If Sophie's Right...

Because I’m “handing” this blog in late, I had the chance to sit in class and think about travel with regards to The Evening of the Holiday. What occurred to me was the strange proposition of Sophie’s that Tancredi doesn’t know her because she is on holiday, and that she isn’t the same person when she is on holiday. For some reason, this sits oddly with me, because somehow, it’s true. We travel, knowing that our journey will only be for a short amount of time, and that we will be returning. Those who travel, as Sophie says, are not fully themselves while they do so, because they are relaxed, not worrying, or simply putting on a different “façade”. Not that people are fake when they travel, they just simply act differently in unfamiliar surroundings than they would in their everyday routines. This is the reason for which Sophie says Tancredi cannot know her fully.
One of the first questions that we covered in this class was: “why do we travel?” One of the reasons people travel, among many others, is to find a change for themselves. We go to other places to look for this change, this epiphany, which will turn us around and let us figure out who we are, and what will make our lives better. Yet, taking into perspective the idea that we are not ourselves when we travel, how can we change? If we go into a different place with a different outlook on things, then we can’t truly adapt what we’ve learned back into our own daily routines, because when we return home, we leave the “traveler” in us behind. If Sophie cannot go away to a different country and fall in love, truly know somebody, then how can any traveler come to know themselves?