Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying

Ever since I decided to go abroad for the semester, I’ve been fielding the same question: Why do you want to go to Scotland? I suppose people had asked me the same question throughout last fall—as I went about my normal routine at Columbia—but earlier on the question seemed more hypothetical, along the lines of, “Why would you like to be invisible?” However, my time is up: I’m away from Columbia, and in exile from New York, at least until the summer. I’ll be spending my semester at the University of St. Andrews, where I’ll no doubt build new routines that will last me just long enough to grow weary of them.

I passed the hours of my weeks at Columbia, like Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, in long-established patterns—the 8:40 a.m. coffee and muffin at Samad’s, the Sundays at the Barnes and Noble magazine rack hiding Us Weekly behind The Atlantic, saying I would buy the flowers myself. I knew how many hot-dog stands I’d hit between Lincoln Square and Columbus Circle. I also knew, a bit later, that eventually I’d need to change my surroundings in order to avoid becoming an Upper West Side curmudgeon before I reached the age of 23, sitting in a pile of New Yorkers and monitoring the price of scallion cream cheese. Studying abroad seemed as good a way as any.

I wish there had been some climactic moment when I decided to give up New York for good. If nothing else, it would make for an interesting first column. But, as I told people rather simply, studying abroad was “something I’ve always wanted to do.” This vague forward momentum indicates an uncertainty of purpose rather than a commitment to a goal­—an inertia of sorts, as the decision to go abroad was made long ago. Referring to it as though spring 2009 would never actually happen—that my mornings would be characterized by a string of carrot-pecan muffins into the indefinite future—became one of my many routines.

In her famous essay about leaving New York, “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion wrote, “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.” While I don’t know exactly when I decided to leave school for a semester, perhaps my planning to leave New York—undertaken as I began digging little ruts for myself—was an end rather than a beginning. I was able to look at everything from a certain distance, knowing that I’d eventually leave it behind. I gracefully omitted the coming-back element of the equation.

Knowing I was on my way out, I allowed myself only an ironic frisson of delight in the gossip of my friends, seeking to match Didion’s world-weary disinterest (in my case, the gossip was more about Brooklyn bars than book advances.) But in a manner I think not uncommon to those who know they’ll be studying abroad, I began to view this gossip as less involving on a personal level and more interesting as news from a tribe from which I would soon be excommunicated. With no real knowledge of what was to come and only a tenuous connection to the reality of my surroundings, I found that my semester before study abroad was one of the most peculiarly sublime periods of my life.

The sublimity has now ended, as I fill my days by applying for a student visa and searching for a warm fleece coat. But the ignorance of what is to come has not abated. My justifications for going abroad seem clear to me, and I’m happy to be doing it­—but Scotland? While I auditioned for Jeopardy this semester (looking for a way, any way, to pay for nights in hostels in Vienna and the like), the interviewer asked me whether I hoped to find love at St. Andrews, as Prince William had. I’d read the same Vanity Fair article as my interviewer had, so I laughed uproariously and agreed. A coworker of my dad’s asked me whether I was ready to eat haggis—the infamous Scottish organ-meat dish—and, performing once more, I laughed.

I am looking forward to getting out of a city—going from New York to London would be a bit too much urbanity. My routines would look precisely the same, just with different skylines. Perhaps I hope that Scotland will be just like a song by the Scottish band Belle and Sebastian: cute and verging on too cute. The desire for time to read a book alone in a bucolic setting, expressed in more or less every Belle and Sebastian song, seems divorced from the neurotic discipline of my regimented days in New York—a dreamy alienation from responsibility and time. If there were ever a moment to escape New York, it was that time just before job searching and rent checks closing in. I’m looking forward to the experiences I’m going to have this semester, and to documenting them. In spite of everything, after reporting on life in Los Angeles and elsewhere, Didion returned home, to New York. There’s all the time in the world for me to grow crabbed and feeble—but this is a semester to try something different.

Daniel D’Addario is a Columbia College junior majoring in American studies. He is spending the semester at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The State I Am In runs alternate Fridays. Opinion@columbiaspectator.com">Opinion@columbiaspectator.com