Beyond Tourism
By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE
The conviction that traveling in general, and walking in particular, can bring inspiration and even enlightenment is a very ancient one, and it exists in many cultures across the globe. As the old adage, taken up by the wandering scholars of medieval Europe, had it, “Solvitur ambulando” (“It is solved by walking”). In the sixth century B.C., the Indian saint Mahavira is said to have received enlightenment while walking, and the idea is still current. I recently met an itinerant Jain nun who told me: “This wandering life, with no material possessions, unlocks our souls. There is a wonderful sense of lightness, living each day as it comes.” For her, journey and destination became one, thought and action became one.
Illustration by Jeffrey Fisher
IN MOTION
The Experience of Travel
By Tony Hiss
339 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95
Related
-
Excerpt: ‘In Motion’ (October 27, 2010)
-
Books of The Times: Books About Travel by Alain de Botton and Tony Hiss (October 27, 2010)
A similar notion lies at the heart of Tony Hiss’s interesting and ambitious but flawed meditation, “In Motion: The Experience of Travel.” For Hiss, travel and especially walking can bring a sense of heightened awareness of the world, a kind of sensory exhilaration he calls Deep Travel. As he makes clear, such travel need not involve an epic journey; a simple visit to the bagel store at the end of the street can bring it on. What it awakens is a latent, childlike sense of wonder at the world around us.
Nevertheless it is long journeys that bring out the possibilities of Deep Travel most strongly, removing us from our familiar comforts and security, taking us into new situations, alone and vulnerable, our minds open to the world and its sensations, bringing about an enhanced sense of perception. Such travel can also allow us to rediscover parts of our own selves that are normally obscured by the humdrum routines of daily life. Hiss quotes Pico Iyer’s observation that travel allows us “to tap parts” of the self that are “generally obscured by chatter and routine,” and also to realize how subjective our certainties can be. “The first lesson we learn on the road,” Iyer has written, “is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal.”
This interesting intuition is one that Hiss explores at length and from an impressively wide variety of disciplines. Like Bruce Chatwin’s great novel of nomadism, “The Songlines,” an intriguingly unclassifiable analysis of the creativity to be found in restlessness, “In Motion” ranges widely over continents and approaches and time frames, leaping from idea to idea. Like “The Songlines,” Hiss’s book is full of evidence of his impressively wide reading and intelligent speculation, replete with strange discoveries and serendipities. At its best, “In Motion” has an enjoyably erratic and discursive structure, moving from anthropologists studying the first human footprints in the grasslands of Africa to Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon, taking in, along the way, American Indian winter camps in the swamps of New Jersey, Alexander Kinglake’s turban-spotting in Ottoman Belgrade and the first settlements of early hunter-gatherers in Israel and Syria. Hiss darts from the experience of “bobbing along the ‘lazy river’ pool behind the MGM Grand, the 5,000-room hotel on the Las Vegas Strip” to a description of a movie heroine listening to seals singing on the beaches of the Inner Hebrides. He mentions the giant dragonflies that existed before the ice age, Coleridge’s opium trances and his own wanderings through New York during the great blackout of 2003. He talks to an ecologist who has discovered that humans everywhere seem to have a deep love of grass lawns, and provides us with a glimpse of the mythical Inca birdmen who were once said to inhabit the rainforests of Peru.
And yet, for all its interest and expansiveness, “In Motion” does have some severe problems. At times I found it frustratingly woolly — the central concept of Deep Travel is, for example, defined differently at different places in the book — and it is jargon-ridden throughout. Hiss has a great fondness for capitalized terms. In addition to Deep Travel, he gives us Deep Time, Ceremonial Time, a Suspended Moment, the Longer Now, assorted Deep Nows, the Deep Now at Hand and even a Directed Deep Now. Few of these coinages really help bring his ideas into focus; instead they simply add difficulty, and at times almost self-parody, to notions that could perhaps be better expressed in metaphor. While Hiss has a magpie-like attraction to dazzling ideas, “In Motion” shows a frustrating lack of clarity in drawing them into a coherent argument, as well as a disappointing lack of elegance in expressing them — two qualities Chatwin excelled in.
The exhilaration of the open road and the feeling of connectedness to the natural world that it can produce, is, after all, a common human experience. Simply expressed, it has produced some of mankind’s greatest writing. The Swiss travel writer Nicolas Bouvier explores this territory in his youthful masterpiece, “The Way of the World,” where he conveys as well as anyone the raw intoxication of being on the road. “Deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper,” Bouvier writes, makes you “more open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight.” Thus traveling “outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you — or unmaking you.”
Comments