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The Mobile Age, Part I: Modernism
But these are also the internal tensions I now understand to have driven the events of my life as it has followed. The movement of my parents toward one another, toward Ecuador and then Venezuela and then five kids and that final, long and arduous trip to Vancouver that ends with me crying at the foot of their bed, saying, in effect, Enough is enough. No more nomad, no more refugee. I want to be a settler! Telling sentiments from the two-year-old version of myself because I remain a settler to this day, even returning to Vancouver after my family had all moved to Alberta. And although I do not live what appears to be a settled life – all but my immediate family is dispersed, my work is scattered all over, taking me to Toronto, Costa Rica and Shanghai in the past few months – I now also understand this to be a product of the diagram above. Because those tensions, those tendencies and yearnings that defined the modern era of mobility have also pushed us onward to further necessary distortions of the four basic archetypes. I’ll be exploring these in two upcoming articles: the evolution represented by my own globalized era and the evolution I anticipate for the post-globalized era to be inherited by my three-year-old son. But I won’t close before offering a final image from the modern era behind us, from my father’s life, naturally enough. He’d become a settled Albertan after moving there in his early 50s. And that was what he remained until only very recently when, having lost my mother early last year, a telling transformation has taken place. He announced he wanted to buy a second home in Vancouver, so he could visit and go for walks. Then he shifted focus to Victoria. Then, a couple weeks back, he shifted focus again. He’s thinking about a camper van now. “I could drive around,” he explained to me. “I could stop here and there. See a lot of different places.” Which was an idea to which I might have reasonably objected, given he’s 84 years old. But I didn’t say anything. I suddenly understood that this impulse had everything to do with mobility – specifically, that the true site of his settlement hadn’t been a place at all, but a person, a 52-year marriage. And without my mother, my father had in some ways been returned to a previous ordering of things in life, some element of himself necessarily remobilized, certain impulses of the modern nomad reawakened. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net |
