"The Gravitas of the South," Unabridged

The "director's cut" of my conversation with Tom Zoellner for Los Angeles Review of Books

Possibly the most Atlanta scene ever.

Last month, Los Angeles Review of Books published my conversation with Tom Zoellner, a good friend and one of America’s most perceptive and prolific writers on place and history. We talked about my new book, The Road to Unforgetting, and lots more. For paid subscribers to The Detourist, I present a bootleg version of that conversation in its unexpurgated entirety.

TZ: A lot of the photos in this collection are of decay—a shuttered movie theater, decrepit houses, defunct soda brands, a lot of mold and rust. What drew your attention to this side of the South?

PC: My friend David, a theologian, once wrote that surfaces are more complicated than depths, or something to that effect, and that remark has really stuck with me over the years. I do think I am drawn to surfaces for a lot of reasons: some of which are reasons, and some of which have to do with pre-rational taste. And now that you’ve got me thinking about that, I realize how much more thinking I still have to do on this subject. As a photographer—insofar as I can claim to be one, given the names I am about to drop—I have always been attracted to the imagery of Walker Evans, William Christenberry, and William Eggleston, whose work in the South is canonical in the history of photography, but which also stands for me as a kind of visual analogue to the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, which has been so important to me for many years, and who really propelled the Southern tours John Hayes and I started in the late 90’s. I am sure this attention to decay has something to do with growing up in Atlanta, where there was and remains a passionate aversion to the old, much less that which is crumbling before our eyes. Fetishizing decay is in vogue in some styles of photography, but as I look back at my own images in this book, I think a common theme is absence. I do not go out looking for blight, so to speak, but there is something that catches my eye when I see something forgotten, ignored, discarded. I am sure that initially it did so because it elicited this sort of “look—something that hasn’t been bulldozed yet” type of reaction, since that seemed so contrary to my experience in Atlanta. In some small way, I suppose it is an act of remembrance simply to notice something that is in the process of passing away. Sometimes I feel like Dante in the Inferno, who so often encounters these shades of human persons who simply beg the pilgrim-poet to remember them when he returns to the upper world. Buildings and places don’t have that capacity for speech, of course, at least not in that way. I do feel that the camera is often reduced simply to a recording device, but this is a great underestimation of its power as a means of knowledge of the world and oneself in it. I would even go so far as to say that photography—especially on film—can be a sort of spiritual exercise, and in this book I have tried to explore that a little bit.

I do not mean this in any pious sense; as an art form, film photography does allow for the meditation upon absence in an especially powerful way. It is, after all, the production of positive images from negative ones, which is practically an invitation to metaphorize like wild. Some people may see this as an incurable form of nostalgia, but I do not see it that way at all. I do not seek out absence, as it were, but I am struck by how much of it there is across this region. I know it may make little to no sense to talk about the proliferation of a lack, or the ubiquity of something that isn’t there, but I tend to find a view more interesting when there aren’t any people in it. There are so many great photographers of human presence, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, but I suppose I am more interested in the traces of human presence than its actuality, if that makes any sense. The evidence of what once was, the residue more than the thing itself. And that absence, that lack, then raises other questions: why have we forgotten this? What are we trying to avoid, in choosing not to remember this story? What are we afraid of?

So much of the history of the South could be told in terms of residues, the things that are left over from an age we have so obsessively romanticized and mythologized. It’s what didn’t get air time but which we are still living with somehow that interests me. We are living with the residue of a culture of white supremacy which, if not explicitly active, is still at work in passive ways in the systems that it created, and which still function in tacitly racist ways. I think that is often reflected in the spaces we have chosen to hand over to the indifference of time, or to put it more graphically, which we have decided to let rot.

You revisit Plato’s Republic as a road story, and also key elements of Christian theology. How much of your former career as a religion scholar was emanating through these reflections of the rural South?

When I made a move away from academia, I distanced myself from theology as an academic discipline, not least because I came to realize what a negative effect it was having on my writing. So after I left, I began to write in a mode that was 180 degrees from writing scholarly papers. For one thing, academic writing is generally hostile to thinking and writing in the first person. Given the combination of my academic background and my upbringing in a Southern family that held it as axiomatic that “you make a better showing with your mouth shut,” it was a steep learning curve for me to write about my own history. Eventually I came to realize that I couldn’t pretend that my training in theology isn’t a fundamental part of who I am and how I think. And after all—writing in the first person was not embarrassing to some of the earliest and greatest theological writers, like St. Augustine, whose influence on me has remained so strong outside of academia. So in my early post-academic writing I think I developed an impatience for abstraction, which may have become a little exaggerated. The Road to Unforgetting allowed me to indulge my speculative side in a way that might seem unusual in a book of photography that is preoccupied with the margins of the Southern landscape, but in this work I think the speculative and the artistic, the material and the abstract, all began to coalesce for me. In my forthcoming book, A Deeper South, which is a companion to The Road to Unforgetting, and a much longer narrative account of the 25-year journey that Road presents visually, I begin with the way in which I felt academia forced, or at least encouraged, me to identify a fragment of myself with the whole of myself, and to discard, or at least view almost with some sense of reserve, those aspects of myself that did not quite fit into the highly-specialized and intensely narrowly-focused nature of contemporary academic work. In fact, I was told that one high-level academic who participated in my job interview at Baylor warned my department chair that I was “eclectic,” and this was not an asset. If they were going to hire me, the message was, be warned. I was basically interested in too many things to be a good academic. As it turns out, he was right.

So when this whole journey—which comprises both The Road to Unforgetting and A Deeper South—came into being, it originated as an attempt to reassemble a self that I felt had been sort of dismembered in part by my academic pursuits. I retuned to photography. I wrote in a comic mode. I listened to music most tenured professors might not admit to enjoying. And ultimately I found that the academic part of my story had to be integrated into that re-membered self, too, and that pretending that wasn’t important to who I am would be just as self-deceitful as ignoring those other pieces of myself that I felt I had lost.

The gist of all of this is something like re-integration, but if I am honest there is no better word for what I am attempting to do in these two books and their related works than “re-membering.” And I mean that word with every ounce of the rich theological weight and saturation with which the word was taught to me. In the Christian tradition to which I belong, the central act of our faith is an act of remembering, in Greek an anamnesis, which literally means “unforgetting.” When we celebrate the Eucharist, we are taught to do this in anamnesis of Christ. So everything I am attempting to do has, I think, its source in a pretty strong belief in the importance of memory as a deeply theological act, even if it is not in the context of a sacramental rite.

More than anyone else, my old friend St. Augustine taught me the centrality of memory to the integrity of the human person. From him I learned that a healed, restored, and re-integrated memory is essential to what he—and a whole tradition before and after him—meant by “salvation,” or in his more simple and elegant language, salus, or “well-being.” Augustine showed me how human well-being is inseparable from a well-formed memory. That insight led me to both high and low moments of recovery, from revisiting the significance of a Sony radio that used to sit in our kitchen when I was a kid, to meditating on the absence of a marker to indicate a site of horrific white violence against a Black State Senator in South Carolina. Memory is the scarlet thread that holds all of my work together, from my academic work on medieval memory to what I am doing now.

Anyone who’s spent time in Atlanta is going to know the name Candler, not just because of its early Coca-Cola associations but for its prominence around town with any number of cultural and educational contexts. You’re the distant cousin of Gov. Allen D. Candler, for whom a rural county was named in the segregation era. How did this unique vantage point from the urban and genteel side of the South come into tension or dialogue with the poor and rural South?

Allen Candler was my great-great-grandfather’s first cousin, so I am not directly descended from him. He is an interesting figure in many ways, not least because he saw himself as a bit of a rural outsider to his cousins, who I think he saw as urban elites. “The Governor” was from Gainesville, and my side of the family ended up in Atlanta, where they really began to make a name for themselves. I think Allen Candler may have had some insecurity about that, but he was plenty prominent in his own right as a public figure. So in that one generation of the family there is this tension between town and country, as it were.

My great-great-grandfather was Allen’s first cousin, John Slaughter Candler, the youngest of eleven children of Samuel Charles and Martha Beall Candler of Villa Rica. Growing up I knew of John Slaughter Candler simply as “The Judge,” and the moniker was the extent of my knowledge of him. The Judge became a Supreme Court Justice for the State of Georgia in 1902, just as Allen was leaving the Governor’s mansion after two terms. After his time on the bench, The Judge went into private practice, and set up an office in a brand-new building funded by his brother Asa, who had made it big as the founder of the Coca-Cola Company. The Judge became senior partner of Candlers, Thomson, and Hirsch in 1906, and set up shop in the brand-new Candler Building at the pointed corner of Peachtree and Park Place at the geographical heart of Atlanta (the building is now a boutique hotel).

The “Candlers” in the new firm included both the Judge and his oldest brother Milton, who by then was basically retired, and died a few years later. The two brothers were twenty-four years apart, but between Milton and the Judge was also a significant generational shift. Uncle Milt was an old-school white supremacist who helped engineer the removal of Black state legislators from the State Assembly in 1868, and was close friends with General John B. Gordon (whose bust adorns the extraordinary staircase in the Candler Building, near those of Samuel and Martha). Gordon is widely regarded as the head of the Klan in Georgia, and I am sure Milton was a Klansman himself. Milton’s daughter was the President of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Decatur, and led the campaign for a Confederate monument there, which was installed on the courthouse square in 1908, and removed in 2020. Now none of this history was common currency in my family until very recently.

But yes, the Candler name is pretty ubiquitous in Atlanta, and you’re right, not just because of Coke. Asa’s name is all over the place, but the seminary at Emory is named for Asa’s and John’s middle brother, Warren, who was a prominent Methodist bishop and first Chancellor of Emory University. Asa, John, and Warren, were all quite close to one another. (My great-grandfather, Asa Warren Candler, was named for both of them.) They often worked together, both at Coke and at Emory, where I was born exactly 110 years after The Judge.

Across Atlanta, there are all kinds of mementos of a wide and deep family legacy, including—once—a building named for my grandfather that is, unsurprisingly, now an empty lot. The ubiquity of my family name in my hometown had a sort of reverse effect on me, though: I think I grew up not wanting to talk about my family, out of some sort of sheepishness or whatever. It wasn’t the sort of thing I was especially eager to draw attention to, perhaps partly out of fear that people would think everything I did was reducible to the fact that I came from a family with wealth and stature. Fair enough. On the other hand, there is also a certain tendency to over-mythologize the Candler family that some of my relatives have encouraged, a motive best represented by a book that came out in the early 1990s called The Real Ones, about Asa and his descendants. I wanted nothing to do with that sort of barf-inducing navel-gazing and self-congratulation.

So I tended to follow the other course, just ignoring all of it. It was much later that I began to really take that family legacy more seriously, and try to understand it all a little better. I discovered that not really caring about your own family history was, in my case, the height of what we now call white privilege. And eventually I learned how much of a luxury it had become for me not to bother with it, but to be content with a convenient mythology that required little of me, and could confidently bury that history under reductive, one-name monikers like Asa, The Bishop, The Judge, The Governor, and so on. There is some weird pathology to all this strange sense of indifference about history within my family, as if you are somehow above it all, and can leave the attention to historical detail to the bloggers or amateur genealogists.

But when my kids began learning what I was learning about my family history, they became very interested in it, because it was objectively kind of fascinating. They were not encumbered by all the layers and layers of inter-generational suppression and denial and willful forgetfulness. They helped me see that it was just kind of fascinating, and that it was cool to have an interesting family history. I have great admiration for what my ancestors have positively contributed to Atlanta, and it has in many ways motivated me to carry on that legacy. But I also know them better now, too, and to that degree I think I can say my appreciation is invested with some hard-learned truthfulness. And my children also expressed no tendency whatsoever to want to pretend that some of their ancestors were not racist, and they seemed more well-equipped to inherit a more truthful and honest story than I had. 

I learned some of what the very real cost to Black Americans of that historical legacy of forgetfulness, and how it had manifest itself in often violent terms. And in the meantime, I had learned from James Baldwin about the costs of this regime of amnesia for white people, too. Baldwin showed that while it had certainly abetted a culture that allowed white people to flourish materially at the expense of Black people’s oppression, it hadn’t done white folks much good in a spiritual or psychological sense. Suddenly Augustine took on a new, more acute importance for me: he had seen how profoundly damaging it is to all of us to ignore our past, and how essential to our personal and collective healing is the practice of a restored memory. Before there was Baldwin, there was W.E.B. Du Bois, who, as a resident of Atlanta during the time many of the Candlers I have mentioned were rising to prominence. He knew and corresponded with some of them—Allen and Warren, at least—and one of the wonderful and earth-shifting realizations for me was the fact that these ancestors of mine were on Du Bois’ radar, even in his Rolodex, so to speak. And in an even more bizarre twist, it was from Du Bois that I learned about at least one highly consequential—and destructive—contribution one of those forebears in my family made, which never made it down to me through the intra-family oral tradition. It was Du Bois who taught me about Milton Candler’s attempt to remove Black legislators from teh state senate in 1868. Augustine taught me—and I think Du Bois and Baldwin confirm this on virtually every page of their writing—that “you cannot love what you do not know.” If I or anyone else wants to love this region—and the people who have made or unmade it—then we have to know it—and them—first.

Day One of Tour Seven in 2019, in Atlanta

The footnotes in this book are extraordinary. You go into great detail about the images you capture, such as an 1815 tabby structure in McIntosh, Georgia, but the images stand without narrative on the page. Curious readers must go to the back of the book to get details on what they’re looking at. Was this a conscious design choice?

It was, yes. Since I my graduate student days, I have been fascinated by the relationship between form and content in literary texts, and my doctoral dissertation dealt with that in relation to some foundational theological texts of the Middle Ages. I think this book reflects that interest, in the back-and-forth relationship between the texts and the imagery. The footnotes come at the end for deliberate reason, and that is because with many of my images, I was not fully cognizant of what I was looking at or photographing until long after the fact. Reflection, research, and closer examination revealed much more than I had noticed at first, so I want the reader to be able to experience that post factum sense of revelation, as it were. I also hope for each image to be received on its own visual terms, without the “addition” of the knowledge of what the reader is really seeing, in much the same way as my own encounter with many of these sites on the road was often naïve and innocent of any historical knowledge. What is more, since many of these sites were unmarked, I had to dig up material on them once I got back home. 

So when you get to the end of the book, you find that there is this trove of stories about many of the images, that gesture towards a depth that is not always available to us on first encounter, or at first sight. Once you’ve gone through the photographs in the collection, you then find there is a great deal more to be said about some of these pictures, which I hope will prompt the reader to go back in and look again at the particular image, now bearing a greater knowledge of what they are seeing, maybe even seeing what they missed, much as I have done. So yes, the structure of the book is intentionally designed to reflect both the sequence of my own coming-to-know and the reality that no place ever offers itself fully to you all at once, and to replicate that process for the reader. That dynamic is essential to all of the work that has grown out of my experience traveling and photographing the South, and then later reflecting on what I did, but mostly did not, see at the time.

One of the miracles of photography as an art form is its capacity to continue to deliver traces, clues, vestiges of a world that has to be slowly entered into. St Gregory the Great said of Scripture that in one sentence it “describes a fact but reveals a mystery.” He meant this as a remark about the uniqueness of Sacred Scripture, but for me it is a provocative way of thinking about photography. Indeed, it might be truthfully said of any art form, but I think it is particularly apropos of photography because of the way we tend to think—misleadingly—of the camera as a merely passive, receptive instrument whose function is to “capture” or “document” reality. If photography has any advantage over other media, it is the illusion this creates. I find film to be particularly powerful, in its ability to disclose layers and textures to reality—indeed, literally through the medium of light-sensitive materials. But even more to the point, photography can disclose the depths of reality as such, and open our eyes to the potentially infinite density of any given moment of lived existence.

So in one sense I wanted the first impression of these images to be strictly visual, and to effect whatever emotional response in the viewer they might elicit. But I found that something needed to be said, after a spell. Dorothea Lange talked about the mutual “fortification” of word and image, and that was something I was explicitly after in this book. Some photographers may have a sort of scorn for the written word, as if it’s somehow a diminution of the power of an image to add words to it, as if it implies a lack that requires a sort of corrective supplement. Similarly, many writers have a similar attitude towards imagery, as if to imply that good literature does not need pictures or illustrations, and if a book has pictures in it, it is a reflection of some sort of deficiency in the writing itself. This may be true of certain forms of literature. For example, I’m not sure that illustrating Dostoyevsky would be much of a help, but on the other hand, there is a long tradition of mutual interplay between texts and image going back at the very least to illuminated manuscripts in the middle ages, illustrated editions of Dante’s Comedy, and so on, that do not participate in the ivory-tower snobbery about genre. I believe strongly in the non-competitive relationship between word and image. And I am really neither a professional photographer nor a professional essayist by training; since I was never really taught the rules of either professional discipline, I feel no compunction about breaking them, and I have no interest whatsoever in “purity” of any kind. Eudora Welty, a great hero of mine, was also a wonderful photographer who worked for the WPA on the Mississippi guide. She spoke of her experience as a photographer as an essential, part of her being a writer. For Welty, the camera was a “hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know.” Welty approached photography primarily as a writer, and I think her photography reflects a writerly sensibility. I know of no one who has done both so well at the same time as Sally Mann, whose memoir Hold Still is an absolute masterpiece of this sort of mutual fortification. Sally is one of the greatest living photographers we have, and she is as good a writer.

You’re pretty hard on your hometown of Atlanta, describing it at one point as “a looming abyss of meaninglessness” with “no core at all.”  But you also express appreciation for its “hidden gems” and the neighborhood vitality that remains in a city built on transportation, from Confederate railroads, to a spaghetti junction of freeways, to the busiest airport in the world. Everyone likes to poor-mouth their hometown, of course, sometimes in secret, but do you think Atlanta is fated to have this ambivalence sewn into its character?  

Oh, definitely. Although I didn’t really appreciate it when I was younger, I’ve come to realize that’s one of the more interesting things about it. There’s this constant tug-of-war in Atlanta between history and a progressive future that is never really worked out. The city has tried so hard for decades either to suppress or actively promote disinterest in its own history. But that history is one of the more intriguing stories among major American cities. Atlanta is famously mercurial, constantly reinventing itself to suit market tastes. It has been in a perpetual identity crisis since General Sherman provided it with a violent opportunity never have to ground itself in contingent reality. The leveling of Atlanta—mostly by Atlantans, far more than Sherman—serviced a self-image of a city on the move and on the make, never to be too tied down to any one thing or ideal other than the ideal of not being too tied down to anything. This certainly crystallized during Mayor Hartsfield’s tenure, when the city became serious about biracial coalition building and self-branding at the same time. It was Hartsfield who coined the term “the city too busy to hate,” and also—not coincidentally, engineered the airport that is now half-named for him and—fittingly—the busiest in the world.

All of this used to make me highly suspicious—and it still does—but now I find it incredibly fascinating. (In fact, before this book project came into being, I attempted to explore this idea in a kind of ghost story of a novel set mostly underneath a fictionalized version of the city.) Atlanta has made a career out of forgetfulness, and in that sense it is hard to imagine a more quintessentially American city. If amnesia is our most pronounced national trait, Atlanta is clearly more experienced at this than any other major American city. Forgetfulness is practically our mission statement. I realize that my way of putting this may be one more way of making Atlanta exceptional, which is something we have always been doing. It may reflect a deep insecurity, which I know exists at a very deep level here: the sense that we have something to prove. In the Olympic era I think we were driven by a desire to prove that we could hang with the big international A-listers like Barcelona, Paris, Tokyo. And that chip on our shoulder has always been there, at least in modern Atlanta. It’s there now, maybe more than ever. One common motto current in town these days is that “Atlanta Influences Everything.” It’s just the latest iteration of a long trajectory of slick and skillful sloganeering designed to prove that people need to take us seriously. What makes it so interesting is that it’s not complete bullshit. If it were, Atlanta would be just one more metropolitan poseur. But the last two elections have proven how central to American politics the city has become. We are now an undisputed sports mecca, the “epicenter of college football,” as I heard it put this last season. And in some ways the story of sports here is rarely told in its inextricable relationship to race. As with all things, memory has a tendency to compress itself over time, and an active regime of amnesia in town has only accelerated that process. We think of Hank Aaron as a great gentleman of the game now, and have tended to sand down the rough edges of his story, in particular the way he combated racism here in Atlanta, perhaps no more so than at the high point of his glory, when he broke Babe’s home run record. He was bombarded with hate mail. And the way Atlanta has preserved that memory is itself so telling: the spot of fence over which Hank’s 715th home run flew in 1974 now stands preserved in a small island in a vast parking lot where Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium once stood. Hank’s legacy is reduced to this one moment, whose context is now completely absent.

Similarly, but from another angle, after Muhammad Ali was banned from professional boxing in 1967—for his refusal to fight in Vietnam—he staged his professional comeback in Atlanta. That story is so wonky and wrapped up in political dualisms (Atlanta v. Georgia, Black v. White, even Lester Maddox v. Ali himself) that it is almost as if the fight itself is a metaphor for those deeper conflicts that almost no one is aware of now. And I am sure Ali’s relationship to Atlanta was lost to almost everyone in July 1996 when he seemed to appear out of the ether at the downtown end of Olympic Stadium with the torch licking up his forearm. There wasn’t a dry eye in the place. I mean, what a story. But the thing is, the story was even better than that.

If anything, this relentless marketing has had a tendency to dull the edge of what makes Atlanta really interesting. Yes, it’s an important city—I think by now we’ve established that—but the paradox is that the pact that Black and White leaders made decades ago prioritize commercial progress did two things: first, it ended up paving over both Black and white history, but especially Black history—and often literally paved over Black neighborhoods; second, it worked. It’s not an especially morally ennobling tale, but Atlanta managed to avoid so much racial unrest—let’s be honest and call it white violence—for example, in the early 1960s during desegregation, and after Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, because city leaders—including both the Black establishment and elected officials, who were still at that point, almost entirely white (like Ivan Allen, Jr., and police chief Herbert Jenkins)—recognized how bad riots would be for business. And they all basically agreed we couldn’t have that, because if the money withdrew from Atlanta, everyone would suffer.

Salvation through commerce: is there a more American storyline?

Downtown Atlanta, as seen from Oakland Cemetery, on the final day of Tour One in 1997.

The inspiration for this book was a set of road trips you took with your secondary school and college friend John Hayes. Can you tell us a bit more about your friendship and what you discovered on the road with him? 

None of this work would have come into being without John, whom I have known since high school. We have traveled more than just Southern backroads together: we both went into and out of short-lived but highly consequential affairs with evangelicalism, and happened to end up at the same college together, where, as I have said before, we both fell for the same woman, Flannery O’Connor. Much of our friendship has been grounded in shared experiences and shared struggles attempting to come to terms with Christianity and then later with Southern history. To put it one way, O’Connor was a sort of midwife in our deliverance from the former, and into the latter. We have worked through many of the same texts together for years (even now we are reading together a book by Søren Kierkegaard, who has been a constant companion, or sparring partner).

I think one of things that has sustained our friendship and the tours we’ve done together is the fact that we both come from the same basic background: affluent, white, Protestant Atlanta. We both grew up in big mainstream churches in Buckhead, and then drifted into an evangelical subculture at our high school which, while troubling in so many ways, at least introduced both of us to big ideas that seemed to really matter. I think what John and I both discovered as we got out on the road was just how rich and surprising the region is, how mysterious, and how beautiful. I don’t mean picturesque, necessarily, although it certainly has its moments. There is a gravitas to the appearance and feel of the South. It feels heavy, substantial—and so incredibly fertile. We joked on our recent tour how often John remarked at how “lush” the landscape is in some sections.

Much of what I claim to have “seen” in these images and in these reflections is really a fruit of conversation, especially in more recent years. In earlier years I was, as John will tell you, incorrigibly taciturn, and would go days without speaking a word. There was perhaps an element of just taking it all in, combined with a dash of functional depression, I am sure. But my ideas about the South have certainly emerged out of our friendship, and are impossible for me to imagine without that relationship. There aren’t many people who would be able to suffer 10 days in an un-air-conditioned pickup truck in the American South in late summer with me, and vice versa. But John has that unusual capacity, and I think one big part of why we’ve worked so well together as traveling partners is that we share a similar sense of humor. It is not evident in the photographs in the book, for obvious reasons, but the nature of these trips has called for a good deal of levity. Over twenty-five years, it has been a sort of slow-and-low education in how to not take yourself so seriously, while also learning to receive your place in the story of the world with seriousness. We have giggled nonsensically over a dinner of Pabst Blue Ribbon and Pringles in Jeff Busby State Park in Mississippi, and had a protracted laugh at the expense of long dead figures like General Robert Toombs, General Pierre Prudhomme, for whom we have composed counter-factual histories and a song or two. I think the fact that these trips have been so enjoyable for me has helped me to associate the discovery of some unsavory truth, some unhealed wound, with a kind of liberative sense, the joy of discovery with the hope of redemption, the opening of closets with the introduction of fresh air.