Not Now, Voyager

“There is no frigate like a book.” Emily Dickinson

Many of my friends now are packing up and traveling hither and yon in all directions near and far. Some do this almost every other month, to Africa, Hawaii, Europe and just down the I5 to Ashland. I ask, How can they do this, how can they manage to head off once again, so soon after returning from their previous jaunt?

While I had my days of traveling, it was never quite like this and now I am growing weary of the entire enterprise. I have come to feel much like Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who writes in her “anti-travel” polemic, Not Now, Voyager:

“…how much easier it is to let the mind, rather than the body, do the traveling. No tickets or schedules, no borders, no passports. Thought is the one thing that remains free no matter what changes outside the head.”

Schwartz wonders if people really enjoy traveling as much as they claim. And like her, I ask, “What do they truly learn in the new territory?”

Yet, in spite of all the anti-travel remarks in the first chapter of her book, Schwartz spends the remaining eight chapters describing various trips she took to far off lands, while at the end of each account, professing how happy she is to be finally back home. So much for consistency between words and actions.

For me travel was always a search for a place where I finally felt at home. When I was foolishly young, I thought it was Paris and then, when I was a little less young, but equally foolish, I realized it was Florence. I knew I could live there quite contentedly, but in the end, it too was not much more than a dream. They do have their winters in Tuscany after all and my life-long companion did not find the idea the least bit appealing.

Going off here and there, traveling from place to place for a week or so is not how I search for home. And so I return to Florence as often as I can and stay for a month or so each summer, wandering about the city, exploring as much of it as I can, only to fly back to the place I’ve never “connected” with and want only to leave the moment I get off the plane.

I do now feel that learning about a country, a place, the peoples and their culture can be readily conveyed in books and films. Since these experiences can be repeated and lingered over in the comfort of your armchair, whatever learning is sought may, in fact, be equally, if not more, easily acquired.

Jhumpa Lahiri wrote, “For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.”

There is also no doubt it is carried out at less cost, less hassle, and none of the burdens of arranging tickets, accommodations and “all the rest of it.”

Cities Without Cars

It snowed heavily on the drive back to Portland from the Bay Area. The weather gurus didn’t know this was coming, no one was prepared, trucks and buses did not chain-up, the roads were not sanded. And then the disaster began.

Traffic came to a halt. No one moved for hours. Long lines of stranded drivers stretched down I5 mile and after mile and then some more. Trucks and buses couldn’t get up the icy hills, cars ran out of gas, it was a monumental traffic jam, better thought of as solitary confinement on the Interstate.

A man jumped out of his car and ran into the woods to do what he could no longer avoid (I am thinking, how are others handling this?); a woman vomited out her car window; drivers pushed their cars onto the siding and walked off to nowhere.

It was then that I thought of Venice and the hill towns of Italy. Venice--the city without cars, the carfree city, the city that never heard of an Interstate or being imprisoned on a roadway, the city that is surprisingly quiet without the roar of motorcycles or four-barrel-carburetors.

In his recent book, Carfree Cities, J. H. Crawford offers a potential solution to the many urban problems caused by the automobile. He argues, without much dispute, that a carfree city saves energy, preserves the environment, and improves the quality of our lives. Crawford expresses his approach this way:

"Imagine life in a city free from the noise, stench, and danger of cars, trucks, and buses. Imagine that all basic needs, from groceries to child care, lie within a five-minute walk of every doorstep. Imagine that no commute takes more than 35 minutes from door to door, and that service is provided by a fast, cheap, safe, comfortable public transport system… the car is a technology that has run wild, and that the time has come to reclaim city streets for human activities."

He describes cities throughout the world that have established carfree neighborhoods or carfree zones and includes what I regard as striking photographs of these places and the life that goes within them. You can glimpse this at the Carfree Times Web site and subscribe to its periodic publication distributed over the Internet. If you review the latest issues, you will notice the many inviting images of carless piazzas in Venice and other carfree cities throughout the world.

I realize it is impossible these days to live without a car or at least without access to one once in a while. Our communities have been designed for automobiles and so they have become a necessity. What then are the practical applications of the carfree concept for contemporary urban communities? Crawford proposes a carfree city planned to maximize the quality of life and provides a fair number of suggestions for implementing the carfree concept in both new and existing cities. I have lived in carfree cities and been in others where carfree zones have been established on certain days and whenever I am in these places I have seen the way they have returned the city and its streets to the people.

Of course, these ideas are not going to help me much in driving into Portland on a snowy winter day, but they will bring the city alive once I manage to get there. And perhaps one day, I won’t have to drive or fly to the Bay Area for the holidays. Instead, I will get on a hi-speed train that will whiz me there in a few hours, whereupon I will proceed into a community where I will have no need for a car of my own. This is not a dream in the cities depicted in Carfree Cites, so I have no reason to believe it isn’t a realistic possibility elsewhere.

On the Move

This is the season to travel, perhaps not so far this year, but still somewhere if you can afford it. Long ago Blaise Pascal wrote, “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” And yet most of us leave our room at this time of the year to travel hither and yon. But why? The current issue of Lapham’s Quarterly has devoted its current issue to the subject of travel and sometimes to this question.

The issue consists of a series of excerpts from contributors as varied as Herodotus, Basho, Melville, Dorothy Parker, etc. It is a little confusing to skip from one excerpt to another but enough are interesting to make it worthwhile and, even better, on most pages there is a painting, a map, a drawing, a box with historical facts, or a photograph.

In reading the issue, I made note of some of the quotations sprinkled throughout the text and, along with some of my own, I have selected a few to post.

On Going
What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eager abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn’t have lost if you hadn’t left home in the first place. Bill Bryson

The wise traveler travels only in imagination. W. Somerset Maugham

Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy. Francis Burney

Purpose
The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go on a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences—to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others. William Hazlitt

Out of touch was where I wanted to be. The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace. Paul Theroux

One’s destination is never a place but a new ways of seeing things. Henry Miller

Getting There
Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything. Charles Kuralt

More and more I like to take a train. I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling—it is so much more sociable, and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating. Gertrude Stein

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships, or trains. Alain de Botton

Effects
The farther one goes
The less one knows. Lao Tzu

And see all the sights from pole to pole,
And glance, and nod, and bustle by;
And never once possess our soul
Before we die. Matthew Arnold

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think. Lawrence Durrell

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. T. S. Eliot

On Traveling

If I have trouble finding a book that captures my interest, it is usually because it doesn’t make contact with some aspect of my life—where I am, how I feel, a recent experience or whatever it is that I’m searching for. If I am in the mood to read something French or Russian I know exactly where to look. If I am at loose ends, I want a book that echoes and perhaps reflects on that experience.

But after reading Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon last year, I’ve been having trouble finding much pleasure in any particular book. Mercier’s novel is an intellectual tour de force and I am always on the lookout for one of those, regardless of anything else.

However, I was recently and unexpectedly entertained by a very long short story, The Lover, by Damon Galgut in the latest Paris Review. The story is about a young man, whose name we never learn, who is at loose ends in South Africa. The tale depicts his wanderings from one place to another and then several more for the better part of what must have easily been a year. And since I am always wandering from one place to another, whether it be for somewhere to live or an idea to investigate, I found myself enjoying the story even though it seemed excessively repetitious.

In this tale the central character simply decides: “one morning to leave and gets on a bus that same night. He has it in mind to travel around for two weeks and then go back.”

His travels last far more than that. Galgut writes:

What is he looking for? He himself doesn’t know.

His life is unfocused and directionless, he has not made a home for himself.

…he thinks that he has lost the ability to love, people or places or things, most of all the person and place and thing that he is. Without love nothing has value, nothing can be made to matter very much.

Eventually he meets up with some other people and ambivalently decides to join them on their own unfocused wanderings. At certain times he leaves them. But soon thereafter he races after trying to join them once again.

He is continually uneasy, no matter where he is and who he is with, always uncertain about the idea and the value of traveling. After several months of what was to be a two-week excursion, he eventually returns to his home in South Africa, where he is soon overcome with a deep sense of apathy and once again at drift.

The story ends on what a philosophical note when the hero begins to question himself about the very nature of experience itself. Galgut describes his thoughts this way:

A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it is made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.

…soon your presence, which felt so weighty and permanent, has completely gone. Things happen once only and are never repeated, never return. Except in memory.

Is the purpose of any trip primarily to collect memories? Does a trip even have to have a purpose? The experience itself is so fleeting. It starts and then it is over and what is left other than the memories that in time will fade or are transformed and then totally forgotten. Is it worth it? Of course, there are all those photos, but that isn’t why you went all that distance or incurred all those costs.

As far back as 1670, Pascal wrote in the Pensees: The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

I remember Pascal’s words every time I consider traveling far from home and then, as I begin to imagine how much I’ll enjoy being there, I promptly ignore his wise consul and begin to make my plans. How much more sensible it would have been to have taken his advice more seriously and simply stayed at home to travel there on Goggle Earth.