JOURNEYS I AM NOT ON

Sometimes the use of words enables us to evade coping with difficult realities. I am not sure this is a good thing.

Given events transpiring domestically and on the global scene it is hard to believe that May 16th wasn't a heavy news day. Yet, The New York Times found room on its front page for a lengthy article explaining the evolution of the word “journey.”

Despite what initially struck me as too trivial for serious reporting, I read the article with relish. I hoped that it would reinforce my discomfort with the au courant use of words, of which I have more than mild contempt. I was pleased to discover that in my disturbance I am not alone.

A confessional moment is in order. Though politically I identify as a Leftist, there remain certain aspects of my personal values that are admittedly conservative. Most pertain to the private sphere and the day-to-day relations I have with others. Another that assuredly endures is a conservative commitment to language and how it is used.

I was a Latin and Greek major in my undergraduate days, and few languages are as besotted with grammar as these ancient linguistic gems. In the elementary stages, learning Latin and Greek seemed to be little but grammar – conjugations, declensions, active and deponent verbs, and a seemingly ubiquitous application of moods, the subjunctive being the most haunting. And then there was a flood of irregularity, which required taxing memorization. A common verb in Greek used to illustrate conjugation in elementary textbooks is the word “luo,” which means to “loose” or “release.” Why this relative outlier? I concluded that it was one of the relatively few verbs in that complex language that was conjugated without irregularities.

Grammar is a bane to most, students and others. But I loved it. I see grammar as an underlying template, organizing what lies above and requiring consistency. It is the invisible, indwelling structure of language, as we might say proportion underlies art. It is reminiscent of jigsaw puzzles requiring that pieces fit together neatly. In grammar's rationality, I sense an enduring aesthetic. What for many is tedious, I saw, and continue to see, as a source of beauty and elegance. Even dealing with irregular verbs and grammatical structures could be attractive. They add distinctiveness to language and a touch of the exotic. They are artful exceptions that nudge us to be free of what Emerson referred to as “foolish consistency.” But even the exceptions are often not arbitrary. They exist to fulfill another requirement when we look at language in a larger grammatical context.

As stated, I am a linguistic conservative. I want our grammatical usage to be correct and consistent. I accept that I am pushing against the current, however. Language and grammar itself change and evolve as a result of popular use. This is inevitable and my hanging on to a static reality, rooted in antiquity, is a losing struggle. I know that. It also makes me appear priggish and pedantic in the eyes of others and in my own. I admit it; when it comes to language I am committed to pedantry, like the geezer who keeps beloved relics in the attic long after their usefulness has expired. So be it. We all have our quirks and frailties, and this certainly is not among the worst. It also reveals a personal disposition toward cynicism in that the employment of fashionable terms often seems to me an effort to avoid hard-core realities. It puts aside substance while replacing it with superficiality. While I think of myself as a compassionate soul, I am not a Pollyanna. The philosopher Willliam James had noted that life is serious business, and I agree. I think we need to encounter reality head-on and cope with what life throws at us as best we can.

So it is with The New York Times article on the evolution of the word “journey.” I conclude that it validated my cynicism. The article's author, Lisa Miller, found that the period between 2006 and 2019 is when the change occurred. Before then, journey meant what it has always literally signified, that is, a physical trip from here to there, by train, plane, or automobile, by ship, or on foot. But now this literal use is being superseded by a raft of nouns that used to be applied to sober experience. Many apply it to medical or health conditions. So those struggling with cancer are now on a “journey.” Likewise, those tormented by insomnia (something I know well). But, as noted, it can be used to describe any experience. She references a source as saying, “Putting on your socks can be a journey of self-discovery.” Really? At what point does the use of the word journey become debased to the point of silliness? What is our relation to ordinary or arduous experience when all experience is transformed into a “journey?”

In my view, there is a problem with this transformation of a straightforward experience into a pleasant metaphor. As Ms. Miller notes, “'Journey' has decisively taken its place in American speech. The word holds an upbeat utility these days, signaling struggle without darkness or detail, and expressing – in the broadest possible way – an individual's experience of travails over time.” She cites a Betty Patton, who suffers from relapsing polychondritis, an inflammatory disorder. In the chronic disease community, Ms. Patton stated that “journey” is a debated word. “It's a way to romanticize ordinary or unpleasant experiences, like 'Oh this is something special and magical.'” Not everyone appreciates this, she said. “Romanticize” – and prettify, I would say. This prettification evokes a very unpleasant personal encounter.

I have written before in Beyond Appearances, about my wife's hospitalization while we were vacationing in London in 2015. She suffered a stroke and then cardiac arrest. The latter resulted in not only her heart seizing, but kidney failure, greatly diminished blood pressure, and neurologically she was rendered aphasic and unable to move, except for her left arm and leg. She could not swallow and she was minimally conscious, though able to respond to my questions by moving her head to the left or right. All of this came suddenly and totally unexpected. It was a time of incomparable anguish and fear.

The underlying cause was found to be pancreatic cancer, and given that condition, I am now grateful that Linda was never in pain. Through the extraordinarily meticulous and compassionate care of the doctors and nurses at Charring Cross Hospital, all of Linda's functions were restored to normal, with the exception of devastating neurological impairment. We were able to bring her back by air ambulance, and she was taken to the hospital closest to our home, the largest in the county.

It was clear that my beloved wife did not have long to live and hospice was appropriate. I was torn. My love led me to want her to die at home. But bringing her home would require great care, which emotionally I was not prepared to give. I concluded that her being at home would detract from my ability to provide the emotional support she needed. There is an excellent free-standing hospice in our county and I decided to have Linda transferred there. It turned out to be the right decision. I slept in her room for her last three nights, and two days before she died, many friends and relatives came to visit. She seemed to be especially alert that day.

To make that hard decision, the hospital sent their hospice specialist to help me better understand the options and their consequences. I don't recall if she was a social worker or a nurse. What she had to tell me was what I vaguely anticipated. She had a New Age sensibility, which frankly I despised. In the course of her explanation of the hospice alternatives, she referenced the fact that with hospice my wife would be on a “journey.” I greatly resented that description, and I recall the anger that welled up. I held my tongue but was inclined to tell her, “No, my wife is not on a journey. She is dying from an insidious and horrid disease. It has destroyed her autonomy and taken away her dignity. I suspect that she is in a state of fear, coerced into silence through an incapacitating act of nature. I myself am in a state of unparalleled anguish. There is absolutely nothing redemptive in this for anyone. It is just awful beyond words, and I resent being told otherwise. To call it a 'journey' is to feed me an illusion and deny a most painful reality. No. My wife was not on a journey.”

The misplacement of the term invokes remembrance of another, and a far more pleasurable experience. Almost 30 years ago, I fulfilled a teenage wish and rode my bicycle across the United States. The trip from Seattle to New York took 47 days, with only four days off, and averaged more than 70 miles per day. Planning for it took weeks, which I found most pleasurable, as I do the memories of what was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I recall moments of great beauty and awe as I road through the dense evergreen forests of the Northwest, crossing the Rockies amid the majesty of Glacier National Park and riding under the dome of endless skies that covered the prairies.

My bike trip was a journey, to be sure, but I seldom describe it that way. It was not, given the topic under discussion, a “journey.” The trip was marvelous and it gave me an array of experiences, some of them unique. However, it did not lead to any significant personal insights. In fact, most of my thoughts were mundane and related to physical experiences that were quite ordinary. In my prolonged solitude, I recall counting the mile markers on the road, or wondering why this section of highway, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, was sponsored by Suzy's Music Store. And then there was the pain, which was the most pervasive experience. Struggling to get my bicycle loaded with 40 pounds of gear up the Cascade Mountains with a seven percent grade that went on for 20 miles was not easy. Nor was fighting powerful headwinds that reduced my speed to close to zero. Perhaps my thoughts of greatest introspection merely involved focusing my concentration in an attempt to move the pain from my right knee to the left and back again.

This was a great achievement for me, with many wonderful as well as challenging – and painful - moments. But to employ another glibly invoked term, there was nothing spiritual about it. My bicycle journey across the United States was not a “journey.”

Miller's article in The Times explains “how 'journey' transformed from an experience into a metaphor.” Indeed, all language is metaphorical. We have substantive experiences but we give them meaning and expression to ourselves and the world through language. Language is the ideational abstraction of experiences in ways that fit into narratives and allow for their communication. Our thoughts exist within webs of narratives and metaphors. We humans are mythopoeic creatures. There is experience and the realm of ideas and thoughts attached to experience that we might – metaphorically – conclude float above experience.

Sometimes we seek to give flight to metaphor, most creatively in literature and poetry. But in everyday usage, by temperament, I want my language to hew as faithfully as possible to the experiences from which it derives. I believe there is elegance in this faithfulness. For me, it is a basis of intellectual integrity and comes with its own aesthetic.

Ms Miller ends her article on a stark note:

“When in 2020 a Swedish linguist named Charlotte Hommerberg studied how advanced cancer patients describe their experience, she found that they used 'battle' and 'journey' like everyone else. But most also used a third metaphor that conveyed not progress, fight, or hope. They said that cancer was like 'imprisonment,' a feeling of being stuck – like a 'free bird in a cage,' one person wrote. Powerless and going nowhere.”

Let journeys be journeys. And reality be reality.

Miller, Lisa. “When Did Everything Become a ‘Journey?’” The New York Times, May, 16, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/well/health-journey.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI%20want%20to%20see%20the,not%20progress%2C%20fight%20or%20hope.n