With Hopper and Reznikoff in Thailand

In today's New York Times, Jori Finkel writes of Edward Hopper's enormous influence on our culture and quotes the owner of a San Francisco gallery as saying, "Hopper is huge,” Mr. Fraenkel said. “I think he’s had a pervasive impact on the way we see the world, so pervasive as to be almost invisible." I'm not as sure as Finkel is, that Hopper was the first artist or writer to capture the spirit that we find in Hopper's paintings, but I agree that his impact is so large as to be invisible. Certainly, the spirit that moves through Hopper, moves with a presence much larger than style, and is more accurately described as a sensibility.

I won't attempt to describe Hopper's impact on others, but I know that his paintings have given me an approach to the situations I find myself in all of the time as a travel writer in strange lands. When you travel alone, and frequently, as I do, you often find yourself in an interior zone that feels much like what comes out of one of Hopper's urban scenes. You're in a cafe, a hotel lobby or buying a newspaper and you're somehow inside of but not part of the social dance going on around you. Simultaneously isolating and comforting, there is a tangible relief in not being attached to your own history.

It calls to mind the Objectivist poetry of Charles Reznikoff. His most famous line describes how the ruins of a building can create that otherworldly feeling.

The house-wreckers have left the door and the staircase,
now leading to the empty room of night

When we rip ourselves out of our normal contexts, we are essentially leaving only the door and the staircase of our lives. As in the poem above, that often frames the edge between where our thoughts & observations border on the big mysterious night beyond.

A few years ago, drinking beers in a ramshackle roadside bar in Pattaya, Thailand, it occurred to me that it was precisely this feeling, as in a Hopper painting, that I was traveling to find. At that moment, the bar maid sat opposite me. She asked where I was from and what had brought me to Pattaya. I answered and asked how things were going for her.

It was a friendly, disanimated conversation between two disconnected lives, looking out from the tangle of their own stories, for a relief from those stories.