(An excerpt)
Travel writing is, I think, coeval with writing itself. We move and remember the place that we left; from a distance we send letters home. Those scribes who first kept laundry lists in Nineveh or Babylon, those men in Egypt naming names, belong to the one genre. An account of journeys taken or a report at journey’s end, a message from the provinces or a dispatch from the capital: each must be written down. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Hindu epic Mahabharata, The Tale of Genji on his wanderings: all these record departure and new terrain traversed. And there’s a retentiveness also entailed; when the bear goes over the mountain to see what he can see be carries with him — if he be a writer — a quill pen or PC.
In the Western tradition of literature, the common denominator of the Odyssey and Pilgrim’s Progress, The Canterbury Tales and The Divine Comedy — not to mention Don Quixote or Moby-Dick or Faust — is near-constant motion. One way to read the Book of Genesis is to consider that expulsion as a journey out of Eden; the long travail of Moses is a hunt for promised land. So too is the Aeneid a travelogue that starts in Troy and ends hard years later in Rome. “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” are descriptions of waterlogged distance traversed; Captain Cook and Magellan and Lewis and Clark get parsed now for their prose. Although we’re not certain how widely he traveled, Avon’s Bard set many of his plays abroad; it sometimes seems as though all texts we hold to be enduring ones evoke a world of wonders that at first seem passing strange …
This holds just as true for those who — like Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson — remain inside the house. Imagination need be neither time- nor space-bound, finally, and writing gets done at the desk. The stay-at-home may take projected trips or may, like Marcel Proust, remember where he lived when young: A la Recherche du Temps Perdu is a remembrance not merely of time but of scenes and places past. The writer may be imprisoned, as was the Oscar Wilde of De Profundis, or, like Charles Darwin, confined to a cabin on the HMS Beagle — but each and all of them are travel writers in the largest sense: I have been there, witnessed it, and am come alone to tell thee what I saw.
Marco Polo — who may or may not have gone where he said — announced his voyage thus:
Emperors and kings, dukes and marquises,
counts, knights, and townsfolk,
and all … will find all the great wonders
and curiosities of Greater Armenia and
Persia, of the Tartars and of India, and
of many other territories. Our book will
relate them to you plainly in due order,
as they were related by Messer Marco
Polo, a wise and noble citizen of Venice,
who has seen them with his own eyes.
There is also much here that he has not
seen but has heard from men of credit
and veracity….
Those who once were travelers are tourists now; those who set out for points unknown, whether pilgrims or Crusaders, have been supplanted by the gang who follows where a tour guide leads. Open any airline magazine or travel section in the Sunday paper and you’ll find an industry devoted to what Mark Twain called “Innocents Abroad.” To begin with, it was only the nobility, or their cast-off sons and marriageable daughters, who went away for pleasure or profit; in the last two hundred years all that has changed. As John Julius Norwich puts it, in his anthology, A Taste for Travel:
[By] 1815 … Travel had ceased to be
the prerogative of the gentry; the roads
of the Continent were now thronged
with middle-class Englishmen who had
made their fortunes in the first wave of
the Industrial Revolution and were anxious
to show that they too could understand
and appreciate all that Europe had
to offer. Increased numbers soon resulted
in improved facilities: the first cross-Channel
steamer was introduced in
1816, a regular service between Dover
and Calais was inaugurated in 1821 and
five years later there were almost as many
crossings as there are today. In France
and Germany, Italy and Switzerland, hotels
sprang up like mushrooms along the
main routes….
Today it’s easy to forget how recent was the shift. Those fabled early travelers who set out from Baghdad or Beijing or Calcutta may well have done so with servants, but their exploits are reported on as individual: X made ten thousand miles on foot, Y traveled twenty years and through forty kingdoms, Z acquired fifty languages and a hundred children before he came back home. A Sentimental Journey, as Laurence Sterne would have it, was one man’s ambling ramble through France and Italy. The Romantics on their walking tours of Switzerland or the Lake District wandered with a boon companion or, more often than not, alone. Lord Norwich turns up his well-bred English nose at the idea of collective travel and those who pay with vouchers for a pre-arranged forced march:
The man who started the rot, I fear, was
that disagreeable old abstainer Thomas
Cook, who, already by the middle of the
century, had developed the idea of insulating
his clients as far as possible from
the uncouth conditions all too frequently
prevailing in foreign parts by swathing
them in a protective cocoon of block
bookings, meal vouchers and–most
dangerous of all–temperance. He began
indeed by offering them even more:
on the very first excursion that he ever
organized, which took place on Monday
5 July 1841, the 570 people intrepid
enough to venture at–the cost of one
shilling–the ten miles from Leicester
to Loughsborough and back enjoyed the
services of a full brass band, to say nothing
of tea and buns at Mr Paget’s Park.
The age of the tourist had arrived.
Most contemporary travel writers set out with the more-or-less conscious purpose of writing it all down. The death last year of Wilfrid Thesiger rings a kind of death knell also for the solitary wanderer whose trip is open-ended and who has no planned return. Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban, I’d guess, go nowhere nowadays without a contract and a camera; when Gretel Ehrlich or Terry Tempest Williams head off into the wilderness, it’s with the apparatus of retention and the likely prospect of turning their trip into text. Where once there was just Baedeker or a Guide Bleu we have whole travel sections in any self-respecting bookstore; there’s nearly nowhere on the globe that hasn’t had its witness and been in purple prose or Technicolor described …
The last four names I’ve named (Theroux, Raban, Ehrlich, Williams) are working now, and it’s not an accident that two of them are women. This was not always the case. For reasons too obvious to belabor, the travel writers of the fifteenth or the eighteenth century were almost without exception male, and most of them well educated and well heeled. Several of the true heroes of the genre are its early heroines: Mary Kingsley and Freya Stark went where almost literally no single woman went before, and Beryl Markham and Martha Gellhorn are easily the adventuring equals of Antoine de St. Exupery and Ernest Hemingway. One way of looking at the issue of “women’s liberation” would be to do a statistical analysis of just such reportage; there are more women writing for publication today than at any previous moment in our history. Travel writing is a genre that’s no longer gender-bound.
Within such overarching inclusiveness, there are distinctions to draw. Books about Julius Caesar or Abraham Lincoln or Joan of Arc are travel writing in the largest sense, but their focused exploration has to do with the world of the past. Adventure tales through time and space aren’t within my compass here: the historical novel or escapist fantasy — from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to The Swiss Family Robinson — is a travel book imagined, not reported on. So equally with 1984 or 2001, which once seemed future facing, or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and the whole field of science fiction: books about robots and extraterrestrials are travel writing of a kind, but not the kind I mean.
A ship’s log makes an inadvertent book, as do a naturalist’s field notes: the journal of a journey with no prior thought of audience. Much of what we read today is a by-blow of such voyaging: the first account of the North Pole, the first of North America, were composed by authors who would not describe themselves primarily as such and whose “letters home” were not dispatched with publication in mind. That suggestively named professional the “underwriter” might require details, and the owners of a galleon would make “manifest” the lists of crew and cargo, but personal opinion is what we as readers hunger for; it invigorates eyewitnessing and quickens the long dead.
There’s a subset of the genre from, as it were, the captive class: a slave or bondswoman’s narrative, a farmer’s wife carried off by an Indian tribe. Not every traveler is literate or maintains a journal; not every Robinson Crusoe finds pen and paper to hand. But think of Mungo Park or Richard Burton, John Speke or Henry Stanley — those wanderers who made their fortune by reporting news of Africa — and intention enters in. When Boswell followed Dr. Johnson on his journey through the Hebrides he knew he would remember it and come back with a book.
Two strains seem worth disentangling in this common cloth. First, and perhaps most frequent, is a report from far away–the news sent back from a little-known or rarely visited part of the world: a tribe or terrain that appears inhospitable, a record of hardships endured. The writer travels long and hard and stares wide-eyed at landscape and behavior that feel foreign. The place and the people merit describing, and though we no longer report on three-headed men or single-breasted women–fire-breathing dragons, Loch Ness monsters, and the like–such travelogues traffic in distance, the wonder of what’s hard to find.
Almost by definition, this variety of travel writing depends on the first view. The voyager attains a premised end and does so once–or, possibly, buoyed by success and fame, not to mention an expense account, returns. The point is, however, that he or she goes as a stranger, and what’s remarkable in these accounts depends on first impressions: a freshness, an alertness, a sense of something new. So it isn’t deep-rooted knowledge but an amateur’s enthusiasm that signals destination and establishes the tone. A good enough artist may perhaps be able to convey such alertness during a visit to London or Rome, but the odds are better if the place attained is Patagonia or Uttar Pradesh.
This sort of exploration is always improvisational; it reports on happy accident or unhappily being blown off course, and the writer profits from a prior ignorance. Indeed, it’s almost a sine qua non of the genre; you can’t undertake a voyage to map your own hometown. So expertise in this case means not familiarity with but a fresh encounter with the alien, the other. Travel writing of this kind requires a physical distance–the wanderer on train or steamship or horseback or dogsled, going somewhere hard to get to, and for the first time. Whatever he or she reports is more than what was known before or we as readers knew. Discovery is crucial here: the difficult journey “anywhere out of this world.”
The phrase is Baudelaire’s. He meant by this a yearning for what’s far away and rarely visited and therefore doubly seductive. The “bazaar” and the “bizarre” are cognate terms, and the lure of the tropics or a pure uncharted ice floe is, for the heart sore, strong. Such stories start often as not in the city, with a man or woman sick of prior worldliness or a “damp, drizzly November in my soul” — as Melville’s Ishmael puts it — and in thrall to the unknown. It’s no doubt not an accident that Melville’s major commercial success came as a travel writer; his books Typee and Omoo retail exotica. This is the sort of book in which the voyager hears siren songs and wanders where they beckon; it deals with the South Seas or the hidden mountain kingdom of Nepal. Again — almost by definition — it’s a trip undertaken alone. And the farther the better, the farthest the best: nothing difficult is easy, and few rainbows end next door.
In the twenty-first century, however, such destinations grow harder to find, and solitary explorations are a thing of the vanishing past. When the first Westerner made his disguised way into Mecca or her camel-assisted trek across the Sahara, he or she could not have imagined the legion being herded down those well-worn paths today. Sir Walter Raleigh and Hakluyt shared as voyagers a breath-held sense of danger, an implicit and sometimes explicit assertion that much was at stake and at risk. War correspondents belong within this category, though the purpose of their coverage is not to chart terrain. And the governing verb form is an imperative: Reader, look over my shoulder. Spend two years with me before the mast or follow where the song lines lead; few have come this way before.
Much of the commercial popularity of Seven Pillars of Wisdom or the novel Lost Horizon — to take only a pair of examples of stories retrieved from the “ends of the earth”–derived from just such a remoteness. But now that the globe is a village, it’s nowhere near as difficult to reach the Gulf of Aqaba or the town of Kathmandu, and reports from what used to be called Arabia or the Orient require not a rare first view but grounded expertise. Books about smoke jumpers and coal miners and bridge builders are in this sense travel writing; they provide the reader with detailed information about a way of life and a set of skills unlike the reader’s own. There’s a special subset of the genre recovered from those who failed to return: the letters from a battlefield or found in a tent in arctic tundra or raised up from the sea. So now we get The Perfect Storm or Into Thin Air — accounts of a kind of extremity but not an unexplored one; the action itself may be special and strange but the landscape has been long since mapped.
Here’s the entirety of Chapter XLII, “Concerning Owls,” from The Natural History of Iceland, written by Niels Horrebow in 1758: “There are no owls of any kind in the whole island.”
By contrast, therefore, there are more contemporary books that deal with semi-permanence in a “New Found Land.” This is the sort of account — think of Peter Mayle or Francis Mayes — in which the stranger settles down and reports on what it meant to grow acclimatized to Provence or Tuscany. Here the narrative are almost always consists of ignorance that yields to understanding, a bedazzled attraction to a place that deepens into love. And it requires the clarification provided by hindsight and time. The writer reports on local custom and how he or she–first quizzical and then convinced–learns how the natives cook or farm or court or kill or renovate a house. Often these dispatches too are sent back from “the field”; more often they are written after the fact as memoir.
This sort of book is less about wandering than sitting still, but it too belongs to the genre. It is powered by the elegiac impulse rather more than by astonishment; it reports on custom embraced rather than in shock recorded, and the pattern is one of incremental pleasure as the writer settles in. There’s a standard shift of attitude; what at first seemed nonsensical starts to make sense; what required explaining to begin with grows, over time, self-evident. It’s the relativist’s credo, in effect: “When in Rome, do as the Romans do …”
Here it matters if the writer arrives in “Rome” as an adult or was to the manner if not manor born. If the former — as with Mayle and Mayes — the book may be written while still in residence; if the latter, the perspective shifts and Arcady is at a remove. “I had a farm in Africa” (Isak Dinesen’s famous phrase, my emphasis) is the operational mode — the past tense suggesting it’s all over but the writing; memory preserves a place and time long gone.
Whereas the first of our two modes consists of a report from afar, this second one by contrast speaks of lost familiarity. The witness has moved on. From the distance of both space and time the writer reconstructs his youth as a tenant farmer’s son in the South, the rigors of her childhood in Botswana or Bengal. The beloved mother or grandfather is dead, the custom of sheep shearing or snake charming has been altered by the trappings of modernity. The tribe that once was unencumbered now watches TV through the cold winter nights, the shaman owns a cell phone, and what used to be unending prairie is now a housing tract. If the writer writes of vanished youth, he or she may do so for the purpose of score settling or as a lament for yesteryear or with a dry-eyed dispassion; what’s constant is this sense of distance and a world elsewhere.
It’s the difference, in effect, between an act of discovery and one of recovery; as an autobiographical account, it reports on information gained or innocence long lost. Therefore the noun of travel depends upon its yoked preposition; it’s travel to or travel from, and much is entailed by the shift.
Pico Iyer has been charting this terrain since 1988 and his first travel book, Video Night in Kathmandu. Sun After Dark, his new book, brings the total of such inquiries to seven; his other titles include Falling off the Map, Sushi in Bombay, Jetlag in L.A., Tropical Classical, and The Global Soul. As these names suggest, the described locations vary but the enterprise is constant: a man adrift yet purposive, taking “flights into the foreign”–which serves as the subtitle of his recent collection of essays. As Iyer puts it, “The traveler, if he comes from a place of comfort, travels, in part, to be stood on his head; to lose track of tenses, or at least to be back to essentials, free of the details of home.”
Although this writer is deliberately personal, deploying the first-person pronoun throughout, his texts recall those of Bruce Chatwin — another wanderer of great sophistication with a thirst for places “primitive” and hard to reach. The authors he studies — Kazuo Ishigum, W. G. Sebald — inhabit a nonnative land; the celebrities he interviews — Leonard Cohen, the Dalai Lama — are monks. Whether in Yemen, Haiti, Ethiopia, Laos, or Bolivia, Iyer hunts his own place in displacement and seems most at home when least.
Here’s a line of cultural anthropology from one of the first tourists, Herodotus: “Apart from the fact that they prostitute their daughters, the Lydian way of life is not unlike our own.”
Consider, by contrast, this account by an outraged Englishman, one Dr. Birch, of his time in the presence of Peter the Great (who founded St. Petersburg in 1703) and how the czar entertained.
There are twenty-four cooks belonging
to the kitchen of the Russian court,
who are all Russians; and, as people of
that nation use a great deal of onion, garlic,
and train oyl, in dressing their meat,
and employ linseed and walnut oyl for
their provisions, there is such an intolerable
stink in their kitchen, that no
stranger is able to bear it, especially the
cooks being such nasty fellows that the
very sight of them is enough to turn
one’s stomach….
The number of the persons invited is
commonly two or three hundred, though
there is room for no more than about an
hundred, at four or five tables. But as
there is no place assigned to any body,
and none of the Russians are willing to
go home with an empty stomach, every
body is obliged to seize his chair and
hold it with all his force, if he will not
have it snatched from him.
The Czar being come in, and having
chosen a place for himself, there is
such scuffling and fighting for chairs,
that nothing more scandalous can be
seen in any country….
At great entertainments it frequently
happens that nobody is allowed to go
out of the room from noon till midnight.
Hence it is easy to imagine what
pickle a room must be in, that is full of
people who drink like beasts, and none
of them escape being dead drunk.
They often tie eight or ten young
mice on a string, and hide them under
green peas, or in such soups as the
Russians have the greatest appetites
to; which sets them a kecking and
vomiting in a most beastly manner,
when they come to the bottom and
discover the trick. They often bake
cats, wolves, ravens and the like in
their pastries, and when the company
have eat them up, they tell them what
stuff they have in their guts.
Let me confess to personal experience of the several kinds of travel writing I’ve described. Some fifteen years ago or so, I had a friend — a publisher — who wanted to revive the genre, or at least to make a commercial venture in America of what had been more popular abroad. His notion was to commission books by “an interesting mind in an interesting place,” and he flatteringly invited me to be one of his first authors in what became the “Traveler” series of Atlantic Monthly Press. He was well funded, well disposed, and at the lunch where we discussed the project I had too many Bloody Marys and my head, it must be admitted, was a good deal less than clear.
So was his. I remember asking if he’d pay for a trip up Everest and he said, Sure, Sherpas, the whole show … I remember asking if he’d pay for outriders in the Outback and he said, The entire rig, why not … So by the time lunch was over and we’d gone our separate ways I had effectively signed up, signed on, and soon enough a contract arrived, saying simply “Nicholas Delbanco, Travel Book.” But I had no idea at all of where to travel to.
Reality set in. In sober truth I felt too old and unadventurous for the Himalayas or Australia’s barren interior; my wife and I had two daughters by then, and I was happily domestic and didn’t want to leave for long or travel far away. The more I thought about it the less 1 was inclined to try for category one of what I’ve been trying to categorize, and so fell back on the notion of category two. This entailed a landscape of which I’d had a more or less sustained experience: a report, in effect, on strangeness grown familiar. The place I settled on was one I’d often settled in, and it did qualify as a beloved countryside: Provence. In time it did become a book: Running in Place: Scenes from the South of France.
But the problem here, of course, is that Provence has been described often and well; it has been charted to the millimeter, and one can barely visit a museum or cafe without encountering a legion of other travel writers taking notes. It’s scarcely terra incognita, and there’s the real risk of cliche. My solution, such as it was, was to turn inward — and to report upon the way the landscape looked to me in childhood, young manhood, young married manhood, as a father of a daughter, then two daughters. It was an inward trip at least as much as an outer exploration, and for me at least the journey proved rewarding.
It’s difficult to know, in this epoch of Heisenberg and Einstein, what is absolute, what relative, and why. Do we change as witnesses, or does what we witness change, or both; does it alter because of the viewing, and is our estimate altered by the very consciousness of sight? These issues of philosophy and mathematics are domestic riddles also; was it always just like this, and did we fail to notice? So the chance to see for a second or third time a place we remember vividly is a chance worth taking; the six or seven stays in Provence on which Running in Place reports were, in effect, stages of age.
As a result of that book — it appeared in 1989 and has been reprinted since — I acquired some small reputation as a travel writer. This was an unintended consequence, mad one I had my doubts about, but the phone did ring. Soon enough I found myself becoming precisely the sort of voyager I disparaged above: the one with an expense account who goes not so much to blaze a trail as to make certain it will be well marked. So I wrote a piece for Travel and Leisure called “Up in the U.P.” because I’d never been to that part of Michigan and needed an excuse to go; for much the same reason and because they waived the entrance fee, I wrote on Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum. The Greek government, to take a more romantic example, wanted to establish the Mani peninsula as a tourist destination, and my wife and I bounced and jiggled along the newly paved roads of the region in order to ballyhoo hotels. It’s a wonderful part of the Peloponnesus and I have no regrets; a glossy travel magazine footed the bill, and when Olympic Airways lost track of Elena’s suitcase they bestirred themselves mightily to find it once I dropped that magazine’s name.
But it’s a strange way to see a landscape — spurious, largely, and traversed with the subsidized intention of spending a good deal of money in order to encourage your readership to do the same; that original impulse to escape (as in Baudelaire’s yearning desire for “anywhere out of this world”) has been transformed past recognition in the travel pages of House & Garden or Gourmet. It’s a far cry indeed from Mornings in Mexico or Sea and Sardinia (D. H. Lawrence’s travel memoirs) or Eric Newby’s classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.
I name this last because decades ago we too passed through the Khyber Pass from Kabul to Jalalabad. Elena and I hired a driver to pilot us along the lunar landscape; this was well before the Taliban controlled the countryside, but even so it seemed threatful and fierce: steep-pitched gorges, boulder-strewn hills, no water one could see. It’s hard to conceive how this might have been the Silk Road or a populous trade route, since nothing in it represents prosperity or seems to welcome and enable life. Endless-seeming vistas of dried mud and dun-colored chasms, the track a slightly flatter, slightly purposive declivity through the surrounding wastes. At a certain point we stopped for lunch–wax-paper wrapped sandwiches the hotel in Kabul had provided—and because there was, the driver said, a bit of both water and shade.
All I could see was rock. We parked in the flat sheltered space and stepped out to stretch. The wind was high. I steeled myself and took a very short walk in the Hindu Kush, and then the wind shifted so that with total clarity I heard, “Do you take lemon or sugar–one or two lumps?–and do you prefer milk or cream in your tea?” It was, it turned out, the wife of the British ambassador, and she was regaling some visitor of consequence with cucumber sandwiches and a proper British refreshment while the chauffeur dusted off the Jag; this dry oasis was the recognized stopping place on the road to Jalalabad, and there were two cars parked on the two sides of the one rock. One has to travel long and far to be alone.
Charles Baudelaire, twenty years old, was sent from France to India in 1841. He was to be weaned from his dissolute life, his taste for prostitutes and unpaid bills, and the lure of drink and drugs. Like many of the great French rebel artists, he had been raised in propriety; his stepfather was a general, an ambassador, and, finally, a senator. That worthy and the poet’s mother hoped the young man might become a lawyer; he was to leave behind his wanton ways–though he had contracted, already, the syphilis that would destroy him–and go abroad for two years.
But “anywhere out of this world” for Baudelaire proved an inner destination; his travels were truncate and few. When the boat put into Mauritius fur repairs, the poet insisted on turning around; he reversed the voyage out. Was it an access of boredom, fear, homesickness? was it, perhaps, a sense that his vocation called so strongly that he need not roam? It was on this journey that he composed the first of the Fleurs du Mal. At any rate the yearning need to “sail away” (the title of a song by the far better-traveled Noel Coward) seemed a thirst rapidly slaked. World-weariness for Coward would be a condition to relish and, in the relishing, put to good use; ennui for Baudelaire would be not the exception but the rule.
Once safely back in Paris, and having attained his majority, the poet squandered his inheritance with an adept’s fervor; living the life of a dandy in the Hotel Lauzun on the Ile St. Louis, he met Jeanne Duval and — not necessarily in this order — made the acquaintance of Courbet and Delacroix and began his translations of Poe. The long slow decline from luxe, calme, et volupte to debt and degradation proved ever more rapid and steep, a journey he could not reverse.
We have the great photograph from 1863. Baudelaire stares balefully out at the camera of Etienne Carjat, dark eyes half-enshadowed beneath the white brow. We have Manet’s engraving of the same face and a lithograph by Rouault. Rouault made a series of portraits intimes, though what he renders here is the portrait by Carjat. Rodin, too, tried his hand at the head–though far less often and less daringly than with the head of Balzac. In each version of the poet’s face there is the same rife blankness, the high dome and the lick of hair and the lack of bonhomie; things matter, he seems to be saying, and I refuse to smile. He died in 1867, with much of his writing unpublished and all of his works out of print.
The “Advice to Travelers” component of the literature is a category in itself. Here’s a series of non sequiturs from a Russian primer, Hossfeld’s New Practical Method for Learning the Russian Language, 1903:
What did Susanna reply?
Susanna made no reply, but Eleonora
Karpovna suddenly approached
and said that Susanna liked music
very much and played on the piano
most beautifully.
Then Mr. Ratch must have married
a widow the first time?
If art’s high task is to “Make It New,” then newness in and of itself may prove germane. A reader, after all, encounters Place A or Character B for the first time on a first page, and has no previous familiarity with the contours of that landscape or that face. The scribe describes it; we plot the coordinates of imagined terrain and act as its surveyor–and sometimes this seems simpler when the landscape as such is not long-established or known. I mean by this that wide-eyed witnessing is as feasible–more so, perhaps–if what we witness is new to us too. A tourist’s first visit to Paris will yield a different impression than does a fifth or fifteenth. To be “silent on a peak in Darien” is a function of “First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and Keats was bedazzled by the vista in a way the classics scholar cannot replicate. Repeated exposure supplies expertise, but it’s the amateur’s excitement we hunt for in a book.
The armchair traveler in this regard seems the necessary secret sharer of the travel writer. The act of exploration that the best books offer is mirrored by the forward march we make with each turned page. When you travel you take yourself with you, and adventure of the sort I mean can take place in a hammock as well as on a raft. The conscious voyager–whether solo or part of a party, whether hired or on some private quest, whether male or female, rich or poor–is almost always hunting change, in search of something new.
It may be as literal as discovery: a stretch of coast not mapped before, a mountain range not previously climbed or named. More likely nowadays it’s an inward journey, and the writer reports on distance traversed by the wandering self. Almost by definition (again I exclude those accounts of arctic expeditions found beside the frozen body or those sea logs retrieved from a drowned sailor’s sea chest), to survive is to come back enlarged. When the bear went over the mountain he found another mountain — or at least had a story to tell.
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