Travel and Bildung and Goethe, Oh My!

"Alles, was uns begegnet, läßt Spüren zurück. Alles trägt unmerklich zu unserer Bildung bei." ("Everything we encounter leaves traces behind. Everything contributes imperceptibly to our education.")  J.W. Goethe 

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1842) has long been viewed as one of Germany’s great cultural heroes. Arguably the greatest: a quintessential intellectual in a country that has historically prided itself on its tradition of writers, philosophers, scientists and musicians. He is, in other words, one of those dead white men that contemporary academic thought teaches us to regard with suspicion. But, in my opinion at least, Goethe has the advantage of being a great deal quirkier than your typical DWM. His rendition of Faust is a sprawling, rambling, unperformable mess—and it also happens to be fantastic. His novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was fueling teenage angst decades before The Catcher in the Rye. His total body of work is massive, and disregards all boundaries of genre, subject and style.

Goethe also happens to have been a huge fan of travel. He wrote extensively on the subject: the book Italienische Reise (“Italian Journey”) is a travelogue adapted from the journals he kept during his travels in Italy in his mid-thirties. In college, I dismissed this branch of Goethe’s work out of hand. The expoundings of a thirty-something German Romantic on the sublime beauties of the Italian Alps or the curious ways of quaint Italian village-folk seemed entirely irrelevant to my life as a young twenty-something in the twenty-first century. But now, on the verge of my own Deutsche Reise, I’m reevaluating my position and, with the help of that great boon to research, Google, I’ve turned up a couple of ideas worth pondering.

As I’ve said already, Goethe was a huge advocate for the merits of travel. Specifically, he believed strongly in the importance of travel as it pertains to Bildung. Bildung is one of those great German words, like Wissen, Dasein, Weltanschauung, the meaning of which the English translation— in this case, “education”— doesn’t quite capture. Education is in there, certainly, but it shares the stage with a sense of development (if you’re reading this with a solid grasp of basic literature vocabulary, you might remember Bildungsroman, which is translated in English to “novel of development”), and of experience. Just because we English-speakers don’t have a word for this phenomenon doesn’t mean that we don’t recognize it, don’t aspire to it. Thinking about myself and my friends—particularly those who were at Kenyon with me—it seems to me that what we’re all after, at least in part, is Bildung.

According to Goethe, the best opportunities for Bildung are to be found, not in tiny liberal arts colleges on hills in Ohio, but on the road. “Die beste Billdung findet ein gescheiter Mensch auf Reisen,” (“A clever person finds the best education in travel,”) he writes at one point in the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. (I’ve already admitted that my primary research source on this subject has been Google, so I trust you won’t hold it against me when I tell you that I haven’t actually read this novel and therefore don’t know in what context this statement is made, by whom, or to what extent the reader is meant to take it seriously. I’ve graduated, I’m lazy, and I, like most people, have a fondness for snappy capsule-quotes that seem to say something meaningful about Life, the Universe, and Everything.) If I’m interpreting the opinions of Germany’s foremost Geistesmensch correctly, he believes that travel is important because it forces us into contact with different languages and foods, different ways of thinking and of doing things, different value systems and different points of view. In other words: Goethe, off in fuddy-duddy Dead White Man land, advocates travel for much the same reasons as our living, breathing college professors do when they urge us to study abroad. I can almost imagine Professor Goethe at a small liberal arts college today, in a tweed jacket with worn elbows, a rumpled, food-stained shirt and loosened tie, sitting in his book-cluttered office across from a bright-eyed undergrad and saying, “Go. Travel. See. Learn. It’s the best way to become a person.”

So that’s what I intend to do. It’s what programs like Fulbright are for, if you think about it: I’m going to see new things, hear new things, smell and touch and taste new things (in short: five senses, prepare to be rocked). I’m going to talk to new people whose backgrounds and perspectives differ radically from my own and, when it’s all said and done, the theory goes, I’ll a better person for it. While that may sound selfish and not suitably idealistic, I’m certainly not out to achieve world peace by teaching English in upper-class urban Frankfurt, and I think it would be much worse to claim that I was. I guess the idea is that I do ultimately do something with my gebildet-ness (though, like all good German abstracts, Bildung is a Platonic ideal, something not to achieve but to constantly strive toward). Something that—I don’t know—advances human understanding, makes the world a better place. But I’d be kidding myself if I claimed, at twenty-two, to know what that something might be.

Here’s a question to wrap up on, then: what does it mean to be gebildet in our increasingly globalized, ever-more fragmented twenty-first century world? In Goethe’s time, it meant a solid grasp of philosophy and science and language, and an appreciation for the finer things in life, like music and art and literature. But while those are all still noble pursuits, and things that any good Gebildete should try to attain, I think our modern world might call for more emphasis on other ideals, like cultural literacy or tolerance or progressiveness. These are the qualities the world might be in need of, going forward; and while it may not necessarily pay all that well to become gebildet, at least we can rest easy knowing that the world will never be short on idealistic young globe-trotters to follow Goethe's advice: “Die beste Bildung findet ein gescheiter Mensch auf Reisen.” 

Ten Days Until Departure...

... so it may seem like this blog is a little premature. But I've been stuck in a maddening sort of  pre-departure holding pattern for a week and a half now, with nothing to do but twiddle my thumbs and obsess over what may or may not have gone wrong/be going wrong /go wrong in the future, and I've decided the only way to reclaim some peace of mind is to stop sulking and start acting like someone who is going to Germany for a year. And what do people who are going to Germany (or anywhere for that matter), and who are my age, do? Why, blog of course!

The waiting is, by far, the worst part. I've been doing my level best to distract myself: with trips to the gym, with flexing my newly found cooking muscles for my family, with HBO-GO and iTunes and the Food Network and NPR. But mostly I skulk around my house in my comfy pants, assembling a mental catalog of all the potential catastrophes that may interfere with my travel plans or, worse, with my grant as a whole-- an important email overlooked, a crucial form gone AWOL, etc. (**BREAKING NEWS** Even as I write this, my mother comes into my room with a package containing the student ID card I need to board my flight and neglected to order until the last possible moment. Phew) Also, I waste excessive amounts of time on Facebook, jealously stalking those friends who have already embarked on the first stage of their post-graduation life, whatever that stage looks like for them; or, worse still, the friends who are, this very day, returning to the reassuring shelter of the tiny liberal arts college on the hill that, with all due pomp and circumstance and a couple of speeches of varying usefulness, kicked me to the curb in May with a piece of paper that supposedly attests to my readiness for what lies ahead. One positive to come from all of this Facebook stalking: it has forced me to come to terms with the hard truth that I had been conveniently ignoring all summer: I am no longer an undergraduate. Ready or not (I mean me) here I come.

Again, I try to distract myself from all of this-- from feeling thoroughly unprepared for real life; from being paralyzed with the fear and uncertainty of moving to a 1.) large city in a 2.) foreign country, both of which are new to me (I didn't go abroad as an undergrad, even though I was a language major, because funds and fortitude were lacking); from mourning the relationship I had no choice but to give up in order to embark on this grand adventure. Mostly, though, my brain feels much like those wild cats in the Cat House down at the Cincinnati Zoo look: when it's not sleeping, which most of the time it is, it's pacing back and forth endlessly along the plate glass that separates it from the rest of the world, able to see what's on the other side but utterly flummoxed as to how to get to it.

Once the ball gets rolling, of course-- once I'm in Germany, once I'm finally doing instead of waiting to do-- most of my current anxieties and neuroses will disappear or, more accurately, be replaced by new ones. Right now I'd welcome those new, more kinetic worries: starting work, finding a place to live, meeting new people, navigating a new city/country/language/culture. These are worries that come with concrete nouns and active verbs attached-- a sense, again, of doing, and of moving forward as opposed to idling. Right now, though, I can't really do much, just watch the very dramatic and decisive life change headed my way come closer and closer. I can't reach out and touch it yet; it's on the other side of that glass which, granted, will disappear soon-- sooner, perhaps, than I'd like it to. Once the safety glass is gone, though, will I have the courage to step out of my accustomed habitat into a larger world that I have, until now, watched only from a comfortable and protected distance? (This is where the cat analogy breaks down: in the case of the animal, the glass is more for the protection of what's outside the glass than what's inside.)

That, I suppose, remains to be seen.