I boarded a flight at Kennedy Airport in New York. There were HSBC ads in the jet bridge. I flew for 24 hours to the bottom of the world. There were HSBC ads in the jet bridge…

I left a country, the United States, in the midst of an election campaign. I arrived in a country, Australia, in the midst of an election campaign…

I had a cappuccino before I left. There was a cute heart shape traced in the foam. Next to the Sydney Opera House, familiar from photographs, I had a cappuccino. There was a cute heart shape traced in the foam…

From my window in Brooklyn Heights I watch joggers at water’s edge, some with dogs or infants in strollers…From my Sydney hotel window I gaze at an urban landscape similarly transformed. I watch joggers at water’s edge. They wear the same gear. They use the same devices. They are into wellness in the same way.

I lose myself in the silvery play of moonlight on water. Where on earth am I? I have traveled a long way through time zones over a vast ocean to find myself in the same place. My Twitter feed looks the same. My Facebook friends have not changed. My little universe with all its little excitements and aggravations is still at my fingertips. My bills are maddeningly accessible. Through an immense displacement nothing has been left behind. Even in another hemisphere I contemplate my life from the same angle. People argue about climate change and same-sex marriage and jobs and immigration, as if the world is now a place where everyone discusses the same thing…

In his great poem “The City,” C.P. Cavafy wrote that: “As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.” We never escape our own skins, nor our lives lived to this point, however far we go in search of escape. But today’s trap, fashioned through technology, is of a different nature. The homogenization of experience is also an insidious invitation to conform.

Experience, like journalism, withers without immersion in place. At some level, the truly lived moment involves the ability to get lost — lost in a conversation, or in the back alleys or Naples, or in silence, or in the scents and inflections of a new city. There is no greater thrill than being lost in this way because self is left behind, a form of liberation.

Yet a world is taking form that wants you never to be lost, never to feel displaced, never to be unanchored, never to be unable to photograph yourself, never to stand in awe before mystery, never to exit your safety zone (or only in managed fashion), never to leave your life behind: a world where you travel for 24 hours to your point of departure.

How reassuring! How desperate!…

So I am somewhere else after all. Surely I am. I wake at night, sleep by day, and find myself altogether lost in translation.

~ Roger Cohen, excerpts from Australia or Anywhere

Photo: Hiro Harumatsumoto via Ignant.de