The Tao of Travel

V. S. Naipaul Disgusted by India

The point that one feels inescapable is the fact of India's poverty; and how deep is one's contempt for those Indians who, finding no difficulty in accepting one standard in India and another outside it, fail to realize this, and are failing to work night and day for the removal of this dreadful insult and humiliation ... I wonder, wonder if the shitting habits of Indians are not the key to all their attitudes. I wonder if the country will not be spiritually and morally regenerated if people were only made to adopt the standards of other nations in the business of shitting...

So goodbye to shit and sweepers; goodbye to people who

tolerate

everything; goodbye to all the refusal to act; goodbye to the absence of dignity; goodbye to the poverty; goodbye to caste and that curious

pettiness

which permeates that vast country; goodbye to people who, though consulting astrologers, have no sense of their destiny as

men

...It is an unbelievable, frightening, sad country. Probably it all has to change. Not only must caste go, but all those sloppy Indian garments; all those saris and lungis; all that squatting on the floor, to eat, to write, to serve in a shop, to piss.

—letter to Moni Malhoutra, 1963, in Patrick French,

The World Is What It Is

Umberto Eco, Hyperbolic in San Luis Obispo

The poor words with which natural human speech is provided cannot suffice to describe the Madonna Inn. To convey its external appearance, divided into a series of constructions, which you reach by way of a filling station carved from Dolomitic rock, or through the restaurant, the bar, and the cafeteria, we can only venture some analogies. Let's say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overdose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli. But that doesn't give you an idea. Let's say Arcimboldi builds the Sagrada Familia for Dolly Parton. Or: Carmen Miranda designs a Tiffany locale for the Jolly Hotel chain. Or D'Annunzio's Vittoriale imagined by Bob Cratchit, Calvino's Invisible Cities described by Judith Krantz and executed by Leonor Fini for the plush-doll industry. Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor sung by Perry Como in an arrangement by Liberace and accompanied by the Marine Band. No, that still isn't right. Let's try telling about the rest rooms. They are an immense underground cavern, something like Altamira and Luray, with Byzantine columns supporting plaster baroque cherubs. The basins are big imitation-mother-of-pearl shells, the urinal is a fireplace carved from rock, but when the jet of urine (sorry, but I have to explain) touches the bottom, water comes down from the wall of the hood, in a flushing cascade something like the Caves of the Planet Mongo.

 — Travels in Hyperreality (1995)

Lord Byron on the Black Sea (the Euxine)

There's not a sea the passenger e'er pukes in, Turns up more dangerous breakers than the Euxine.

—Byron,

Don Juan

(1818–24)

20. Imaginary People

IT IS NOT FRIVOLOUS TO CONSIDER THE TRAVEL literature that describes men with tails, or one-eyed people, or dragons. Such marvels are the reasons the early travel books commanded attention. The Tang Dynasty traveler Xuanzang, who was meticulous in his topographical descriptions, often mentions the presence of dragons. ¶ The many varieties of travel narrative show what readers wish to find in travel—the strange, the sexy, the disgusting, the amazing, the Other. Susan Sontag analyzed this fascination (and gullibility) in her essay "Questions of Travel," where she wrote, "Books about travel to exotic places have always opposed an 'us' to a 'them'—a relation that yields a limited variety of appraisals. Classical and medieval literature is mostly of the 'us good, them bad'—typically, 'us good, them horrid'—sort. To be foreign was to be abnormal, often represented by physical abnormality; and the persistence of those accounts of monstrous peoples, of 'men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders' (Othello's winning tale), of anthropophagi."

Those men whom Othello mentions having seen appear in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, one of the most popular books of the Middle Ages. It was popular precisely because of the bizarre people and places it described. Mandeville claimed that he traveled the world from 1322 to 1356. The first known edition appeared in French in 1371, and in English translation in the early fifteenth century. It went through many editions, and was augmented and embellished as it was reprinted. Mandeville probably did not exist, or if he did exist as a fantasizing Frenchman of the fourteenth century, he may not have gone anywhere: many of Mandeville's strange tales also appeared in the books of other travelers of the time.