The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

15. Staying home

THE NONTRAVELER SEEMS TO ME TO EXIST IN suspended animation, if not the living death of a homely routine or the vegetative stupor known to the couch potato. From an early age I longed to leave home and to keep going. I cannot imagine not traveling — stuck home all the time, in the confinement of a house or a community or a city. ¶; Yet some people never leave — distinguished writers and thinkers, chained to their desks, their towns, making a virtue of it. In his entire eighty-year life, Immanuel Kant never traveled more than a hundred miles from his birthplace, Königs-berg (now Kaliningrad), where he died. Philip Larkin, who hardly stirred from his home in Hull on the English coast, said, "I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back home the same day." Needless to say, he lived for much of his life with his mother.

Thomas Merton, who traveled widely in his early life, entered a Trappist monastery at the age of twenty-six, and for the next twenty-seven years seldom uttered an audible word, having taken a vow of silence. He did not leave his monastery in Kentucky until 1968. Invited to a conference in Bangkok, on this first encounter with the wider world after all those years of seclusion, he accidentally electrocuted himself in his hotel room. Edgar Allan Poe spent a few youthful years in Britain. Thoreau never left the United States. Emily Dickinson was more or less housebound. Yet all these people wrote brilliantly of other lands. Something about staying home, staying inside, or going in circles can stimulate a mind in the manner of conventional travel.

In fiction, the character with the most convincing philosophical objection to travel is the decadent Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes, in Huysmans's Against Nature (1884). He makes an elaborate plan for a trip to London, but overcome with sloth, satiated (and "somewhat stupefied") with the Dickensian atmosphere of the English-style pub in Paris, he reflects on the tedium of the Channel crossing and decides to stay put: "After all, what was the good of moving, when a fellow could travel so magnificently sitting in a chair? Wasn't he already in London, whose smells, weather, citizenry, and even cutlery, were all about him? What could he expect to find over there, save fresh disappointments?"

Henry Fielding's Voyage to Lisbon

FIELDING, LOOKING FOR a rest cure and a mild climate, sets out from London for Lisbon toward the end of June 1754; and after hundreds of pages, toward the end of August, he is still off the coast of England, becalmed. In the delay and idleness he grows irritable and confides his irritation to his journal. He called himself a "great, tattered bard," and was highly skeptical of "voyage-writers," as he explains in his long preface to the published Journal.

This seems a superb Fielding farce, the absurdity of setting out and going nowhere — he'll never make it! Much of the book is satirical, ironic, blustering, and his ailments so numerous and debilitating, it is like self-satire, or at least comic exaggeration. Only forty-seven, he is plagued by "lingering imperfect gout…[and] besides being lame, I was very ill with great fatigues I had lately undergone added to my distemper… My health now reduced to the last extremity… I went into the country [Bath] in a very weak and deplorable condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy [edema], and an asthma, altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so entirely emaciated, that it had lost all muscular flesh… I was now, in the opinion of all men, dying of a complication of disorders."

Still in England, he recovers with a regimen of tar-water treatments and then, with "the first dawnings of my recovery I had conceived of removing to a warmer climate." He rejects Avignon and decides on Lisbon for convalescence, leaving home in a lugubrious frame of mind. "On this day, the most melancholy sun I ever beheld arose and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun, I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on whom I doated with a motherlike fondness."

His book is a chronicle of delay and frustration. It's true that Fielding ultimately arrives in Lisbon, but the greater part of the voyage is spent at various anchorages and moorings on the English coast, the winds too light to bear the ship away, so Fielding and his party go ashore and stay in public houses and inns to pass the time. The contentious and tyrannical captain cruises back and forth from Ryde to Portland to Spithead, awaiting a favorable wind and complaining.

"The captain now grew outrageous, and declaring open war with the wind, took a resolution, rather more bold than wise, of sailing in defiance of it, and in its teeth." This tactic fails; they are soon back on the English coast. Fielding fills his journal with reflections on eating, on the difference between seamen and landlubbers, on tyranny and officialdom, on his quarrels with the captain and the customs officers, on mythology. He writes that if his disquisitions can serve as a remedy for "the most inveterate evils, at least, I have obtained my whole desire, and shall have lain so long wind-bound in the ports of this kingdom to some purpose."

Never less than adversarial, the captain believes that he is "under the spell of witchcraft" and spends less and less time on his ship, going ashore or to other ships to socialize, as Fielding — fading again — is attended by doctors.

Toward the end of August, the wind picks up and proves helpful, and a full two months after setting off, Fielding is at last on his way, at sea. The rest of the voyage is brisk. Four days later they are "thirty miles to the westward of Plymouth," the next day in the Bay of Biscay, and becalmed, then in a gale: "Our voyage was retarded." Several days after the gale they are off the Portuguese coast and soon at Lisbon. The actual voyage is so abbreviated as to seem an anticlimax: "About seven in the evening I got into a chaise on shore, and was driven through the nastiest city in the world, tho' at the same time one of the most populous, to a kind of coffeehouse, which is very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile from the city, and hath a very fine prospect of the river Tajo from Lisbon to the sea."

He hoped to regain his health in Lisbon, but the last lines of the Journal are ominous, and seem like a premonition of his own death. Horace: "This is the end of the story, and the journey" (Hic finis chartaeque, viaeque).

Fielding died in Lisbon a little over a month after arriving, in October 1754. The book was published posthumously in 1755.

Xavier de Maistre: Traveling Around His Room

A JOURNEY ROUND My Room is one of the curiosities of travel literature. De Maistre (1763–1852), born in Savoy, peripatetic as a soldier and landscape painter, ended his life as a naturalized Russian subject. Arrested in Italy while serving in the Austro-Russian army, he was put under house arrest in Turin for forty-two days, where he wrote this book of forty-two chapters. He hadn't planned to publish it, but when his brother Joseph, a political philosopher, read it, he persuaded Xavier to do so, and the book appeared in 1794. It has been described as "a delightful chat with the reader, filled with delicate observations, in which an artless grace, humor, and spontaneous wit are wedded to a gentle and somewhat dreamy philosophy." In fact, it is parody, self-mockery, and willfully eccentric, a deliberate attempt to stave off the boredom of confinement, calling this a "new mode of traveling I introduce into the world." Hyperbolic (one chapter describes "Latitude and Topography"), it is also a disquisition on the meaning of ordinary things.

"The voyages of Cook and the observations of his fellow-travelers… are nothing compared with my adventures in this one district." He anatomizes the pictures on the walls, his furniture, his bed: "A bed sees us born and sees us die. It is the ever changing scene upon which the human race play by turns interesting dramas, laughable farces, and fearful tragedies. It is a cradle decked with flowers. A throne of love. A sepulcher."

Kamo-no-ChŌmei: Recluse in a Remote and Tiny Hut

THE TEN FOOT Square Hut, a brief account of the withdrawal of a man from public life to a tiny hut, where he ended his days, is often compared with Thoreau's Walden. The work is attributed to Kamo-no-Chōmei, a twelfth-century Japanese aristocrat who, disappointed at being passed over for the post of warden of the shrine of Kamo in Kyoto, simply retreated, rusticating himself to the mountains, living alone, "a friend of the moon and the wind."

He was in his fifties when he forsook the world, first for a hut near Mount Hiei, and after five years he moved into greater seclusion in Hino, near Tokyo, for a hut that was hardly ten feet square and seven feet high. Like Thoreau, he describes his simple furnishings (baskets, a brazier, his straw mat, his desk). It is the ultimate in simplicity. Altogether he was a recluse for eight years, and his writing shows the effects of his retreat and renunciation and his nonattachment, achieving a Buddhist ideal. Calmly, he lists the catastrophes of all sorts — acts of God, acts of man — that have befallen Japan. And he sums up his existence in the tiny hut: "Since I forsook the world and broke off all its ties, I have felt neither fear nor resentment. I commit my life to fate without special wish to live or desire to die. Like a drifting cloud I rely on none and have no attachments. My only luxury is a sound sleep and all I look forward to is the beauty of the changing seasons."

Thoreau: Home Is the Heavenly Way

HENRY DAVID THOREAU was so emotionally attached to his home in Concord that he found it almost impossible to leave. In fact, after 1837 he did so only for short periods — thirteen days on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, some visits to Cape Cod, three trips to the Maine woods, brief spells in Staten Island and Minnesota. He was never alone on these excursions; he always went with a friend or relative. Although he philosophized constantly about travel (he was widely read in the travel books of his time), he is a much better example of someone who really didn't go anywhere. The Maine trip was a team effort, and Thoreau was a follower. A Yankee in Canada is about a one-week train trip with several hundred tourists, what we would call a package tour today. He made no bones about not being a traveler. He boasted of staying home; indeed, he made a virtue of it: "Live at home like a traveler." Homesick on Staten Island, he wrote, "My thoughts revert to those dear hills… Others may say, 'Are there not the cities of Asia?' But what are they? Staying at home is the heavenly way" (letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson).

Travel in your head, Thoreau preached in Walden: "Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade but of thought." He went on to say that it is "easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals… than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one's being alone."

A frequent hyperbolic flourish in a Thoreau book or essay is his comparing an aspect of his neighborhood with an exotic place. And these deflations are often paradoxes. Why leave Concord when, as he wrote in a poem,

Our village shows a rural Venice,

Its broad lagoons where yonder fen is;

As lovely as the Bay of Naples

Yon placid cove amid the maples;

And in my neighbor's field of corn

I recognize the Golden Horn.

In 1853, as the explorer Paul Du Chaillu (whom Thoreau would later read) is preparing to return to Equatorial Africa, Thoreau is confiding to his journal, "I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me — that by the want of pecuniary wealth I have been nailed down to this my native region so long & steadily — and made to love and study this spot of earth more and more — What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? — The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition."

Though his friend and literary mentor Emerson went to England in search of inspiration, and other contemporaries traveled around the globe — Hawthorne to England, Washington Irving to Spain, Melville to the Pacific — Thoreau was not impressed. The reports of such peregrinations roused him to be defiant and sometimes condescending. He was self-consciously a contrarian. He cultivated his eccentricity and talked it up in his writing, but his personality was a great deal stranger than he knew, and perhaps beyond cultivation.

Thoreau's three Maine trips from 1846 to 1857 overlap the publication of Melville's greatest works. There is no proof that Thoreau read Moby-Dick, but there is ample evidence that he read Typee, which appeared at the time of his first visit to Maine, and which he discussed in a discarded early version of "Ktaadn." Somewhat combative in comparing wildernesses, Thoreau argued that he experienced deeper wilderness in Maine than Melville had as a castaway in the high volcanic archipelago of the remote Marquesas, among the lovely maiden Fayaway and the anthropophagous islanders. It seems a stretch, but there it is.

Emily Dickinson: The Argument for Staying Home

"TO SHUT OUR eyes is Travel," Emily Dickinson wrote to a Mrs. Holland in 1870. By then, at age forty, she had been housebound for almost ten years, and she had another fifteen reclusive years to live. She had begun her studies at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, about ten miles from Amherst, but lasted only a year and, homesick, returned to the family house.

Agoraphobic? Probably not. She made a trip to Boston in 1865, without the fantods, but after that she did not set foot out of the house. Was she lovesick? "Neurasthenic"? One of her recent biographers suggests that Emily might have been epileptic: some of her family suffered from seizures, and she apparently took a drug that was then regarded as efficacious for epilepsy. But Edward Lear, an exact contemporary, was epileptic and a wide traveler — Corsica, Egypt, the Middle East, and India. Like Dickinson, Lear was a loner, craving solitude, because the affliction was regarded as shameful; perhaps that is the key.

Like many other shut-ins, Dickinson made a virtue of her confinement, and denigrated travel in both her poetry and her letters, extolled the joy of being home, and was prolific as a letter writer and a poet — almost two thousand poems. A mere dozen were published in her lifetime, but anonymously.

Like Thoreau, she placed a high value on simplicity and austerity, even deprivation. Also like Thoreau, she was a passionate reader — of novels, poems, essays: Dickens, Emerson, De Quincey, George Eliot, Thoreau's Walden. Her library survives, with all her scratchings on the pages. The English critic Michael Meyer shrewdly wrote, in Thinking and Writing About Literature, "She simplified her life so that doing without was a means of being within. In a sense, she redefined the meaning of deprivation, because being denied something — whether it was faith, love, literary recognition, or some other desire — provided a sharper, more intense understanding than she would have experienced had she achieved what she wanted."

Consider this poem:

Water is taught by thirst.

Land — by the Oceans passed.

Transport — by throe—

Peace — by its battles told—

Love — by Memorial Mold—

Birds, by the snow.

The intensity of vision comes from meditation and expectation, by "throe" — a pang. This view of existence borders on the mystical. Denial, fantasy, imagination, eager anticipation, expectation, all these mattered more to her than the thing itself. Another of her denial poems contains the line "sumptuous Destitution."

She does not say: Stay home and the world seems wonderful. "Home is a holy thing — nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals," she wrote in an 1851 letter to her brother. And "Duty is black and brown — home is bright and shining." And again, home "is brighter than all the world beside."

Travel Wisdom of Freya Stark

English by nationality but born in Italy (in 1893), where she died a hundred years later, Freya Stark was conflicted by nature, though good-humored and appreciative in her travel. An accomplished linguist and a wonderful descriptive writer, she traveled throughout the Middle East, Turkey, and Arabia. Her books include The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), The Southern Gates of Arabia (1935), and Winter in Arabia (1940). She wrote, "I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs." Stark herself was famous for her hats, which she wore to cover a disfigurement of scalp and ear, resulting from a painful accident in childhood. ¶ She was one of the singular discoverers (and photographers) of traditional cultures and old ways. In her first book, The Valleys of the Assassins, she speaks of "the old days how bad and how pleasant, the new how good and how dull."

***

Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

— Riding to the Tigris (1959)

***

One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.

— Riding to the Tigris

***

The Turks, with the most splendid, varied and interesting country in the world, are naturally anxious to obtain tourists, and their difficulties in this respect are caused chiefly by the quite phenomenal badness of their hotels.

— Riding to the Tigris

***

We English rely for success almost desperately on the breaking of rules, and it will be a poor day when we forget to do so, for this idiosyncrasy may rescue us in a deluge of the second-rate. It incidentally gives us an advantage in the understanding of traditions other than our own which more logical nations find difficult to master.

— Riding to the Tigris

***

"How can I know what I think till I hear what I say?" The quotation came into my mind, and another one from Mr. Gladstone, who is supposed to have remarked that he never met anyone from whom he couldn't learn something, but it was not always worth while to find out what it was. Perhaps to find out what one thinks is one of the reasons for travel and for writing, too.

— Riding to the Tigris

***

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or a penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles. The fear of an unbroken tête-à-tête for the rest of his life should, you would think, prevent any man from getting married… Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while, like a wave lifting us into new seas, the history of the world develops around us. I was thinking these thoughts when Husein, out of breath and beating the grey mare for all he was worth with the plaited rein, came up behind me, and asked how I could bear to go on alone for over an hour, with everyone anxious behind me.

— The Valleys of the Assassins

***

The great and almost only comfort about being a woman [traveler] is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised. When the police stopped our car at Bedrah and enquired where we were staying, the chauffeur, who did not know, told him to ask the lady.

"That is no good," said the policeman. "She's a woman."…To be treated with consideration is, in the case of female travelers, too often synonymous with being prevented from doing what one wants.

— The Valleys of the Assassins