All this flag waving and talk of justice served doesn't obscure for me the (now apparent fact) that we gunned down an unarmed man. They say he resisted. Was he throwing rocks? (The conspiracy theorist in me suspects a CIA Wet team did the actual deed, including the crashed helicopter in the compound. Navy SEALS provided the legitimacy of the hit. But hey, that's just me.)
We are so desperate to believe in anything as a united people that this pathetic action is rousing our spirits. It's not a sporting event like the Olympic games. Chants of "USA! USA!" turn my stomach.
We have conveniently forgotten Osama bin Laden was trained, unleashed on the world and betrayed by the U.S. government during the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Remember the Rambo flick "Dedicated to the brave freedom fighters of Afghanistan?" That was the Taliban.
It's easier to cheer on the murder of a super villain than to take stock as citizens of the country that we have let run astray. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the SOB is dead and no longer poses a threat to the world. If I were President I would have ordered the hit too. But it sickens me to see my fellow Americans taking such zealous glee in his murder. That's the thing that sticks in my craw. As a nation, we have forgotten many things, among them the ability to think critically and the resolve to make our government accountable for its actions against the rest of the planet. The notion, if anyone truly buys it, that killing Osama bin Laden makes the world a safer place is inane. Our actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere have guaranteed a ready supply of terrorists willing to blow down our doors. Stop waving your flags with such ignorant delirium.
Somehow I think Thomas Jefferson would be spinning in his grave.
Tuesday, May 03, 2011
Monday, May 02, 2011
Osama bin Laden is Dead
For months after 9/11/2001 I was in kind of a state of stunned disbelief. Oddly similar to how I feel now. I take no pleasure in this. It's justice served and deservedly so, but what price have we as a country and culture paid to achieve retribution? This is no time to breathe easy.
I gotta ponder on all this...
I gotta ponder on all this...
Friday, April 29, 2011
This "Birther" Business
I'm following this bullshit via the New York times and many of my Facebook friends. Now President Obama has felt compelled to post his birth certificate online so the world will know that being born in Hawaii makes you an American citizen.
Still, the howling mob of idiots scream "Fake! Fake! Fake!"
And I'm wondering just what is really going on here. No one can seriously doubt that Barack Obama is a natural born Amurikan. This goes deeper. Almost beyond race. But not quite.
Then it came to me in the night. "Our" world is passing away. What do I mean by "Our" world. I'm a 61 year old white guy. From my earliest years I was taught the history of the world through Caucasian eyes. Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale, George Armstrong Custer, Teddy Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, George Patton, John Glenn. All white. Mostly men. No doubt, like you, that was my frame of reference.
For almost all of American history our story has been dominated by white folks. Oh sure, there were the likes of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, even Muhammad Ali. But they fit into the story because they were "homegrown" so to speak.
But now the story is shifting. It's been shifting for some time, but the rise to the White House of a black man has brought it into sharper focus, especially since he is the son of a non-US-born father. That's key.
For years we've known the fastest growing minority in the US is among Spanish speaking people. There's that whole movement to have English declared the "official language" of the United States. Bet you find a lot of Birthers are involved in that.
You can declare all you want. People are still going to speak what they're comfortable with.
The east and west coasts teem with people of Asian descent. Pockets of various ethnicities exist in what seem like the most unlikely places. Somalis in New Marshfield, Ohio? Who'd a thunk it in 1968?
We always like to claim America is a melting pot. But that seems to work only if the ingredients come from Europe. If you're from east of Istanbul or south of Cairo the welcome mat isn't always so welcoming.
Doesn't matter. People are still drawn to America because our economic, social and political potential is still the best in the world. We are inexorably linked to the world outside our borders. And the world is linked to "us."
The sooner we quit thinking about "Them" and "Us" the better off we'll all be. It's ALL US! The face of America is changing every day. The America of 2111 is going to look a WHOLE lot different than the America of 2011. Get used to it. Better yet, embrace it. We are a better people and a better country when we realize this.
The Birthers don't get this. Probably they'll never get it. They'll be swept away by history.
Good riddance!
Still, the howling mob of idiots scream "Fake! Fake! Fake!"
And I'm wondering just what is really going on here. No one can seriously doubt that Barack Obama is a natural born Amurikan. This goes deeper. Almost beyond race. But not quite.
Then it came to me in the night. "Our" world is passing away. What do I mean by "Our" world. I'm a 61 year old white guy. From my earliest years I was taught the history of the world through Caucasian eyes. Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale, George Armstrong Custer, Teddy Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, George Patton, John Glenn. All white. Mostly men. No doubt, like you, that was my frame of reference.
For almost all of American history our story has been dominated by white folks. Oh sure, there were the likes of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, even Muhammad Ali. But they fit into the story because they were "homegrown" so to speak.
But now the story is shifting. It's been shifting for some time, but the rise to the White House of a black man has brought it into sharper focus, especially since he is the son of a non-US-born father. That's key.
For years we've known the fastest growing minority in the US is among Spanish speaking people. There's that whole movement to have English declared the "official language" of the United States. Bet you find a lot of Birthers are involved in that.
You can declare all you want. People are still going to speak what they're comfortable with.
The east and west coasts teem with people of Asian descent. Pockets of various ethnicities exist in what seem like the most unlikely places. Somalis in New Marshfield, Ohio? Who'd a thunk it in 1968?
We always like to claim America is a melting pot. But that seems to work only if the ingredients come from Europe. If you're from east of Istanbul or south of Cairo the welcome mat isn't always so welcoming.
Doesn't matter. People are still drawn to America because our economic, social and political potential is still the best in the world. We are inexorably linked to the world outside our borders. And the world is linked to "us."
The sooner we quit thinking about "Them" and "Us" the better off we'll all be. It's ALL US! The face of America is changing every day. The America of 2111 is going to look a WHOLE lot different than the America of 2011. Get used to it. Better yet, embrace it. We are a better people and a better country when we realize this.
The Birthers don't get this. Probably they'll never get it. They'll be swept away by history.
Good riddance!
Friday, April 15, 2011
World’s Oldest Man Dies at 114
Walter Breuning of Great Falls, Montana was the world's oldest man. Not person. Apparently there's a woman in Georgia who is 26 days older. But Walt passed on a couple days ago. In a recent interview he laid out some some interesting advice for living a long life:
— Embrace change, even when the change slaps you in the face. ("Every change is good.")
— Eat two meals a day ("That's all you need.")
— Work as long as you can ("That money's going to come in handy.")
— Help others ("The more you do for others, the better shape you're in.")
Then there's the hardest part. It's a lesson Breuning said he learned from his grandfather: Accept death.
"We're going to die. Some people are scared of dying. Never be afraid to die. Because you're born to die," he said.
And so it came to Walter Breuning. All in all he sounded pretty Buddhist.
We could do worse...
— Embrace change, even when the change slaps you in the face. ("Every change is good.")
— Eat two meals a day ("That's all you need.")
— Work as long as you can ("That money's going to come in handy.")
— Help others ("The more you do for others, the better shape you're in.")
Then there's the hardest part. It's a lesson Breuning said he learned from his grandfather: Accept death.
"We're going to die. Some people are scared of dying. Never be afraid to die. Because you're born to die," he said.
And so it came to Walter Breuning. All in all he sounded pretty Buddhist.
We could do worse...
Monday, April 11, 2011
Wishing Good Fortune to Purple Heaven Temple
Friday, April 08, 2011
Hooray! Hooray! The Federal Budget has passed!
This bit of political theatre only served to remind me that "We the people..." are totally irrelevant to the whole process. It was just a show. Not even a good one.
It's a sorry example of American life.
The 2010 Federal budget was $3,456,000,000 so we can assume the new one is in that neighborhood. The talking heads are saying they cut $38 billion. So basically they cut one percent.
A pox on all their houses!
It's a sorry example of American life.
The 2010 Federal budget was $3,456,000,000 so we can assume the new one is in that neighborhood. The talking heads are saying they cut $38 billion. So basically they cut one percent.
A pox on all their houses!
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Climate Change and "Experts" Who Deny it's Existence
"It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Upton Sinclair
OK I cribbed this from a NYTimes Paul Krugman Op-Ed. But it pretty much nails it.
OK I cribbed this from a NYTimes Paul Krugman Op-Ed. But it pretty much nails it.
Of ebooks, China, and the internet
And I must say they are fantastic. Purchasing books was never so easy! But it turns out B&N will only allow online purchases from a computer located in the United States. This was a problem since I was on my way to China for a year.
A Barnes & Noble rep in New York suggested I get a Virtual Private Network or VPN. A VPN, through the magic of the interweb, allows your computer to "appear" to be in the continental US. My VPN runs around $80 a year and makes my laptop appear to be in Oakland, California. Ergo I now have 90+ books on my nook and never have to leave behind favorites in my travels because my backpack is too full and I'm over the 20 kilogram airline weight limit for checked bags.
Many people say they prefer an actual book, that they like the feel of the pages, etc. Fair point. I do too. But ebooks are the wave of the future for those who still read. In fact I predict young folks will be more inclined to read on these gadgets. Time will tell. Fact is the growing sales of ebooks (now an official category on the New york Times best seller lists) bodes well for the technology.
It turns out there is another advantage to a VPN. It is a well known fact the government of China blocks such internet sites as facebook, Youtube and many blogs (doubt if they've picked up on this one). Of the 500 million registered facebook users in the world only something like 14,000 are in the People's Republic of China. that's an incredible number considering China has 1.4 billion people. Yet I have many friends here in-country, foreigners and Chinese alike who regularly post on facebook and Youtube. The reason? VPNs and other software that allows this.
Except for dissidents and some attempts at protests against government policies, the Chinese rulers seem to take a fairly light-handed approach to life online. It's true they employ official hackers to try to counter the potential deleterious effects of the web against them. But I suspect ultimately it will be to no avail. Regular citizens can read about the 1989 Tienanmen uprising and arrests, beatings and jailings of well-known dissidents, including Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo. The lid is off this Pandora's box and it will be very difficult to put it back on.
This is a big country with a LOT of people. Much of it still rural and still developing. The critical mass for political change may still be decades off. Or it may not. Six months ago who saw the uprisings in the Arab world coming? No one. Not even them.
Monday, April 04, 2011
Why Is It...?
If someone is against gun control, is for increased defense spending and thinks Ronald Reagan was a great president you can bet money they think man-made global warming is bullshit.
But if they are for same-sex marriage, increased spending on education and thinks George Bush was a tool of Dick Cheney you can wager that same bet they think man-made global warming is real.
None of the mentioned beliefs have anything to do with global warming. I wonder what that says about us.
But if they are for same-sex marriage, increased spending on education and thinks George Bush was a tool of Dick Cheney you can wager that same bet they think man-made global warming is real.
None of the mentioned beliefs have anything to do with global warming. I wonder what that says about us.
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Taoism and Buddhism
For seven months we have been living, training and learning in the Wudang Taoist Tai Ji and Kungfu Academy. We train in a Taoist temple. Often the temple is visited by Buddhist monks and nuns. Many Taoist monks and nuns live and work here.
Much of the philosophy of our martial arts training is incorporated in the Tao. And much of the Tao is very similar to Buddhism in it's precepts.
We had a Taoist monk here to teach us about Taoism a couple weeks ago. He laid out some things about both schools I thought might be interesting.
I won't get into the whole Taoist "catechism" nor the history of Gautama, who became Buddha. I just want to throw up a simple comparison given by the monk in which each purports to teach us how to live.
To boil it down, each philosophy (I refuse to call them religions as neither are confessional) has three basic "Pearls."
Buddhism's are:
1. Wisdom
2. Patience
3. Compassion
Taoism's are:
1. Compassion
2. Moderation
3. Humility
You can right away see the similarities. Buddha preached "The Middle Path," which could also be considered Moderation.
Both start within ourselves, but in a sense face different directions. Buddhism teaches us how to deal with the world outside of ourselves, while the Tao looks more inward. Another way of looking at them is that Buddhism is more concerned with one's mind while Taoism is more focused towards the body, hence the martial arts component.
Now these are VERY simplistic explanations and I wouldn't want to assert any authority on these words. But it is clear to anyone exposed to these bodies of belief that the keys to being a good person lie within.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
This is Kungfu. This is What it's Like Here (Thanks to Hani for the Quote)
“The master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he is always doing both.” Lao-Tzu
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Thoughts on Botswana
I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of finishing my Peace Corps service in Botswana.`Haven't written much about that episode of my life but a couple thoughts have been buzzing around my head in recent days.
Peace Corps released a sort of self-congratulatory video celebrating it's 39 years in Botswana. I was amazed to see how similar scenes of villages in photos from the 60s and 70s were to the village I lived in and to most of the villages I saw when I was there. The same mud and stick houses, pit latrines, chickens in the yard, etc.
Forty years of not only Peace Corps, but uncounted millions in dollars, Yen, Euros, Pounds and Renmimbi have been poured into this country and except for the Gaborone area (The Capital city) not all that much has changed. This is a country that has had no wars, has natural resources (e.g. diamonds) and a booming tourist industry.
I was struck by that because in 1975 and '76 I was stationed in South Korea with the army. At that time the countryside was pretty similar to Botswana's. Rural, under-developed, mud and stick houses, old men carrying firewood stacked high on A-frame "backpacks." Seoul, the capital was pretty modern. But once you left that city it got "country" real quick. In 2003 I returned to find an extremely modern developed country. Nothing could be found of the "old" Korea I once knew. This was a country with no outstanding natural resources and sharing a border with North Korea and their two million man army poised for attack.
I just wonder what is the difference.
This isn't about Peace Corps or any of the dozens of other Aid programs and their effectiveness. I'm not against helping others in need. It is after all the Golden Rule. But after 40 years what's the point?
Peace Corps released a sort of self-congratulatory video celebrating it's 39 years in Botswana. I was amazed to see how similar scenes of villages in photos from the 60s and 70s were to the village I lived in and to most of the villages I saw when I was there. The same mud and stick houses, pit latrines, chickens in the yard, etc.
Forty years of not only Peace Corps, but uncounted millions in dollars, Yen, Euros, Pounds and Renmimbi have been poured into this country and except for the Gaborone area (The Capital city) not all that much has changed. This is a country that has had no wars, has natural resources (e.g. diamonds) and a booming tourist industry.
I was struck by that because in 1975 and '76 I was stationed in South Korea with the army. At that time the countryside was pretty similar to Botswana's. Rural, under-developed, mud and stick houses, old men carrying firewood stacked high on A-frame "backpacks." Seoul, the capital was pretty modern. But once you left that city it got "country" real quick. In 2003 I returned to find an extremely modern developed country. Nothing could be found of the "old" Korea I once knew. This was a country with no outstanding natural resources and sharing a border with North Korea and their two million man army poised for attack.
I just wonder what is the difference.
This isn't about Peace Corps or any of the dozens of other Aid programs and their effectiveness. I'm not against helping others in need. It is after all the Golden Rule. But after 40 years what's the point?
Spirituality and Mount Wudang
We are here studying TaiJi and Kungfu on one of the most sacred places in Taoism. Taoism is a major philosophy or religion if you will here in China, very closely akin to Buddhism. Both TaiJi and Taoism began right here on this mountain so it draws people from all over the world. Seekers.
I suppose you might say we came here as seekers as well. For me it was just to get into great shape and experience 21st century China for a bit. But our school gets people often who seem to be seeking some kind of ethereal, quasi-religious, transformative experience. Kind of a "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," floating through the bamboo trees kind of thing.
Of course there is no such thing. Even here on this holy mountain physics rules. No one floats. People get insight, sure, but that can happen anywhere.
Life for us here is very physical. We get up in the morning, train for two and a half hours, rest for lunch, train again another two and a half in the afternoon. It's hard. I've dropped 13 pounds. Gained flexibility. Gotten stronger. But it never lets up. Day after day it's the same program. Winter, 19 degrees Fahrenheit? Outside in the snow kicking. Summer, 85F? Kicking. Rain? Kicking. It never ends (Except Wednesday afternoons and Thursdays).
Still no out-of-body experience.
And yet it's a transformative place. We have looked into our lives and found deeper meaning to who and what we are. But it occurred to me this morning this is not my first time for such a similar experience.
Military veterans of every branch of service from any country in the world will relate their basic training to this experience. I went through Ranger training almost 40 years ago. Yet I carry the lessons learned there with me every day. Now NO ONE in their right minds would try to sell the military as an "ethereal, quasi-religious, transformative experience."
But brother let me tell you, it is as life changing and meaningful as anything one can ever experience.
And I think that's what we have here on Wudang Mountain.
I do like to watch the bamboo swaying in the wind though. From the ground...
I suppose you might say we came here as seekers as well. For me it was just to get into great shape and experience 21st century China for a bit. But our school gets people often who seem to be seeking some kind of ethereal, quasi-religious, transformative experience. Kind of a "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," floating through the bamboo trees kind of thing.
Of course there is no such thing. Even here on this holy mountain physics rules. No one floats. People get insight, sure, but that can happen anywhere.
Life for us here is very physical. We get up in the morning, train for two and a half hours, rest for lunch, train again another two and a half in the afternoon. It's hard. I've dropped 13 pounds. Gained flexibility. Gotten stronger. But it never lets up. Day after day it's the same program. Winter, 19 degrees Fahrenheit? Outside in the snow kicking. Summer, 85F? Kicking. Rain? Kicking. It never ends (Except Wednesday afternoons and Thursdays).
Still no out-of-body experience.
And yet it's a transformative place. We have looked into our lives and found deeper meaning to who and what we are. But it occurred to me this morning this is not my first time for such a similar experience.
Military veterans of every branch of service from any country in the world will relate their basic training to this experience. I went through Ranger training almost 40 years ago. Yet I carry the lessons learned there with me every day. Now NO ONE in their right minds would try to sell the military as an "ethereal, quasi-religious, transformative experience."
But brother let me tell you, it is as life changing and meaningful as anything one can ever experience.
And I think that's what we have here on Wudang Mountain.
I do like to watch the bamboo swaying in the wind though. From the ground...
On Michel de Montaigne
I've been reading some of his essays. Montaigne has been called the world's first blogger. He lived in France in the 16th century. But if you read him you'd swear he wrote yesterday, and specifically to you.
So the dude has inspired me. I've said before I was going to blog more. But I haven't. This time it'll be different. Every stupid, insipid, insulting, asinine thought that pops into my head is going up.
Let the insanity begin...
So the dude has inspired me. I've said before I was going to blog more. But I haven't. This time it'll be different. Every stupid, insipid, insulting, asinine thought that pops into my head is going up.
Let the insanity begin...
Friday, December 31, 2010
Good-bye 2010, hello 2011!
Just a few minutes ago our TaiJi school informed us we would have the next two days off to celebrate the calendar New Year (not the Chinese New Year in February). So, whoopee! We're going to nearby Shiyan tomorrow morning for some rest and dining.
Twenty-ten was a very active year to say the least. We began it in Zanzibar. Cabrini's and my first night dive together the evening of January 1st was a thrill. We surfaced to a full moon rising over Stone Town, a thrill I'll never forget.
Later in the year we got to spend some time among the African wildlife in the Okavango Delta.
Then of course we finished our Peace Corps service on May 19th. Immediately we bolted for wonderful Cape Town, South Africa where we got a tremendous adrenalin rush doing some shark cage diving among other things. During that trip we relaxed along side Lake Malawi (my only new country visited in 2010, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro (summiting at 6:45AM, June 17th), cruised the Nile, visited ALOT of piles of ancient Egyptian rocks and got some great reef diving in at Sharm El Sheikh.
Finally, after over two years we got a few minutes back in the US and A. Six weeks actually. It was great, but the road still called.
August 25th found us landing in Beijing. If you ever want to see what's going on in China now's the time to do it.
Four months later we are living and training at the Wudang Taoist Kungfu and TaiJi School in the Wudang Mountains. We're loving it! The training is generally hard, but we're surrounded by gorgeous vistas. Our biggest challenge now (aside from the twice daily workouts) is the January and February weather. It'll be cold but together Cabrini and I will see it through and come into Spring lean and mean.
We're planning on staying here until at least August. After that, what the hey, more travel. We want to visit Lhasa in Tibet, Sikkim in India, Bhutan, Vietnam and BACK TO SRI LANKA!!!!!
With all the travel and everything this year I only read 79 books, fewest since 2006. Probably won't do much better this year, although my Nook ebook reader from Barnes & Noble makes access to books VERY easy!
But for this moment now we want to say Happy New Year to all our friends, fiends and loved ones!
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
"Why We Travel" by Pico Iyer
Reprinted from "WorldHum," The Best travel Stories on the Internet.
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that’s “moral” since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” and “travail,” and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship—both my own, which I want to feel, and others’, which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion—of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.
Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of “Wild Orchids” (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week’s wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.
If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald’s would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator—or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,” perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don’t: Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo—or Cuzco or Kathmandu.” It’s all very much the same.
But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you’ve landed on a different planet—and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they’re being visited by an extra-terrestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as to receive only a single channel).
We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the internet and a “one world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.
And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon—an anti-Federal Express, if you like—in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.
But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import—and export—dreams with tenderness.
By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more—not least by seeing it through a distant admirer’s eyes—they help you bring newly appreciative—distant—eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new “traditional” dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second—and perhaps more important—thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe.
Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.
On the most basic level, when I’m in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.
We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity—and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).
Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious—to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves—and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”
There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year—or at least 45 hours—and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I’m not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I’m simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense.
So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can “place” me—no one can fix me in my resume—I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.
This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear”—disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families—to become better Buddhists—I have to question my own too-ready judgments. “The ideal travel book,” Christopher Isherwood once said, “should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.” And it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that you can never quite find.
I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully though my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning—from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament—and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.
We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I’ll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.
That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you’ve abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.
That whole complex interaction—not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?)—is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.
All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips, and “being transported” by private as well as public means; all saw that “ecstasy” (“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come when we’re not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it. I remember once asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis if he’d ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at me astonished. “To write well about a thing,” he said, “I’ve got to like it!”
At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O’Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It’s not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, post-national, global, mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world.
In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco. And—most crucial of all—the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas—and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald’s outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.
The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents’ inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic—the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million—it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)
Besides, even those who don’t move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you’re traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room—through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing—not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing.
All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville’s colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East he’d never visited, it’s an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.
In Mary Morris’s “House Arrest,” a thinly disguised account of Castro’s Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, “All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla itself are creations of the author’s imagination.” On Page 172, however, we read, “La isla, of course, does exist. Don’t let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn’t. But it does.” No wonder the travel-writer narrator—a fictional construct (or not)?—confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. “Erewhon,” after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler’s great travel novel, is just “nowhere” rearranged.
Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is—and has to be—an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin’s books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul’s recent book, “A Way in the World,” was published as a non-fictional “series” in England and a “novel” in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux’s half-invented memoir, “My Other Life,” were published in The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as “Fact and Fiction.”
And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that “traveling is a fool’s paradise,” and the other who “traveled a good deal in Concord”). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us.”
So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also—Emerson and Thoreau remind us—have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.
And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Matthiessen’s great “The Snow Leopard”), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack’s “Island of the Color-Blind,” which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.
So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”
I like that stress on work, since never more than on the road are we shown how proportional our blessings are to the difficulty that precedes them; and I like the stress on a holiday that’s “moral” since we fall into our ethical habits as easily as into our beds at night. Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” and “travail,” and I know that I travel in large part in search of hardship—both my own, which I want to feel, and others’, which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion—of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly. For seeing without feeling can obviously be uncaring; while feeling without seeing can be blind.
Yet for me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of “Wild Orchids” (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: In China, after all, people will pay a whole week’s wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.
If a Mongolian restaurant seems exotic to us in Evanston, Ill., it only follows that a McDonald’s would seem equally exotic in Ulan Bator—or, at least, equally far from everything expected. Though it’s fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the “tourist” and the “traveler,” perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don’t: Among those who don’t, a tourist is just someone who complains, “Nothing here is the way it is at home,” while a traveler is one who grumbles, “Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo—or Cuzco or Kathmandu.” It’s all very much the same.
But for the rest of us, the sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. When you go to North Korea, for example, you really do feel as if you’ve landed on a different planet—and the North Koreans doubtless feel that they’re being visited by an extra-terrestrial, too (or else they simply assume that you, as they do, receive orders every morning from the Central Committee on what clothes to wear and what route to use when walking to work, and you, as they do, have loudspeakers in your bedroom broadcasting propaganda every morning at dawn, and you, as they do, have your radios fixed so as to receive only a single channel).
We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of the internet and a “one world order” grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.
And in the process, we also get saved from abstraction ourselves, and come to see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and how much we can become a kind of carrier pigeon—an anti-Federal Express, if you like—in transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.
But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go, and in many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands. In closed or impoverished places, like Pagan or Lhasa or Havana, we are the eyes and ears of the people we meet, their only contact with the world outside and, very often, the closest, quite literally, they will ever come to Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton. Not the least of the challenges of travel, therefore, is learning how to import—and export—dreams with tenderness.
By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes. Yet one of the subtler beauties of travel is that it enables you to bring new eyes to the people you encounter. Thus even as holidays help you appreciate your own home more—not least by seeing it through a distant admirer’s eyes—they help you bring newly appreciative—distant—eyes to the places you visit. You can teach them what they have to celebrate as much as you celebrate what they have to teach. This, I think, is how tourism, which so obviously destroys cultures, can also resuscitate or revive them, how it has created new “traditional” dances in Bali, and caused craftsmen in India to pay new attention to their works. If the first thing we can bring the Cubans is a real and balanced sense of what contemporary America is like, the second—and perhaps more important—thing we can bring them is a fresh and renewed sense of how special are the warmth and beauty of their country, for those who can compare it with other places around the globe.
Thus travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.
On the most basic level, when I’m in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.
We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity—and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).
Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious—to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves—and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”
There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year—or at least 45 hours—and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand. Language facilitates this cracking open, for when we go to France, we often migrate to French, and the more childlike self, simple and polite, that speaking a foreign language educes. Even when I’m not speaking pidgin English in Hanoi, I’m simplified in a positive way, and concerned not with expressing myself, but simply making sense.
So travel, for many of us, is a quest for not just the unknown, but the unknowing; I, at least, travel in search of an innocent eye that can return me to a more innocent self. I tend to believe more abroad than I do at home (which, though treacherous again, can at least help me to extend my vision), and I tend to be more easily excited abroad, and even kinder. And since no one I meet can “place” me—no one can fix me in my resume—I can remake myself for better, as well as, of course, for worse (if travel is notoriously a cradle for false identities, it can also, at its best, be a crucible for truer ones). In this way, travel can be a kind of monasticism on the move: On the road, we often live more simply (even when staying in a luxury hotel), with no more possessions than we can carry, and surrendering ourselves to chance.
This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear”—disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. I, like many people, tend to ask questions of the places I visit, and relish most the ones that ask the most searching questions back of me: In Paraguay, for example, where one car in every two is stolen, and two-thirds of the goods on sale are smuggled, I have to rethink my every Californian assumption. And in Thailand, where many young women give up their bodies in order to protect their families—to become better Buddhists—I have to question my own too-ready judgments. “The ideal travel book,” Christopher Isherwood once said, “should be perhaps a little like a crime story in which you’re in search of something.” And it’s the best kind of something, I would add, if it’s one that you can never quite find.
I remember, in fact, after my first trips to Southeast Asia, more than a decade ago, how I would come back to my apartment in New York, and lie in my bed, kept up by something more than jet lag, playing back, in my memory, over and over, all that I had experienced, and paging wistfully though my photographs and reading and re-reading my diaries, as if to extract some mystery from them. Anyone witnessing this strange scene would have drawn the right conclusion: I was in love.
For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning—from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament—and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
And what this metaphor also brings home to us is that all travel is a two-way transaction, as we too easily forget, and if warfare is one model of the meeting of nations, romance is another. For what we all too often ignore when we go abroad is that we are objects of scrutiny as much as the people we scrutinize, and we are being consumed by the cultures we consume, as much on the road as when we are at home. At the very least, we are objects of speculation (and even desire) who can seem as exotic to the people around us as they do to us.
We are the comic props in Japanese home-movies, the oddities in Maliese anecdotes and the fall-guys in Chinese jokes; we are the moving postcards or bizarre objets trouves that villagers in Peru will later tell their friends about. If travel is about the meeting of realities, it is no less about the mating of illusions: You give me my dreamed-of vision of Tibet, and I’ll give you your wished-for California. And in truth, many of us, even (or especially) the ones who are fleeing America abroad, will get taken, willy-nilly, as symbols of the American Dream.
That, in fact, is perhaps the most central and most wrenching of the questions travel proposes to us: how to respond to the dream that people tender to you? Do you encourage their notions of a Land of Milk and Honey across the horizon, even if it is the same land you’ve abandoned? Or do you try to dampen their enthusiasm for a place that exists only in the mind? To quicken their dreams may, after all, be to match-make them with an illusion; yet to dash them may be to strip them of the one possession that sustains them in adversity.
That whole complex interaction—not unlike the dilemmas we face with those we love (how do we balance truthfulness and tact?)—is partly the reason why so many of the great travel writers, by nature, are enthusiasts: not just Pierre Loti, who famously, infamously, fell in love wherever he alighted (an archetypal sailor leaving offspring in the form of Madame Butterfly myths), but also Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence or Graham Greene, all of whom bore out the hidden truth that we are optimists abroad as readily as pessimists as home. None of them was by any means blind to the deficiencies of the places around them, but all, having chosen to go there, chose to find something to admire.
All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips, and “being transported” by private as well as public means; all saw that “ecstasy” (“ex-stasis”) tells us that our highest moments come when we’re not stationary, and that epiphany can follow movement as much as it precipitates it. I remember once asking the great travel writer Norman Lewis if he’d ever be interested in writing on apartheid South Africa. He looked at me astonished. “To write well about a thing,” he said, “I’ve got to like it!”
At the same time, as all this is intrinsic to travel, from Ovid to O’Rourke, travel itself is changing as the world does, and with it, the mandate of the travel writer. It’s not enough to go to the ends of the earth these days (not least because the ends of the earth are often coming to you); and where a writer like Jan Morris could, a few years ago, achieve something miraculous simply by voyaging to all the great cities of the globe, now anyone with a Visa card can do that. So where Morris, in effect, was chronicling the last days of the Empire, a younger travel writer is in a better position to chart the first days of a new Empire, post-national, global, mobile and yet as diligent as the Raj in transporting its props and its values around the world.
In the mid-19th century, the British famously sent the Bible and Shakespeare and cricket round the world; now a more international kind of Empire is sending Madonna and the Simpsons and Brad Pitt. And the way in which each culture takes in this common pool of references tells you as much about them as their indigenous products might. Madonna in an Islamic country, after all, sounds radically different from Madonna in a Confucian one, and neither begins to mean the same as Madonna on East 14th Street. When you go to a McDonald’s outlet in Kyoto, you will find Teriyaki McBurgers and Bacon Potato Pies. The placemats offer maps of the great temples of the city, and the posters all around broadcast the wonders of San Francisco. And—most crucial of all—the young people eating their Big Macs, with baseball caps worn backwards, and tight 501 jeans, are still utterly and inalienably Japanese in the way they move, they nod, they sip their Oolong teas—and never to be mistaken for the patrons of a McDonald’s outlet in Rio, Morocco or Managua. These days a whole new realm of exotica arises out of the way one culture colors and appropriates the products of another.
The other factor complicating and exciting all of this is people, who are, more and more, themselves as many-tongued and mongrel as cities like Sydney or Toronto or Hong Kong. I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman. I was, in short, a traveler at birth, for whom even a visit to the candy store was a trip through a foreign world where no one I saw quite matched my parents’ inheritance, or my own. And though some of this is involuntary and tragic—the number of refugees in the world, which came to just 2.5 million in 1970, is now at least 27.4 million—it does involve, for some of us, the chance to be transnational in a happier sense, able to adapt anywhere, used to being outsiders everywhere and forced to fashion our own rigorous sense of home. (And if nowhere is quite home, we can be optimists everywhere.)
Besides, even those who don’t move around the world find the world moving more and more around them. Walk just six blocks, in Queens or Berkeley, and you’re traveling through several cultures in as many minutes; get into a cab outside the White House, and you’re often in a piece of Addis Ababa. And technology, too, compounds this (sometimes deceptive) sense of availability, so that many people feel they can travel around the world without leaving the room—through cyberspace or CD-ROMs, videos and virtual travel. There are many challenges in this, of course, in what it says about essential notions of family and community and loyalty, and in the worry that air-conditioned, purely synthetic versions of places may replace the real thing—not to mention the fact that the world seems increasingly in flux, a moving target quicker than our notions of it. But there is, for the traveler at least, the sense that learning about home and learning about a foreign world can be one and the same thing.
All of us feel this from the cradle, and know, in some sense, that all the significant movement we ever take is internal. We travel when we see a movie, strike up a new friendship, get held up. Novels are often journeys as much as travel books are fictions; and though this has been true since at least as long ago as Sir John Mandeville’s colorful 14th century accounts of a Far East he’d never visited, it’s an even more shadowy distinction now, as genre distinctions join other borders in collapsing.
In Mary Morris’s “House Arrest,” a thinly disguised account of Castro’s Cuba, the novelist reiterates, on the copyright page, “All dialogue is invented. Isabella, her family, the inhabitants and even la isla itself are creations of the author’s imagination.” On Page 172, however, we read, “La isla, of course, does exist. Don’t let anyone fool you about that. It just feels as if it doesn’t. But it does.” No wonder the travel-writer narrator—a fictional construct (or not)?—confesses to devoting her travel magazine column to places that never existed. “Erewhon,” after all, the undiscovered land in Samuel Butler’s great travel novel, is just “nowhere” rearranged.
Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is—and has to be—an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him. Thus Bruce Chatwin’s books seem to dance around the distinction between fact and fancy. V.S. Naipaul’s recent book, “A Way in the World,” was published as a non-fictional “series” in England and a “novel” in the United States. And when some of the stories in Paul Theroux’s half-invented memoir, “My Other Life,” were published in The New Yorker, they were slyly categorized as “Fact and Fiction.”
And since travel is, in a sense, about the conspiracy of perception and imagination, the two great travel writers, for me, to whom I constantly return are Emerson and Thoreau (the one who famously advised that “traveling is a fool’s paradise,” and the other who “traveled a good deal in Concord”). Both of them insist on the fact that reality is our creation, and that we invent the places we see as much as we do the books that we read. What we find outside ourselves has to be inside ourselves for us to find it. Or, as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We carry within us the wonders we seek without us. There is Africa and her prodigies in us.”
So, if more and more of us have to carry our sense of home inside us, we also—Emerson and Thoreau remind us—have to carry with us our sense of destination. The most valuable Pacifics we explore will always be the vast expanses within us, and the most important Northwest Crossings the thresholds we cross in the heart. The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center.
And even as the world seems to grow more exhausted, our travels do not, and some of the finest travel books in recent years have been those that undertake a parallel journey, matching the physical steps of a pilgrimage with the metaphysical steps of a questioning (as in Peter Matthiessen’s great “The Snow Leopard”), or chronicling a trip to the farthest reaches of human strangeness (as in Oliver Sack’s “Island of the Color-Blind,” which features a journey not just to a remote atoll in the Pacific, but to a realm where people actually see light differently). The most distant shores, we are constantly reminded, lie within the person asleep at our side.
So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake. As Santayana, the heir to Emerson and Thoreau with whom I began, wrote, “There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.” Romantic poets inaugurated an era of travel because they were the great apostles of open eyes. Buddhist monks are often vagabonds, in part because they believe in wakefulness. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Reason #23 Why China Will Rule the World
I want you to take a good look at this seemingly simple roll of toilet paper. Do you see that big number 3? That's THREE PLY amigos! The Trifecta of asswipe.
In Botswana we made do with single ply. It was a hardship, but it was Peace Corps and Africa and sacrifices were to be expected.
When we returned to the States we got back into the double ply routine thinking "That's right America! We're number one with the number two!"
But now I've been "re-educated" if you will. We were once great. But the torch has been passed.
I know. I know, you'll say "Hey, Gillete Fusion! Five blades!" That was then. This is now.
We had a good ride. And sure, we'll be importing three ply into Mal-Warts soon. But the message has been delivered.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Beijing It Is!
We've been here a couple days. Turns out we have to wait a couple more for our train to Wudangshan. It's a twenty-some hour trip. We could've left earlier but the only class seats available were something called "Hard Seat." Even the train's website said these seats were basically Hell and you'd be lucky to arrive with your possessions and sanity intact.
Ergo we got "Soft Sleeper" class seats. Better than a sharp stick in your eye.
So we've been exploring the neighborhood near our hotel. In the days to come we plan to visit Tiananmen Square and other famous spots. Cabrini and I have seen these places before but they are pretty cool in their own rights.
There are some interesting shops all around us. But this one caught my eye. From now on this is where i get my threads.
Ergo we got "Soft Sleeper" class seats. Better than a sharp stick in your eye.
So we've been exploring the neighborhood near our hotel. In the days to come we plan to visit Tiananmen Square and other famous spots. Cabrini and I have seen these places before but they are pretty cool in their own rights.
There are some interesting shops all around us. But this one caught my eye. From now on this is where i get my threads.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Saw "Inception" Tonight
Excellent flick! DeCaprio is great at playing the tortured soul. It has a kind of "Matrix" air about it. Good action. The final scene is a gripper. Gotta see it a time or two to retain everything. Be interesting to see how Rotten Tomatoes judges it.
My only question is this: am I actually sitting in front of a computer writing this?
My only question is this: am I actually sitting in front of a computer writing this?
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