In a different world, probably a better one, I’d be on a boat right now. Some time last year I booked a cruise with my father, leaving from Buenos Aires early March. In mid-February my father decided not to go — some of the ports were canceled because of Omicron, so we rescheduled for the autumn — which left me with a lot of unexpected time in Argentina. I can’t say I did a lot with it; I had expected to be sitting around on a cruise ship largely doing nothing. Instead I sat around in a Buenos Aires’ AirBnB largely doing nothing.

Nothing, in this case, turned out to mean obsessively reloading the news from Ukraine. I find the whole thing incomprehensible, both in its cruelty and its conception. It’s hard to see how anybody, on any side, gains anything from any of the likely outcomes. I suppose if you think politics is zero-sum you can imagine a world in which destroying your neighbor improves your relative position, but that strikes me as a gross misreading of history.

I’ve tried a lot of ways of contextualizing Russia’s invasion: as a plucky fledgling democracy senselessly attacked by an Evil Empire, or as a flawed Realpolitk decision dreamed up in some bloodless Kubrickian war room, or as the reckoning for thirty years of botched diplomatic signaling by the Western World. None of these explanations seem right. Or maybe they all seem equally plausible, while still being woefully reductive.

As luck would have it I started reading Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 back in December. The day Russia invaded I had literally just reached the page covering Ukraine’s secession and the subsequent dissolution of the USSR, so the history of the region was pretty fresh in my mind. In the current crisis, the Russian leadership’s invoking a kind of “blood and soil” ideology that’s at least a century out of date. The European Union, in contrast, seems to have found a renewed purpose and vigor. It’s impossible to know how things will eventually shake out, but it’s at least reassuring to be on the side of those looking towards the future, not the past.

Postwar argues that the European Union wasn’t much of a choice; it was forged out of sheer necessity. In the late 1940s the French steel industry was never going to recover without the German coal industry doing likewise. And somehow it worked. The nationalism and regional prejudices which triggered both WWI and WWII were broadly outpaced by economic prosperity. Everything flowed from there. The failure of the Soviet Bloc to emulate the productivity of the West led to its collapse, and the subsequent integration of former Soviet states into the EU marks a stunning success for the vision of a particular kind of liberal democracy.

That’s not the only way of looking at it, of course. Many of the triumphs of the EU come from closed negotiations between unelected functionaries, which isn’t exactly democratic. The structure of the thing allows national governments to blame EU bureaucrats for unpopular but necessary decisions, endangering its public support. And all the horse trading required to keep the thing running at all leads to a lot of money funding various vague initiatives, with all the associated risks of fraud and waste; there’s been plenty of both.

It’s been odd watching Ukraine and Moldova desperately scramble to get into the EU so soon after we watched the UK desperately scramble to get out. From where I sit, the advantages of membership obviously outweigh the disadvantages. But I admit the tradeoffs are complex. Does the elimination of tariffs compensate for the increase in regulation? Is the strength of negotiating as a block better than the nimbleness of negotiating on your own? How dangerous is having a single currency and a shared monetary policy?

But at its heart, now, the EU is no longer about economics. It’s about identity. A majority of Ukrainians want to think of themselves as Europeans. A majority of Brits do not. Whatever its beginnings, membership in the EU has come to stand for that. And whether you as a citizen of Ukraine or a citizen of the UK think of yourself as a European comes down not to economic policy but to your understanding of who you are and what your place is in the world. It’s yours alone. It’s in your heart.

I’m still traveling, still making an effort to visit places I haven’t seen before. The world’s clawing its way back — prematurely but inexorably — from the shutdowns and closures of two years ago. During the winter of 2020–21 I was locked down in a somber, freezing Dublin; I resolved to fix that this time around. Since I hadn’t gotten a chance to visit any countries in South America in the past few years my destination for this one seemed obvious.

One thing I didn’t quite grasp while planning my trip across Latin America is that the middle of it would be traveling through the heart of the mountains, from Mexico City (2,240 meters above sea level) to Bogatá (2,640 m) to Cusco (3,400 m). I didn’t notice the altitude in Mexico at all, but by the time I reached Colombia I was getting winded walking uphill. It was undeniable in Cusco, though. The second night I spent there I couldn’t get to sleep, laying in bed at midnight and struggling to breathe. It wasn’t that bad — I could breathe — but there was this distressing feeling that I couldn’t quite get enough oxygen, that I was falling behind, drowning ever-so-slowly with each breath.

I recognized the feeling, because I’ve been feeling that way from time to time, between fluctuating COVID restrictions and canceled flights, with the war in Ukraine and the difficulty I’ve had getting a documented booster shot or prescription medication. I flew to the US only to have a larp canceled because of COVID. I made alternative plans only to have the people I was going to visit get sick as well. Plans fail unexpectedly. I have to constantly revise my schedule until I land on one that sticks.

Google Fi finally canceled my international data plan. I had it six years, four of them spent predominantly outside the United States. I knew that was a risk. The terms and conditions say it’s intended primarily for use in the US, so I tried to always connect to WiFi and avoided using it as a hotspot. In the end none of that mattered at all. There was something of a mass termination in February; people who had it for years were cut off alongside people who had it for a couple months.

The problem, of course, is that there aren’t any alternatives. There are no companies, at any price, that offer a high-speed data plan that simply works wherever in the world you happen to be. Google Fi wasn’t cheap, but it did that. Now it doesn’t. As a practical matter that means I now have to buy physical SIM cards every time I land in a country, and I’ll be constantly researching what data plans are available and where the cards will work and just generally slogging through as best I can. What used to be invisible is now obviously and painfully omnipresent.

And that’s that feeling again. Like your options are being taken away from you one by one, that you’ll always be struggling just to recover what you’ve lost. I was traveling with a Russian friend around the beginning of March, and they had a similar experience. Every day brought another sanction: credit cards shut down, bank transfers blocked, flights returning to Moscow cancelled. It’s not personal — it’s never personal — you’re just collateral damage in someone else’s balance sheet. You don’t even rate being an afterthought.

I assumed I had gotten pretty good at traveling — I did get pretty good at traveling — with the whole business of planning and scheduling and booking reduced to something of an art form. And suddenly what seemed to be solid ground is shifting beneath my feet. A lot of that is Omicron, which dashed the hope of a steady, smooth recovery from the pandemic. And maybe the rest is just bad timing, an unexpected stream of bad news hitting all at once. But every one of these things is a drag, a small metaphorical tear in the airfoil that slows down my progress and increases the turbulence. Too many of them, you won’t even get enough momentum to take off. You might as well stand still and never go anywhere.

I told myself one of the reasons I started to travel so much was to understand the world. There’s a limit to what you can learn without going and seeing for yourself, and the United States had started to feel so parochial, so self-obsessed and narcissistic, there wasn’t much more for me to learn there. I needed to broaden my horizons.

There’s limits to what you can learn as a tourist. At the same time, though, there’s something about being somewhere, standing on some historic patch of ground — a battlefield, a shrine, a memorial — that can suddenly make everything click into place, a precipitous insight into the way things fit together that expands your mind and ignites a dozen connections you hadn’t noticed before. It certainly feels like understanding.

But lately I’m wondering if that’s right. I visited a textile museum in Oaxaca and the main exhibition featured weaving techniques from all across Mexico. The displays talked about six indigenous groups, each with their own language and culture and style of weaving. That’s just a tiny sliver of the diversity; there are 68 different indigenous groups recognized in Mexico, with 63 different languages and about 350 different dialects. To really understand each one you’d need to learn the language. And I thought about the effort it would take to learn even one of those languages, let alone six. Let alone 63. I suspect it’s impossible.

In the past thirty years English has been cemented as a kind of de facto second language throughout Europe. A legion of small factors drove this trend. At a certain point the Netherlands tuned wholesale into British television shows. In Belgium it became a convenient way for politicians to sidestep the Flemish/Walloon divide during negotiations. In Germany businesses switched to better integrate with the scientific and technological communities. The French have naturally held out the longest. The Toubon Law mandating the use of French in things like popular music and academic conferences remains in effect, although even there EU directives on the free movement of products have weakened the requirements. And that’s a rearguard action; French was the diplomatic language of the early years of the EU but, as Judt points out in Postwar, it was dethroned not by English diplomats — they were all fluent — but by Scandinavians, who tended to speak impeccable English but decidedly more limited French.

The slow ascendance of English has had the inevitable effect of eroding the general facility in all the other European languages. It used to be critical, if you lived near a border, to learn a bit of the language spoken on the other side, be it French or Italian or Danish. And Europe is full of borders. Now, increasingly, chances are your counterpart across the border knows English. It’s the network effect in action.

But network effects kill diversity. If language is a viewpoint, a way of understanding the world, the omnipresence of English to the exclusion of other languages represents another restriction on your ability to grasp the world. I don’t think that’s good — a world in which more people spoke Dutch would be a better world, just as a world in which more people spoke Nahuatl would be — but I think it’s inevitable. Practicality beats purity.

Ignorance is fractal. To a broad approximation, you know nothing about everything. And even if you manage to fill in the broad strokes of something, zooming in reveals ever more arbitrarily specific levels of ignorance. We talk about expanding or adding to our understanding, which reveals the heart of the problem. That’s the way we talk about empires. There’s the land you’ve conquered and everything else, where there barbarians live. Your understanding, by definition, isn’t universal. It’s singular and monolithic. It only belongs to you.

I’m less and less interested in understanding the world. To begin with, I don’t want to understand why some moldering dictator would invade a neighboring country. But beyond that, I’m becoming more and more aware of the unfathomable diversity of the world, and the violence that forcing it into my frame of reference does. It would take longer than a weekend or a week to learn those nuances. Longer than months or even years. It’s the work of a lifetime.

Heinlein coined the term “grok” in Stranger in a Strange Land to describe moving beyond the limitations of understanding. To grok something is not to be able to explicate it from your viewpoint, but to be able to explicate it from everybody’s viewpoint, all at once. It’s no longer separate from you, you have incorporated it into yourself and, more importantly, it’s incorporated you into itself. And there’s another crucial distinction: in Heinlein’s book, grokking is a Martian concept. Humans, trapped in their single frame of reference, don’t really get it.

But for all of that, for all the difficulties of travel and how little of it I understand, I’m still traveling. I can’t really imagine an alternative. I sometimes daydream of moving in some place for the long term, maybe someplace with a fancy kitchen and room for guests, but I’m always reminded of St. Augustine’s plea to God: “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” There’s still too much to see. Maybe someday.

There are small glimmers that things are improving for everyone. COVID restrictions are being lifted, like it or not. The war in Ukraine is now looking like it might last weeks or months, not months or years. The future is no less uncertain than it used to be — there are aggressive new COVID variants popping up, and the war could well spill over into a larger, broader conflict — but it at least feels like there’s possibilities for better outcomes. I’m happier preparing for the worst if I can hope for the best without feeling like a complete idiot.

If I were still in Argentina, today would be the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice, memorializing the victims of the military junta’s “Dirty War” from 1976–1983. I’m deeply curious how it’s celebrated; fireworks seem unlikely, although they celebrate Memorial Day in the United States with explosions and hot dogs so I suppose anything is possible.

Estimates of the dead hover between 10,000 and 30,000, most kidnapped, tortured, and killed without leaving a trace. The United States is directly implicated in those murders through Operation Condor and the School of the Americas. We trained and funded the Argentine security forces, and instructed them in terrorism under the guise of counterinsurgency. There’s a lot of sad history there, and it’s difficult to know how to feel about that bright ribbon of blood which ties back to my government and, ultimately, to me. I’m not sure disagreeing with your government absolves you of responsibility. I don’t know how to make amends.

I’m giving up on trying to understand everything, to make everything in the world fit into some grand preconceived narrative. The world will never work like that. I don’t want to try and understand cruelty, or hate. I’m tired of putting in effort to grasp the viewpoints of angry people on the internet. I want to try and accept the world as it is for a while, in all its contradictions. Let’s see what that brings, for a change.

I recently reread Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters for the sixth or seventh time. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it, given recent events. The book is a collection of ostensibly unrelated stories — a short story about a historian on a luxury cruise who finds the ship taken over by terrorists, a revisionist account of Noah’s Ark written from the viewpoint of the animals, an analysis of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa — but as you read you notice the same preoccupations seeping in to all the works: being trapped out on the open ocean, separating groups into the clean and the unclean, clinging to hope in the face of disaster.

Also, love. The half chapter is a prose meditation on love that veers between sappy and unsentimental. Barnes directly asks the reader if there’s even room for love given the horrors of the modern world, with our astonishing ability to screw everything up on a magnificent scale. The answer is probably not, but that makes it all the more essential. Love is all we have to set against the weight of history.

In Mérida, there was a small hummingbird resting on the ground when we left the Mayan museum. Its wings were fanned out in a semicircle, each feather a tiny iridescent sapphire, and it woke quickly and looked around when we approached but didn’t move. It wasn’t obviously sick or injured, but at the same time it didn’t startle or leave as more and more people gathered around to look. We thought it might be overheated, or dehydrated. We didn’t know.

I’d like to say that I’ve seen a lot of nature documentaries and I could tell it would be fine, or that I happened to have an eyedropper so we ran to the café and got some water and sugar and after feeding it for a few minutes it flew off. But it just sat there, not moving, and we watched it for a bit. Eventually we found a guard and explained the situation in halting Spanish — colibrí, colibrí — and they gently scooped it up and took it inside. We watched it go, nestled in the hands of someone trying to help. And my friend and I returned to town, to have an early dinner and to pack for the morning. We couldn’t stay longer. We had to keep moving.

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