The Tao of Travel

A JOURNEY ROUND My Room is one of the curiosities of travel literature. De Maistre (1763–1852), born in Savoy, peripatetic as a soldier and landscape painter, ended his life as a naturalized Russian subject. Arrested in Italy while serving in the Austro-Russian army, he was put under house arrest in Turin for forty-two days, where he wrote this book of forty-two chapters. He hadn't planned to publish it, but when his brother Joseph, a political philosopher, read it, he persuaded Xavier to do so, and the book appeared in 1794. It has been described as "a delightful chat with the reader, filled with delicate observations, in which an artless grace, humor, and spontaneous wit are wedded to a gentle and somewhat dreamy philosophy." In fact, it is parody, self-mockery, and willfully eccentric, a deliberate attempt to stave off the boredom of confinement, calling this a "new mode of traveling I introduce into the world." Hyperbolic (one chapter describes "Latitude and Topography"), it is also a disquisition on the meaning of ordinary things.

"The voyages of Cook and the observations of his fellow-travelers ... are nothing compared with my adventures in this one district." He anatomizes the pictures on the walls, his furniture, his bed: "A bed sees us born and sees us die. It is the ever changing scene upon which the human race play by turns interesting dramas, laughable farces, and fearful tragedies. It is a cradle decked with flowers. A throne of love. A sepulcher."

Kamo-no-ChŌmei: Recluse in a Remote and Tiny Hut

THE TEN FOOT Square Hut, a brief account of the withdrawal of a man from public life to a tiny hut, where he ended his days, is often compared with Thoreau's Walden. The work is attributed to Kamo-no-Chōmei, a twelfth-century Japanese aristocrat who, disappointed at being passed over for the post of warden of the shrine of Kamo in Kyoto, simply retreated, rusticating himself to the mountains, living alone, "a friend of the moon and the wind."

He was in his fifties when he forsook the world, first for a hut near Mount Hiei, and after five years he moved into greater seclusion in Hino, near Tokyo, for a hut that was hardly ten feet square and seven feet high. Like Thoreau, he describes his simple furnishings (baskets, a brazier, his straw mat, his desk). It is the ultimate in simplicity. Altogether he was a recluse for eight years, and his writing shows the effects of his retreat and renunciation and his nonattachment, achieving a Buddhist ideal. Calmly, he lists the catastrophes of all sorts—acts of God, acts of man—that have befallen Japan. And he sums up his existence in the tiny hut: "Since I forsook the world and broke off all its ties, I have felt neither fear nor resentment. I commit my life to fate without special wish to live or desire to die. Like a drifting cloud I rely on none and have no attachments. My only luxury is a sound sleep and all I look forward to is the beauty of the changing seasons."

Thoreau: Home Is the Heavenly Way

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was so emotionally attached to his home in Concord that he found it almost impossible to leave. In fact, after 1837 he did so only for short periods—thirteen days on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, some visits to Cape Cod, three trips to the Maine woods, brief spells in Staten Island and Minnesota. He was never alone on these excursions; he always went with a friend or relative. Although he philosophized constantly about travel (he was widely read in the travel books of his time), he is a much better example of someone who really didn't go anywhere. The Maine trip was a team effort, and Thoreau was a follower. A Yankee in Canada is about a one-week train trip with several hundred tourists, what we would call a package tour today. He made no bones about not being a traveler. He boasted of staying home; indeed, he made a virtue of it: "Live at home like a traveler." Homesick on Staten Island, he wrote, "My thoughts revert to those dear hills ... Others may say, 'Are there not the cities of Asia?' But what are they? Staying at home is the heavenly way" (letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson).

Travel in your head, Thoreau preached in Walden: "Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought." He went on to say that it is "easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals ... than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone."

A frequent hyperbolic flourish in a Thoreau book or essay is his comparing an aspect of his neighborhood with an exotic place. And these deflations are often paradoxes. Why leave Concord when, as he wrote in a poem,

Our village shows a rural Venice,

Its broad lagoons where yonder fen is;

As lovely as the Bay of Naples

Yon placid cove amid the maples;

And in my neighbor's field of corn