And who am I when I spend a night alone in a motel outside, say, Erie, Pennsylvania? Who am I when I prowl that room, find only trash on television, when I search the phone book for nonexistent friends and relatives in Erie?
—Kurt Vonnegut
Maybe this one hits me as beautiful because as an airline pilot, I have spent a significant portion of the last ten years of my life prowling hotel rooms in places less glamorous than Erie, PA. For someone like me who is naturally curious and an explorer at heart (as all writers must be), it’s a blessing because it has given me the chance to spend a day somewhere I may never have been otherwise: Des Moines, where I found a pizza place that puts Chinese food on their pizzas. Presque Isle, Maine, a throwback to the 1950s and the height of Main Street America mixed with the grizzled weather-beaten look that pervades Maine, as it did in Bangor when I went to see Stephen King’s house. Or Albuquerque, Tulsa, and Amarillo, where I got a chance to see Route 66 years before I’ll retire and drive all the way down it.
But every blessing has its curse, and along with the free exploring opportunities that come with the job comes an unwanted loosening of the ties and roots of home. When I’m not there, I could be anywhere, but when I am, I still know that sometime, maybe a couple of days or maybe a week, I’m going to have to be gone again. Along with that weakening of a sense of home comes a slight dissolution of sense of place and self. When I say “I’m from Cleveland,” I could be saying that to a hotel desk clerk in Memphis or typing that on a laptop in Minneapolis. For as much of the month as not, I’m in two places at once, which sometimes leaves me feeling like I’m nowhere in particular, just as Vonnegut feels in this week’s passage.
What makes this passage extra piquant is that in only two sentences, even if you don’t travel for a living, you can feel his state of mind, his longing, his ennui. The “trash on television” and “nonexistent friends” beautifully bare what his soul is going through at that moment. That feeling is something he spent most of his life grappling with, even at home, and although it took him two decades to put it into words, the product, Slaughterhouse-Five, deserved the respect and recognition that it received. It was far from his first book, but it’s the one who made him famous, as he makes the main character (who he makes no attempt to distance himself from) “unstuck in time.” He is shattered by war and reality fragments for him, leaving him everywhere and nowhere. The book’s most famous sentence is, “So it goes,” but one of the girders underneath the floor of the book is the opening of this passage: “And who am I?”
For more about that, see my post on my visit to the Kurt Vonnegut museum.
Next week: From bleakness to jubilance in a single paragraph.
See the index for what’s been posted and what’s to come.
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