I’m spending this week at a sleepy house in the woods just outside of Barcelona called Casa Tilo. I’m here for a writing retreat called the Inscribe Residency, which I came across by happenstance in Bluedot’s Slack channel while I was taking courses on AI safety and governance. It is supposed to be an attempt at a European version of Inkhaven. I am no European, but Inkhaven is a whole month long and I have a full-time job, so I applied to Inscribe noting that I have absolutely no connection to Europe; in fact, this would be my first time in Europe. They let me in nonetheless.
The trip here was long and grueling. My plane to Frankfurt, my first stop, was delayed by about thirty minutes. This was just enough to be a problem. When I got to Germany, my connecting flight was boarding. I still had time. But I had to wait for border security, which took nearly an hour. Afterward, I went to my gate and asked how I could get on a different flight. Apparently, I had to either call Condor, my airline, or go outside the secured zone to talk to someone in person. My phone had no service there, so off I went.
When I got there, there was a small line outside. No problem. I ended up waiting over forty minutes to move twenty feet. When I finally got to the support desk, I was informed, after much wide-eyed brow-furrowing and keyboard clacking, that there were no seats available on any flight from Frankfurt to Barcelona in the next two days. So, instead I was to stay the night at the Steigenburger Airport Hotel and depart to Prague the following morning and go to Barcelona from there. Thirty minutes had already cost me twenty-four hours.
While I had a weissbier at the hotel bar, a little girl and her siblings came up to the barkeep. The girl asked, “Excuse me, would you please give me some scotch?” The barkeep was surprised and a little amused. “No! You’re underage?” he said. The girl stood there, unblinking. “Scotch, whiskey?” the man says, gesturing to a bottle of Glenlivet. “Oh! No.” says the girl. She holds up a small envelope, unsealed. “Ah!” The barkeep comes back with a stapler.
The next morning, I have a large breakfast at the hotel an head off to Prague. The flight is sparsely attended and pleasant. The Prague airport is charming. There’s lots of espresso, pastries, and polite Czechs. But my plane is once again delayed. There was only a moderate number of people, but boarding took nearly an hour just to get to the buses shuttling us to the plane. On the flight, everyone was talking. I have never seen so many people get up to use the restroom on a sub two-hour flight. The lady in front of me ordered a hot meal and more than one drink.
When I finally got to Barcelona, I ordered an Uber to get to Casa Tilo. I was too impatient by that point to take a train. The ride took about an hour. The first three quarters of it were blissful, and I slept better than on any of the planes. But when we got into the small town of Arenys de Munt, my driver, Georgii, got lost. He had followed the map and gone to a road that was closed off. We stopped near a tiny bar. Georgii talked to some locals, but didn’t seem to get anything useful. “I don’t know. You can get out? Stay at the bar?” he says. For a moment I thought I would be stuck in the middle of a forest in Spain with no cell service or knowledge of Spanish. Luckily, some concerned and helpful individual was able to point us in the right direction at the last moment. We eventually arrived at Casa Tilo, and I left Georgii a hefty tip.
I started my journey here on Friday at 8 AM. Now it is 4:37 PM on Sunday, and I have an essay to write. I am off into another world.
Airports are a kind of purgatory. Unlike the open road, I don’t think anyone goes to an airport just for fun (at least not the same airports I’m going to). Everyone there is uncomfortable, low on sleep, and itching to get somewhere else. This rubs off on you. If you stay in this no-man’s-land for long enough, it starts to hollow you out.
Perhaps because this journey took so long, I felt that effect with a particular potency. I realized, laying on my hotel bed in Frankfurt, that I had been on autopilot the last couple days. I had brought books to read and crossword puzzles to solve, but I mostly avoided them, even at long stretches at the airport. I just stared out of windows and checked my itinerary. I could barely even get myself to listen to music. When I finally did, I realized that my priorities and sense of what is important had been nuked. I was solely focused on getting to my destination. I had even put out of mind why I was going there. Yes, to write, but why? It’s not as if I had forgotten. The answers were there if I cared to think. But I didn’t.
My first two days at Casa Tilo were much more pleasant, but the feeling of hollowness and displacement got worse. So, I thought a lot about why exactly this was happening. We humans are social beings. Our personalities and identities are in large part tethered to the people we surround ourselves with. Traveling large distances, we uproot ourselves from all of our context, from everything that is familiar. We separate ourselves from the people and places and things we know. And, in so doing, we distance ourselves, even if partially, even if momentarily, from what those people, places, and things consider important.
Arriving at our destination, we step out of the purgatorial fire, emptied and prepared for our new world. Everyone here is a stranger. I spend the first couple days awash in a new set of beliefs, expectations, and priorities. I feel closer to the universal subspace of the internet, a teeming chaosmos of anxiety.
But on the third day, I wake up, and I feel good. Strangers have become friends. I can enjoy the smell of coffee. I hear the goats and goatherds clamoring in the distance. I relax in a hammock. Life feels human once again.
Now, I have two days before my world changes again.
If I have taken anything away from this, it is the importance of having practices to ground yourself at any time and place. You need something that no one can take away from you. This was just a short trip, but it won’t always be. As I talked to my mom about this on the phone, she reflected on her own trip to Spain. She said “Oh, yeah. I can see how I could be isolated and brainwashed.”
Solzhenitsyn composed poetry in his head. Women in a Japanese prison camp in Sumatra used music. For Christians, prayer and Scripture are especially powerful. Scripture lets you see yourself embedded in a larger story—indeed, the largest story. In prayer, we can lay to rest all our concerns and confusions, and remind ourselves of the things that are truly important. As our world becomes more and more a foreign land, so will we need to cultivate a small plot of our true home wherever we are. That much is necessary to stay sane in an insane world.
