Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #5: First Person Singular

The holy business of noticing.

On Fridays I run excerpts from The Road to Elsewhere, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (You can find the first entry here.) It tells the story of my road through Paris, London, and Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living.

EARLY ON IN MY PARIS DAYS, I picked up The Waves, Virginia Woolf’s impressionistic history of six friends as they progress from sensitive children to calcified adults. The first time I read it, I was closer to her creation, a toddler named Bernard, who keenly felt the sploosh of his nurse’s washing sponge, than I was to another character named Louis, who, like my own father, was locked in a business career that rewarded and constrained him in equal measure. 

Near the end of The Waves, Bernard—a life-long writer of phrases that never quite escaped his notebooks—delivered a monologue that struck horror in my 21-year-old soul. I scratched it into an early page of my journal, as a warning: “Outside the undifferentiated forces r…