Double Vision

Double Vision

When I first moved to Paris at the beginning of the year, my routine as a traveler was much different than it is now. Each morning I awoke, excited and wide-eyed, and set out in the city with little or no purpose but to see it. I walked the streets with an eager overattentiveness to detail. The faces of the tall women, sleek and straight-nosed, and their dangling cigarettes; the hunch-backed old men with porridge brown faces and crumbling hands clutching canes; the tall shuttered windows lining the street hovering eyes, openings into salons and dusty bedrooms and lives in the middle of morning... I saw the city, I lived it, as De Botton put it, "alive to the layers of history beneath the present" (247). My father calls it living with double vision. It is the traveler's approach to living. I saw everything as new, special, part of a great beautiful picture I was inside, and so found it exhilirating, as a place, as a home. Yet as time went on, as Paris became more of a home and less of a travel location, I became more and more accustomed to my surroundings and therefore more and more disinterested. I memorized the outline of my street as it bended towards my home, and rushed through the masses of beautiful strangers with nothing but the sight of my building door in mind. I huffed behind slow tall women and waddling old men, belittled them as objects in my path rather than participants in the moment of my life. I have become "habituated and therefore blind" (247).

Reading De Botton's On Habit brought my own life routine into mind. I thought of myself in Paris, and realized that, like in New York, with time I had become over habituated with the surroundings of my life. I walked fast, no matter where I was going or how much time I had to get there, because roads to me were nothing but routes, railways to my destination. I read in subways because shuttles were no more than zooming vessels more efficient transport that would arrive me at my ending point sooner than I could imagine. I rarely took different routes to class and work; I knew the best way to get there, what would be the point of changing now? The wide-eyedness I'd acquired on moving to New York for the first time had faded and I had slipped from the position of traveler, visitor, to inhabitant. Being a lover of travel, I have always prided myself on the thought that I am very visually attentive, not only when new worlds are opened in front of me, but when I wander in my own old worlds, living my own bored daily existence. I never thought I woud lose that sight, that double vision, that allows me to take the time to "notice what [I] have already seen" (254). But reading De Botton's final chapter of The Art of Travel has proved that not only am I guilty of living blindly in my own home, but this second home in Paris, my traveler's home away from home, has fallen into the same habituated state and therefore faded into the unchangeable ordinary in my eyes. De Botton has so convinced me to change, to open my eyes, widen my sight to see everything. I may lose track of my destination. I may take the inefficient route. I may even take forever to get there. But perhaps it's worth it... to walk slower, listen harder, and see wider the world around... perhaps it's worth a little tardiness in the end.