The idea of travel always seems attractive, doesn’t it? To leave behind our humdrum, everyday world and enjoy life as a tourist. To picture ourselves in an exotic environment and perhaps, be transformed by our time in that place? Fortunes have been made over the years in books on this subject: A Year in Provence; Eat, Pray, Love and Under the Tuscan Sun are just three examples. But the fact is, wherever we go, we take ourselves with us and most travelers come back home. Lucy Honeychurch would be the first person to tell you that. Lucy is one of those Edwardian, English girls who will tell you real travel isn’t the flight of fancy you’d imagine. She’s supposedly on this trip to Italy, to pick up some of the culture and sophistication of the continent but she hardly allowed within speaking distance of anyone truly Italian. Her irritating, old-maid cousin is always at her side, the hotel’s land-lady has a cockney accent and all the other guests there are English as well. To make things worse, the reservations got mixed up and she didn’t get A Room With a View. That’s the opening situation in E. M Forster’s story…
It’s a phrase they teach that makes no sense on its face. How can the road to Hell be paved with Good Intentions? If someone starts a course of action with benevolent goal in mind, the results should be good as well. Well, history and nature say otherwise. Sometimes the failure comes from lack of imagination: rabbits were sent to Australia as pets and a possible food source about the same time Kudzu was introduced to the U. S. as an anti-erosion measure. Both brought the disasters of an invasive species: Australia was forced into biological warfare to keep the rabbit population in check and Kudzu is known as “The Vine that Ate the South.” Sometimes the well-intentioned element fails because of lesser parts of human nature. Prohibition was called “The Noble Experiment” with the idea that making booze illegal would make people stop drinking. Instead, people bought and drank unregulated, untaxed hootch and created a market for organized crime. Sometimes everyone starts out with the best of intentions and still end up in tragedy. Some people may look to Romeo and Juliet as their choice for this mess but for me, it’s E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India….
Early on in “Educating Rita” the heroine characterizes Howards End as “one crap book.” When I heard that line, I mentally crossed Howards End off my books-to-read list. Rita is a funny and engaging character so if she said the book was crap, then crap it must be. Ten years later, I saw the Merchant-Ivory film and realized I might have been hasty. More than twenty years have lapsed since then and I am still rereading Howards End, both on paper and as an e-book. It’s a best friend of a book and I can’t believe I nearly missed it. Howards End is about many things but mainly its about the connections we have, the connections we make and how they affect our lives. To begin with, two English sisters named Helen and Margaret Schlegel bump into an English family named Wilcox when they’re all on holiday in Germany. If these two upper-middle class families had stayed in England, they probably would have stayed strangers since, beyond nationality, they haven’t much in common. The Schlegels live in London and spend their time supporting progressive causes and the arts, (In American terms they would probably be called liberal elites) because they…