The Tao of Travel

Landscape in Travel

A landscape looks different when you know the names of things, and conversely, can look exceedingly inhospitable and alien when it seems nameless.—

FAF

It is rare to find silence anywhere in a natural landscape. There is always the wind at least. The rustle of trees and grass, the

drone of insects, the squawk of birds, the whistle of bats. By the sea, silence—true silence—is almost unknown. But on my last day here in Palau's Rock Islands, there was not even the lap of water. The air was motionless. I could hear no insects, nor any birds. The fruit bats flew high, beating their wings in absolute quiet. It seemed simple and wonderful: the world as an enormous room.—

FAF

Africa, seemingly incomplete and so empty, is a place for travelers to create personal myths and indulge themselves in fantasies of atonement and redemption, melodramas of suffering, of strength—binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, looking after refugees, making long journeys in expensive Land Rovers, re-creating stereotypes, even living out a whole cosmology of creation and destruction. That's why many travelers in Africa are determined to see it not as fifty-three countries but rather as a single troubled landscape.—

DSS

The nearest thing to writing a novel is traveling in a strange landscape.—

SWS

Travel as a Waste of Time

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" (1841)

Now my mind is made up. The whole journey is a trap. Travel does not broaden you so much as make you sophisticated, "up-to-date," taken in by the superficial with that really stupid look of a fellow serving on a beauty prize jury.

The look of a go-getter also. Worth no more. You can just as easily find your truth staring for forty-eight hours at some old tapestry.

—Henri Michaux,

Ecuador

(1970)

Travel, indeed, struck him as a being a waste of time, since he believed that the imagination could provide a more-than-adequate substitute for the vulgar reality of actual experience ... No doubt, for instance, that anyone can go on long voyages of exploration sitting by the fire, helping out his sluggish or refractory mind, if the need arises, by dipping into some book describing travels in distant lands.

—Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, in

Against Nature

by J.-K. Huysmans (1884), translated by Robert Baldick (1959)

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy—being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders.—

GTES

The Traveler as a Voyeur