earnest reader of this book, who, means permitting, could retrace Gilbert's steps, much like an fitness routine, to get the same glowing results.
In my spiritual evolution, such as it is, language is the weakest link, fraying and breaking apart the strands that weave the heart of Yoga: the settling of the mind into silence. I did try to write about my spiritual explorations before, but I soon realized that my mind was a blunt tool, lacking not only the finesse to recognize the indescribable in the depths of silence, but also in its brute force to hammer away until it could provoke an echo, not realizing that this sound is of its own making.
A for traveling far to find oneself at home in the universe, I have my doubts. Coincidentally (OK, may be not so coincidentally, if you happen to subscribe to the idea that there are no accidents in the universe), as I took a break from writing this post, I read Simon Winchester's review of Carl Hoffman's Lunatic Express in today's The Wall Street Journal. From what I gather, Hoffman's year-long journey by the nightmarish methods of travel the majority of human beings all over the world endure while they get from place to place (an imperative of the new global reality), may well be the perfect antidote to reading Gilbert's “Eat, Pray, Love,” both as a travelogue and as spiritual discovery.
Well then, maybe on Mr. Winchester's suggestion, I will pick up a copy at an airport, as I am unhoming myself in the limbo between security and boarding the plane so that I can glimpse what's it like to be at home nowhere.