In one of my trips back home after college, I remember my mother telling me, between half-embarrassed chuckles, how in high school she had caught herself genuflecting as she entered the row leading to her seat at the movie theater. My father, who was also there, confessed sheepishly to having had the same experience on a date at the same age.

To my knowledge, neither of my parents suffered from any sort of cognitive impairment in their youth. But what they did have in common was the experience of arriving at church each Sunday and having a neatly attired usher direct them and their family members down the aisle of the central nave into pews on one side or another with enough space for their group. 

That, and going to movie theaters where a similarly attired usher, with flashlight in hand, would beckon them to descend the central aisle of the theater and take their seat in row on either side of that pathway. 

Was their shared experience just a matter of slightly confused motor memory, akin to how I have occasionally caught myself putting a milk carton into the cabinet where I store glasses instead of in the refrigerator? 

Surely that has something to do with it. 

But in the case the church-theater dynamic I think that another factor was also at play: the fact that both church and the cinema were broadly recognized at that time as places where one went in a spirit of reverence, to become quiet and attentive in the face of something greater and presumably more interesting and instructive than one’s own, often repetitive, internal monologues. 

In his memoir Ways of Escape, Graham Greene describes how, by sharpening his senses to take in the new, the beautiful, and the dangerous, travel became for him a way of holding off the always encroaching monotony of his daily existence. 

It has played a similar role in my life. 

When engaging in the voluntary estrangement of solo travel my sense of time expands, and with it, my attention to both the visual and aural details around me, along with the flow of my own thoughts and reflections. 

In this second mode I often find myself pondering the mysteries and wonders of my own life trajectory, trying to remember who I was and what I thought was important in earlier moments of my life, and what realities came along to transform, or not, those previous ways of understanding myself and the world around me. 

And if I am traveling together with my wife in foreign countries, especially in ones where we do not speak the language, we instinctively lower our voices when we speak to each other, not because we are afraid of being seen as Americans, but simply to demonstrate our deference, as visitors, to the ways of culture around us. 

We go to such........

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