The Hardest of Questions

Most of the time, when I meet a Welsh person and we get to talking, the inevitable question arises: What brings a person from Chicago (or America) to here? True, looking at the map Aberystwyth is located in the middle of nowhere between nothing and nothing else. It seems as if someone was trying to get as far away from Birmingham by only walking directly west. When they got to the coast, this person stopped and formed a village around him.

Truth be told, though, this is a popular vacation spot of visiting tourist. This is obvious by the sheer number of hotels, taxis and buses in the area. My walks along the sea front take me past at least a dozen brightly colored hotels that advertise vacancies.

So there are reasons why someone might want to come to this small town situated on the coast between two hills. But the original question is why and how I found my way over here.

The stock answer I give in academic circles is that the department, with Will, Peter and others, is pretty established, especially in the literary field that I want to study. This is going to be my answer when applying for jobs, too:
"Why should we give you a job? You went to a tiny school in the corner of a tiny country miles away from anywhere?"
"Because Aberystwyth is the best little University that you have never heard of."
"Oh? Well then. Welcome to Harvard."

While this is certainly true, narrative theory is certainly not popular in the states, and both Will and Peter are well read and published in the fringe types of literature I am interested in, this is really not the reason that I packed up my life and left all behind.

Truthfully, between you and me, I was running away from Illinois. I had spent my whole life in that strangely shaped state, framed by rivers and Cheeseheads. Granted, for college, I pushed the boundaries traveling as far West and South and the state provided. The rest of my Illinois Experience was spent living in Chicago, the North-easterly corner. However, until this move, I had never lived outside the land of Lincoln.

Knowing one place well has it's advantages. It was nearly impossible for me to get lost almost anywhere in the State. When driving back and forth between Monmouth and Southern Illinois, I would often take back roads to break-up the trip. I had an extensive knowledge of which roads I could take to get where, and which smaller cities sign-posted my trip home. All in all, I was tired of Illinois.

By extension, I was growing tired of America. This is not to say I had some Hemingway-esque desire to expatriate because I found my homeland deplorable. Quite the opposite: I really like being American.

However, never having left America, it begged the questions of whether or not I knew America. There are lots of cultural theorist who argue that the outsider has a better perspective of an object than one who is close to it, and there is probably some validity to that idea. Some epistemological thinkers would argue that to know something, you have to know the opposite. To know good, you have to know not good. To know happy, you have to know not happy. So, by extension, to know America, I need to know not America.

But this jarring experience is going to shed light on more than what my origin country means. It will, in the long run, shed a lot of light on who I am. I am going to spend a lot of time explaining my customs to people, looking at myself through the eyes of other people. People who might not understand why it is I stay up until four in the morning watching DVDs of the The Venture Bros. This sort of self-examination is not possible when constantly surrounded by like-minded individuals.

And that, my readers, is the long and short of it: this trip to nowhere is the best way to know where, and who, I am.