by Paul Theroux
“The voyages of Cook and the observations of his fellow-travellers … 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 sepulchre”.
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 non-attachment, 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 traveller. He boasted of staying home; indeed, he made a virtue of it: “Live at home like a traveller.” 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 neighbourhood 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 neighbour’s field of corn
I recognize the Golden Horn.
In 1853, as the explorer Paul Du Chaillu (whom Thoreau would later read) is preparing to return to Equatorial Africa, Thoreau is confiding to his journal, “I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me — that by the want of pecuniary wealth I have been nailed down to this my native region so long & steadily — and made to love and study this spot of earth more and more — What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? — The traveller’s is but a barren and comfortless condition.”
Though his friend and literary mentor Emerson went to England in search of inspiration, and other contemporaries travelled around the globe — Hawthorne to England, Washington Irving to Spain, Melville to the Pacific — Thoreau was not impressed. The reports of such peregrinations roused him to be defiant and sometimes condescending. He was self-consciously a contrarian. He cultivated his eccentricity and talked it up in his writing, but his personality was a great deal stranger than he knew, and perhaps beyond cultivation.
Thoreau’s three Maine trips from 1846 to 1857 overlap the publication of Melville’s greatest works. There is no proof that Thoreau read Moby-Dick, but there is ample evidence that he read Typee, which appeared at the time of his first visit to Maine, and which he discussed in a discarded early version of “Ktaadn”. Somewhat combative in comparing wildernesses, Thoreau argued that he experienced deeper wilderness in Maine than Melville had as a castaway in the high volcanic archipelago of the remote Marquesas, among the lovely maiden Fayaway and the anthropophagous islanders. It seems a stretch, but there it is.
Emily Dickinson: The Argument for Staying Home
“TO SHUT OUR eyes is Travel,” Emily Dickinson wrote to a Mrs. Holland in 1870. By then, at age forty, she had been housebound for almost ten years, and she had another fifteen reclusive years to live. She had begun her studies at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, about ten miles from Amherst, but lasted only a year and, homesick, returned to the family house.
Agoraphobic? Probably not. She made a trip to Boston in 1865, without the fantods, but after that she did not set foot out of the house. Was she lovesick? “Neurasthenic”? One of her recent biographers suggests that Emily might have been epileptic: some of her family suffered from seizures, and she apparently took a drug that was then regarded as efficacious for epilepsy. But Edward Lear, an exact contemporary, was epileptic and a wide traveller — Corsica, Egypt, the Middle East, and India. Like Dickinson, Lear was a loner, craving solitude, because the affliction was regarded as shameful; perhaps that is the key.
Like many other shut-ins, Dickinson made a virtue of her confinement, and denigrated travel in both her poetry and her letters, extolled the joy of being home, and was prolific as a letter writer and a poet — almost two thousand poems. A mere dozen were published in her lifetime, but anonymously.
Like Thoreau, she placed a high value on simplicity and austerity, even deprivation. Also like Thoreau, she was a passionate reader — of novels, poems, essays: Dickens, Emerson, De Quincey, George Eliot, Thoreau’s Walden. Her library survives, with all her scratchings on the pages. The English critic Michael Meyer shrewdly wrote, in Thinking and Writing About Literature, “She simplified her life so that doing without was a means of being within. In a sense, she redefined the meaning of deprivation, because being denied something — whether it was faith, love, literary recognition, or some other desire — provided a sharper, more intense understanding than she would have experienced had she achieved what she wanted.”
Consider this poem:
Water is taught by thirst.
Land — by the Oceans passed.
Transport — by throe —
Peace — by its battles told —
Love — by Memorial Mold —
Birds, by the snow.
The intensity of vision comes from meditation and expectation, by “throe” — a pang. This view of existence borders on the mystical. Denial, fantasy, imagination, eager anticipation, expectation, all these mattered more to her than the thing itself. Another of her denial poems contains the line “sumptuous Destitution”.
She does not say: Stay home and the world seems wonderful. “Hom
e is a holy thing — nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals,” she wrote in an 1851 letter to her brother. And “Duty is black and brown — home is bright and shining.” And again, home “is brighter than all the world beside”.
Travel Wisdom of
FREYA STARK
English by nationality but born in Italy (in 1893), where she died a hundred years later, Freya Stark was conflicted by nature, though good-humoured and appreciative in her travel. An accomplished linguist and a wonderful descriptive writer, she travelled throughout the Middle East, Turkey, and Arabia. Her books include The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), The Southern Gates of Arabia (1936), and A Winter in Arabia (1940). She wrote, “I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn’t got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don’t believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs.” Stark herself was famous for her hats, which she wore to cover a disfigurement of scalp and ear, resulting from a painful accident in childhood. ¶ She was one of the singular discoverers (and photographers) of traditional cultures and old ways. In her first book, The Valleys of the Assassins, she speaks of “the old days how bad and how pleasant, the new how good and how dull.”
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
— Riding to the Tigris (1959)
One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one’s own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.
— Riding to the Tigris
The Turks, with the most splendid, varied and interesting country in the world, are naturally anxious to obtain tourists, and their difficulties in this respect are caused chiefly by the quite phenomenal badness of their hotels.
— Riding to the Tigris
We English rely for success almost desperately on the breaking of rules, and it will be a poor day when we forget to do so, for this idiosyncrasy may rescue us in a deluge of the second-rate. It incidentally gives us an advantage in the understanding of traditions other than our own which more logical nations find difficult to master.
— Riding to the Tigris
“How can I know what I think till I hear what I say?” The quotation came into my mind, and another one from Mr. Gladstone, who is supposed to have remarked that he never met anyone from whom he couldn’t learn something, but it was not always worth while to find out what it was. Perhaps to find out what one thinks is one of the reasons for travel and for writing, too.
— Riding to the Tigris
Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or a penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles. The fear of an unbroken tête-à-tête for the rest of his life should, you would think, prevent any man from getting married … Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while, like a wave lifting us into new seas, the history of the world develops around us. I was thinking these thoughts when Husein, out of breath and beating the grey mare for all he was worth with the plaited rein, came up behind me, and asked how I could bear to go on alone for over an hour, with everyone anxious behind me.
— The Valleys of the Assassins
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman [traveller] is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised. When the police stopped our car at Bedrah and enquired where we were staying, the chauffeur, who did not know, told him to ask the lady.
“That is no good,” said the policeman. “She’s a woman.”
… To be treated with consideration is, in the case of female travellers, too often synonymous with being prevented from doing what one wants.
— The Valleys of the Assassins
16
Imaginary Journeys
WHAT IS STRIKING ABOUT MANY NARRATIVES of imaginary journeys is the great number written by actual travellers who know the world. In most cases such elaborate fictions are created by writers who have ranged widely. Samuel Butler sailed from Britain to New Zealand and back, Henri Michaux travelled through South America and extensively in Asia, Jan Morris has been practically everywhere on earth. Italo Calvino, born in Cuba, raised in Italy, travelled to the United States and returned to Cuba for a while, lived in Paris, and ended up in Italy. As travellers they were better able to invent journeys and create imaginary countries that were wholly credible, and their fictional travel is clearly based on their own travel.
“A Christian culture could more easily believe in the existence of the monstrous than of the perfect or near perfect,” Susan Sontag wrote in “Questions of Travel”, in the collection Where the Stress Falls. “Thus, while the kingdoms of freaks appear century after century on maps, exemplary races figure mostly in books of travel to utopia; that is, nowhere.”
Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels are obvious choices for this chapter, since Crusoe’s desert island was imagined by the widely read Daniel Defoe, who had travelled throughout Europe but never to the landscapes of his masterpiece — Brazil or the Caribbean. Jonathan Swift sailed back and forth from Ireland to England, and created Brobdingnagian giants as well as tiny Lilliputians and Yahoos for Gulliver’s various voyages. But these books are so well known I decided to omit them.
None of the fictions I’ve chosen are utopias. I find there is always something bloodless and unbelievable about a utopia. Its contrary, dystopian fiction, with its messy lives and its decaying buildings, more often has the ring of truth. What these books of imaginary places have in common is an element of satire — often a characteristic, or even the whole point, when the subject is an imaginary journey.
Samuel Butler: Erewhon: or, Over the Range
SAMUEL BUTLER, WELL educated, clear-thinking, oppressed by his father, had been heading for a career as a clergyman, but between his life at home and his work in a London parish after university, he lost his faith. Later, he was to write in his Notebooks, “As an instrument of warfare against vice, or as a tool for making virtue, Christianity is a mere flint implement.”
And something of his attitude toward family life can be deduced from a notebook entry on the family: “I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other — I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so.”
Not surprisingly, Butler fled from his family to New Zealand in 1859. His four-year spell running a sheep ranch there gave him time to read (Darwin among others) and think about the world he had left. When he returned to England in 1864 and wrote about his imagined world of Erewhon, he included details from the New Zealand he had seen: landscape, manners, aspects of the native population — the people of Erewhon are superficially reminiscent of the Maori.
One of the virtues of Erewhon is its evocation of landscape, its powerful and persuasive sense of place. It opens, and proceeds, like a classic Victorian travel book, describing a once empty land that although colonized still has a great unknown and mountainous hinterland, which exists as a temptation: “I could not help speculating upon what might be farther up the river and behind the second range.” With the help of a native, Chowbok, the narrator, Higgs, sets off for th
e ranges, discovering a material culture and a dark-skinned population who he speculates might be part of the lost tribes of Israel. Before he can decide on anything concrete, he is brought before a magistrate and some others who are disturbed by the appearance of his pocket watch. Some broken machinery in the town’s museum indicates that the people have a horror of anything mechanical. Higgs is put in prison.
The inhabitants seem to him no further advanced than “Europeans of the twelfth or thirteenth century.” He learns the language. He makes friends. Later he mentions that he has a cold — a mistake: “illness of any sort was considered in Erewhon to be highly criminal and immoral”, and he is punished.
After three months in prison Higgs is released, to visit the metropolis and its College of Unreason, where he learns that one of the professors has written a book warning of the possibility that “machines were ultimately destined to supplant the race of man”. There also exists a class of men “trained in soul-craft”. They are called “straighteners”. But what Butler goes on to describe is a society much like that of the Victorian England he knew, yet without a tyrannizing religious sense.
“The Book of the Machines”, which Higgs quotes extensively, warns against “the ultimate development of animal consciousness” — what we would call artificial intelligence. The rights of animals are also described: animal rights are protected.
At last Higgs escapes in a hot-air balloon, and we are left to reflect on the fact that his descriptions of machines, banks, criminality, and animals have echoes in Darwinism, the church, and Victorian law; that the “straighteners” have their counterparts in doctors and priests; that the seemingly distant place he has described is not so distant.