"standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean"

Photo Credit: Maliz Ong

Two weeks ago, the students turned in their first short essay assignment, which is now their second and final short essay in this course and is due December 6th.  I want to see them better integrate ideas from Gunther Barth's City People: The Rise of Modern City Culture in Nineteenth Century America into their work. We discussed ways to do that as a class and moreover, how we will collectively make a class video that presents a narrative based on this assignment, which requires them to write about a building that existed in Tuscaloosa during the nineteenth century. Then we turned to completing Martha Sandweiss' Passing Strange. For the time being, they are comparing geologist Clarence King's experiences,which appear in Sandweiss' book, to those of Eliza Potter, the hairdresser of mixed race  whose experiences appear in her self-penned memoir. They must fold Barth's ideas into this assignment, too. I look forward to seeing what they write. When I created the prompts for this second assignment, even I was surprised to see the degree to which these two unlikely bodies had very similar experiences that might even approach them sharing a particular worldview were it not for the degree to which King as a white man certainly had more power than Potter, a woman of African descent. He was born into wealth in Newport. She was born into more curiously unknown beginnings in New York and accumulated a bit of money as a hairdresser to wealthy whites on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. What makes these two people similar? What makes them different? One strand easily in view when observing their lives is their desire to travel, something about which I was reminded while in Chicago recently. While at a conference, I passed time in a bookstore and there, saw a markdown copy of American travel writer Paul Theroux' The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road. As the blurb on the back of the book  promises, it is filled with blurbs from Theroux's earlier published books and "from travelers both familiar and unexpected," among them Mark Twain and Anton Chekhov. I bought it and am slowly reading it. Today I was drawn to the heading "Travel and Optimism,"  which offers this quote about travel:

It was the poor person's way of going abroad - standing at the seaside and staring at the ocean. All travelers are optimists, I thought. Travel itself is a sort of optimism in action.

This appeared in Theoroux' The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Britain. It made me wonder about the many times I have seen people, rich and poor, drawn to the lake or river fronts and indeed the seaside. The ability to do so becomes a sort of great equalizer, but only for a moment. Certainly one cannot forget the great horrors that took place across time in such a space including the African slave trade. Today, while one can own seaside property, few can entirely prevent others from a glimpse of a body of water that figured greatly, as the students should be learning, into the ways in which America became a modern and industrialized country. For example, like indigenous people, European settlers found value in building settlements beside water where ports and landings connected cities here and abroad to each other. On water, King and Potter often traveled, sometimes seeing different things and often feeling similar feelings, among them feelings of loneliness. Perhaps, as Theroux senses, they moved through space to lighten their spirits. Lest  I write too much, I will leave what else can be said about this matter to the students.