MADRID — Memory, especially unintentional memory, is an intensely powerful phenomenon.
I’m in Spain for fall break, which couldn’t have come any sooner. With the seeming omnipresence of school over the past three weeks, the shimmer of Paris died and was replaced by a gray blur that existed only as a constant reminder of my linguistic failures.
So, it feels good to get away and free my mind with a change of scenery, plus there’s the adage about travel being good for the soul.
This week is the first time I have truly traveled to a completely new place since making the trip to Paris, and yet, strangely enough, the most salient experience thus far has been the train between Madrid and Barcelona due to an overwhelmingly potent stream of memories.
The Spanish countryside struck me as extremely similar to the American west: rolling brown and red hills, dry foliage that clings low to the ground, bright and glaring sun. And there I was, staring out the train window at age 21 thinking of a trip to the west with my father at age eight.
It was a few months after my parents split, and my father wanted to take me on a vacation for us to enjoy time together. Thirteen years is a long time, so most of that trip has faded into white noise.
I remember the circumstances. I remember asking him — because I was eight and it was cool — if we could rent a convertible, instead of a sedan. I remember the mixture of shock and joy at being promoted from the back seat to the front seat for the very first time. But I did not think I remembered much else, at least on a conscious level.
And yet, churning through the sun-beaten hills outside Madrid, I was overcome by a sense of familiarity. Obviously, I had never been here before, but it did not feel foreign in the slightest bit. As the train flew past a particularly high crag, I saw six or seven different rock layers, and I understood that such stratified coloration indicated different geological eras.
‘Look at all the colors — that’s how you know this is oooooold,” my father’s voice rang.
Even in the cities, I’ve discovered caches of information. I knew how to say, “one empanada, please” and then follow up with “I don’t understand, I am American and I don’t speak Spanish. I am sorry,” all because these phrases were common at a beach resort in Mexico I visited several times with my parents. Or, most importantly, on the spot, I knew instinctively when prompted by a waiter for my order that “cerveza” is the Spanish word for beer.
Our brains are such astoundingly evolved supercomputers that you can suddenly access information — and not just data, but a reminder of feelings and sensations — you did not comprehend retaining. This is once again fairly apparent information, but to feel the scale of such power firsthand inside of oneself is fascinating.
Perhaps this is one of our cardinal flaws as humans: that our fast-running brains are always searching for and making connections. I believe it is certainly one of the main causes behind the aphorism “everything happens for a reason” — we create causality by way of relating everything to something else.
Unfortunately, such a process also takes us out of the present. Important as my western experiences were at age eight, it is improper to reduce Spain to an American corollary. Fun as my time at Moon Palace in Mexico was, it was a vacation-oriented experience with nary a modicum of cultural enrichment.
I don’t think it is a process that can be controlled. Perhaps I did a disservice to the identity of Spain, as infinitely nuanced as any place, by relating it to my own experiences, but that inadvertent act certainly made the trip more impactful.
And after all, what is travel if you don’t learn something about your own humanity while you do so?
