The Shock of Teapots by Cynthia Ozick

What makes travel a special kind of experience? In “The Shock of Teapots,” Cynthia Ozick uses a trip to Stockholm as a way of exploring, no the Swedish capital, but the nature of travel itself. Travel sharpens our perceptions; it returns us to the fresh vision of childhood. Part of the pleasure of a journey is the way it can transform a familiar object like a teapot into something extraordinary. This brief, though lavishly written, essay first appeared in 1985 as “Enchantments at First Encounter” in the travel supplement of the New York Times Magazines.

One morning in Stockholm, after rain and just before November, a mysteriously translucent shadow began to paint itself across the top of the city. It skimmed high over people’s heads, a gauzy brass net, keeping well above the streets, skirting everything fabricated by human arts – though one or two steeples were allowed to dip into it, like pens filling their nibs with palest ink. It made a sort of watermark over Stockholm, as if a faintly luminous river ran overhead, yet with no more weight or gravity than a vapor.

This glorious strangeness – a kind of crystalline wash – was the sunlight of a Swedish autumn. The sun looked new: it had a lucidity, a texture, a tincture, a position across the sky that my New York gape had never before taken in. The horizontal ladder of light hung high up, higher than any sunlight I had ever seen, and the quality of its glow seemed thinner, wanner, more tentatively morning-brushed ; or else like gold leaf beaten gossamer as tissue – a lambent skin laid over the spired marrow of the town.

“Ah yes, the sun does look a bit different this time of year,” say the Stockholmer in their perfect English (English as a second first language), but with a touch of ennui. Whereas I, under the electrified rays of my whitening hair, stand drawn upward to the startling sky, restored to the clarity of childhood. The Swedes have known a Swedish autumn before; I have not.

Travel returns us in just this way to sharpness of notice; and to be saturated in the sight of what is entirely new – the sun at an unaccustomed slope, stretched across the northland, separate from the infiltrating dusk that always seems about to fall through clear gray Stockholm – is to revisit the enigmatically lit puppet-stage outlines of childhood: those mental photographs and dreaming woodcuts or engravings that we retain from our earliest years. What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped imprinted, eternally seen. Travelers regain this ghost-seizing brightness, eeriness, firstness.

They regain it because they have cut themselves loose from their own society, from every society; they are, for a while, floating vagabonds, like astronauts out for a space walk on a long free line. They are subject to preternatural exhilarations, absurd horizons, unexpected forms and transmutations: the matter-of-fact (a battered old stoop, say or the shape of a door) appears beautiful; or a stone that at home would not merit the blink of your eye here arrests you with its absolute particularity – just because it is what your hand already intimately knows. You think: a stone, a stone! They have stones here too! And you think: how uncannily the planet is girdled, as stone-speckled in Sweden as in New York. For the vagabond-voyeur (and for travelers voyeurism is irresistible), nothing is not for notice, nothing is banal, nothing is ordinary: not a rock, not the shoulder of a passerby, not a teapot.

Plenitude assaults; replication invades. Everything known has its spooky shadow and Doppelganger. On my first trip anywhere – it was 1957 and I landed in Edinburgh with the roaring of the plane’s four mammoth propellers for days afterward embedded in my ears – I rode in a red airport bus to the middle of the city, out of which ascended its great castle. It is a fairy-book castle, dreamlike, Arthurian, secured in the long-ago. But the shuddery red bus - hadn’t I been bounced along in an old bus before, perhaps not so terrifically red as this one? – the red bus was not within reach of plain sense. Every inch of its interior streamed with unearthliness, with an undivulged and consummate witchery. It put me in the grip of a wild Elsewhere. This unexceptional vehicle, with its bright forward snout, was all at once eclipsed by a rush of the abnormal, the unfathomably Martian. It was the bus not the phantasmagorical castle, that clouded over and bewildered our reasoned humanity. The red bus was what I intimately knew: only I have never seen it before. A reflected flicker of the actual. A looking-glass bus. A Scottish ghost.

This is what travelers discover: that when you sever the links of normality and its claims, when you break off from the quotidian, it is the teapots that truly shock. Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of journey. Nothing shakes the heart so much as meeting – far, far away – what you last met at home. Some say that travlers are informal anthropologists. But it is ontology – the investigation of the nature of being – that travelers do. Call it the flooding-in of the real.

There is, besides, the flooding-in character. Here one enters not landscape or streetlit night scenes, but fragments of drama: splinters of euphoria that catch you up when you are least deserving. Sometimes it is a jump into a pop-up book, as when a cockney cabdriver, of whom you have asked directed while leaning out of the curb, give his native wink of blithe goodwill. Sometimes it is a mazy stroll into a toy theater, as when, in a museum, you suddenly come on the intense little band following the lecturer on Mesopotamia, or the lecture on genre painting, and the muse of civilization alights on these rapt few. What you are struck with then – one of those mental photographs that go on sticking to the retina – is not what lies somnolently in the glass case or hangs romantically on the wall, but the indelible singularity, delivered over forever by your own fertile gaze. When travelers star at heads and ears and necks and beads and mustaches, they are – in the encapsuled forced of selection – making art: portraits, voice sonatinas, the quick haiku of a strictly triangular nostril.

Traveling is seeing; it is the implicit that we travel by. Travelers are fantasists, conjurers, seers – and what they finally discover is that every round object everywhere is a crystal ball: stone, teapot, the marvelous globe of the human eye.