It’s always been interesting to me how the motivations for
travelling vary so vastly from person to person. I want to see the country I’ve
always lived in but never really explored. Sal and Dean were trying to escape.
And a lovely French woman I met in passing in Arizona was travelling to lecture
at universities across the US. It was her first time in the States, so she was blown
away by all of our country’s little details. She kept repeating how she felt as
if she were in another world, and she wanted to make the world her own while
only seeing a certain portion of the country and really only spending time with
other intellectuals. While she appreciated much of what it offered, I could
tell she was a bit conflicted. She didn’t participate in certain aspects
of American culture and sort of looked down on it, but she seemed weirdly
fascinated by the whole thing. Like the boys in SF, I felt as though there was
a subtle cynicism in much of what she said. I’m not sure why, though.
As a woman, her stance of “womanhood” and its definition
intrigued me. According to her, it’s a state of being that we kind of grow
into. Culture makes the woman, not birth. I mean, this idea isn’t totally
unheard of to me, but I’m just interested in what exactly she meant by the
statement. For example, I’m Hispanic, and traditionally the Quinceañera denotes
that a girl becomes a woman at the age of 15. I’m not sure if she was referring
to something like that. I guess she could be referring to our stance in the
country and how we are generally unequal to our male counterparts, but did she
mean only American women? Do French women not experience the same kind of
oppression? Does she believe we can ever reach higher than the resignation we
currently lie in? I had so many questions that I wanted to ask, but as soon as
she appeared she was gone once more.
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