The Tao of Travel

Bronislaw Malinowski: The great pioneering anthropologist in the Trobriand Islands suffered from depression, anxiety, rage, and feelings of rejection. He was seen in his work as objective and wholly focused, and for him the Trobrianders were (as his title depicted them) Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). But in his intimate Diary in the Strict Sense of the Word, published more than forty years later, another Malinowski was revealed. "The natives still irritate me, particularly Ginger, whom I would willingly beat to death," he wrote. "I understand all the German and Belgian atrocities." Or: "Unpleasant clash with Ginger ... I was enraged and punched him in the jaw once or twice." Or: "I am in a world of lies here." In his scholarly work he wrote about Trobrianders as great navigators, canoe builders, and gardeners. But he confided in the diary "my dislike of them, my longing for civilization," and "the niggers were noisy ... general aversion to niggers."

Edward Lear: As the last of twenty-one children, and raised by his much older sister Ann, Lear hardly knew his parents. He suffered frequent grand mal epileptic seizures from early in his life, frequent melancholia, and a depression he called "the morbids."

Jan Morris: Not a mental condition but a sex change, recounted in Conundrum (1974). James Morris climbed Everest and traveled and wrote about the United States, Oman, South Africa, Venice, Spain, and England. Then, after gender reassignment and surgery in 1972, the newly emergent Jan Morris continued to travel and write, about Wales, Hong Kong, Australia, and the great cities of the world. Rare among travelers, indeed among writers generally, for someone to write and travel as a man and then as a woman. After the operation, I believe her prose style became more breathless and bejeweled.

9. Travelers Who Never Went Alone

I HAVE ALWAYS TRAVELED ALONE. WITH THE EXception of large-scale expeditions involving a crew or a team, every other kind of travel is diminished by the presence of others. The experience is shared—someone to help, buy tickets, make love to, pour out your heart to, help set up the tent, do the driving, whatever. Although they do not usually say so, many travelers have a companion. Such a person is a consolation, and inevitably a distraction. "Look at that camel in front of the Lexus, honey—hey, it's the old and the new!" ¶ A man who always travels alone, Jonathan Raban, has this to say on the subject: "Traveling with a companion, with a wife, with a girlfriend, always seems to me like birds in a glass dome, those Victorian glass things with stuffed birds inside. You are too much of a self-contained world for the rest of the world to be able to penetrate. You've got to go kind of naked into the world and make yourself vulnerable to it, in a way that you're never going to be sufficiently vulnerable if you're traveling with your nearest and dearest on your arm. You're never going to see anything; you're never going to meet anybody; you're never going to hear anything. Nothing is going to happen to you" (quoted in A Sense of Place, edited by Michael Shapiro, 2004). Raban has enlarged on this in his essay "Why Travel?" in his collection Driving Home (2010): "You are simply not lonely enough when you travel with companions ... Spells of acute loneliness are an essential part of travel. Loneliness makes things happen."

Underlining this, Kipling wrote in "The Winners," a poem that serves as an epigraph to "The Story of the Gadsby" (1889):

What the moral? Who rides may read.

When the night is thick and the tracks are blind

A friend at a pinch is a friend, indeed,

But a fool to wait for the laggard behind.

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,

He travels the fastest who travels alone.

In an earlier echo of this, Thoreau was succinct on the subject in Walden: "The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready."

None of the following people agreed with this, and even Thoreau, who never traveled alone, did not follow his own advice.

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell