Michael Palin Still Hasn't Run Out of Doors to Look Through

Michael Palin spent his twenties and early thirties writing and performing some of the most quotably absurd comedy of the twentieth century as a member of Monty Python — the dead parrot, the Spanish Inquisition, an entire cinematic argument about gourds standing in for swallows. It’s the kind of career most people would treat as a peak, the thing the rest of a life gets measured against. In 1988, at forty-five, already famous, already comfortable, he agreed to a BBC assignment that had nothing to do with comedy: circle the entire planet in eighty days or fewer, using no aircraft, exactly like Jules Verne’s fictional Phileas Fogg. He has said he took the job not knowing it would become an addiction. It did.

Here’s what makes this a different shape of story than the usual “comedian reinvents himself” arc: he didn’t do it once and move on. He kept doing it, for the next thirty-five years and counting. Pole to Pole. Full Circle, tracing the entire Pacific Rim. Sahara. Himalaya. New Europe. Brazil. A journey into North Korea in his mid-seventies that produced a book most professional foreign correspondents couldn’t have gotten permission to write. At seventy-nine, a series through Iraq. At eighty, a 1,300-mile route across Nigeria. Each series is its own full undertaking — months on the road, a country or a region taken seriously on its own terms — and none of them reads like a farewell tour. He has said, plainly, that despite having seen most of the world by now, he still just has an insatiable curiosity and likes looking out of a window to see what’s on the other side of it.

That’s a strange thing for a famous person to say after forty years of being paid to already know. Curiosity is supposed to be the thing you have before you’ve seen anything — the beginner’s excuse. Palin has kept it running well past the point where most people would let expertise quietly replace it with a settled opinion about how the world works. He’s described the actual job of traveling well as letting go of habit and prejudice long enough to find the unfamiliar interesting instead of merely disorienting — food you’ve never eaten, customs that confuse you, politics you don’t follow, treated as the point of the trip rather than an inconvenience to get past on the way to the point.

Most of us let curiosity calcify into opinion somewhere around middle age, and call the calcifying “wisdom” so it doesn’t have to feel like a loss. Palin, eighty-three years old and still boarding planes for documentaries nobody’s forcing him to make, is the counter-argument still walking around: the door doesn’t stop being interesting just because you’ve walked through a few hundred of them already.