"There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see and sees it, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it. The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more. He is constantly comparing what he sees to what he wants, so he see with his mind, and maybe even with his heart, or tries to. If his peripheral vision gets diminished -- so that he quite literally sometimes can't see what's coming at him from the suburbs of the place he looks at -- his struggle to adjust the country he looks at to the country he has inside him at least keeps him looking. It sometimes blurs, and sometimes sharpens, his eye. my head was filled with pictures of Paris, mostly black and white, and I wanted to be in them." Adam Gopnick in Paris to the Moon

I struggle to find a place in this strange place called Phoenix, and this book has not helped my need to live again overseas. Paris is calling me in some way, tugging at my mind every time I see something that reminds me of anything French. I can literally think myself to tears sometimes thinking about being somewhere else, with a lovely lady on my arm. I have such an over romanticised idea about life, but it is my life, and I can direct and form and shape it into one that isn't mundane and lifeless, but filled with places and things I love -- people in places I love. I look forward to the day I live in Paris. It might be a month, or it might be a year, but I know it is in my path.

Afr-ica

"Poor Africa, the happy hunting ground of the mythomaniac, the rock star buffing up his or her image, the missionary with a faith to sell, the child buyer, the retailer of dirty drugs or toxic cigarettes, the editor in search of a scoop, the empire builder, the aid worker, the tycoon wishing to rid himself of his millions, the school builder with a bucket of patronage, the experimenting economist, the diamond merchant, the oil executive, the explorer, the slave trader, the eco-tourist, the adventure traveler, the bird watcher, the travel writer, the escapee, the colonial and his crapulosities, the banker, the busybody, the Mandela-sniffer, the political fantasist, the buccaneer and your cousin the Peace Corps Volunteer. Oh, and the atoner, of whom Thoreau observed in a skeptical essay: “Now, if anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions ... if he has committed some heinous sin and partially repents, what does he do? He sets about reforming the world.” Thoreau, who had Africa specifically in mind, added, “Do you hear it, ye Wolofs?”

To Ponder

I went out to buy transcendence
and came back with a telephone.
Anthony Weir

I am twenty-two years old and will wait no longer.
Scott Valentine

We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor
because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of
them for that reason as free.
Marshall Sahlins

Once Known.

It became clear to me that I was privileged to be living in an African world that had not been written about. This was not the Africa of Conrad, or Karen Blixen, or Hemingway, or Even Laurens van der Post. No one had written about this particular Africa. That, I think, was my good luck. It was for me to describe this unknown time and place. There was a colonial hangover, and Africans were now being uncomfortably accommodated in the white clubs. But I was not a member of any clubs; I did not go on safari. I came to be fascinated by this Africa of hilarious dance halls and village feasts and bush schools. Crazed politicians ranted all over the countryside, and yet there was a power vacuum in which most Africans, rather enjoying the anarchy, felt free. In a cheerful, scribbling, self-deluded frame of mind, in this in-between period after colonialism and before politicians and soldiers tightened their screws, I felt safe.

Dorset

When I left the tropics after working for almost nine years in hot countries, I went to England and experienced a great shock. It seemed to me to be one of the strangest places I had ever been (and I had lived in Uganda and traveled the Congo and in upper Burma). This was Dorset. I was just about to write, "Hardy does not prepare you for Dorset." But of course he does. His work is very truthful to that county. I found the place dark and deeply rural, extremely beautiful, and often inexplicable. People did not seem so much to live there as to be holed up there. There was an uncertainty and a tribal mistrust of outsiders. And "outsider" did not necessarily mean an American. It might be someone from Yeovil or Salisbury. Everything I had expected to find in Africa I found on the edge of Marshwood Vale. I was fascinated, but also a little frightened. These are the emotions that produce fiction.

Look Thy Last on all things Lovely

After a time we moved from Dorset to London, but I never lost the feeling that I was a castaway. As a foreigner, I was determined not to die in Britain and be buried in a gloomy churchyard under a blackish dripping yew tree. One day I would sail away. I never guessed that I would leave alone, feeling as portable and insignificant as when I arrived. I landed in Britain on November 4, 1971 and left on January 19, 1990. The years that these dates enclosed were among the happiest as well as teh saddest I have ever known: joy bordering on rapture, misery at the very edge of despair.

Target.

I developed internal ways of stimulating my memory. It is possible for a writer to think creatively only if he or she manages to inhabit a mood in which imagination can operate. My need for external stimuli inspired in me a desire to travel – and travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is for me the opposite: nothing induces concentration or stimulates memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. More likely you will experience intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life. This does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present, however in fact, what makes the whole experience thrilling is the juxtaposition of present and past – Medford dreamed in Mandalay.

I aspire, where material possessions are concerned, to the Buddhist condition of non-attachment. That is my ideal. I am not so acquisitive that I am possessed by these objects, though I do feel dependent on them at times. I think one must practice ridding onself of them, but that requires concentration and great mental poise – I was to learn how to give them away; it must be my confident decision. I don’t want them torn out of my hands. Obviously, the happiest person is that Buddhist who truly sees that such objects are illusion, and who owns nothing – all these possessions are in his or her memory.

In the most common situation, the threat comes from more than one person – rarely is it one-on-one. The group of people in the car or speedboat, the phalanx of jet skiers, are nearly always male. Their response appears to be a reflex of violent envy directed against an isolated and vulnerable person – the skimpily clothes jogger, the madly balancing paddler, the panting cyclist. It is like an objection to the assertive freedom and health implicit in these pastimes, and it might be bound up with the suspicion – in a minority of cases a well-founded suspicion—that someone who exercises this way so publicly is showing off.

Hold on to what you know I suppose. It is clearly not ok to keep moving about so much is it? It is so not the norm, but maybe, I’m just making my own way through a world of weirdness and wonder. Just sailing along, sometimes alone, and sometimes joined by others.

Fresh air Fiend {friend}.

[Portions of this are from the Paul Theroux book entitled “Fresh Air Fiend”. Many of his writing seem to resonate with me personally, on a level that I can’t quite understand fully yet. Anyway, what he says in parts of this book especially seem to help me think about my journeys around the world and also coming back to the U.S. where, frankly, I’ve felt a little alien.]

For long periods of my life, living in places where I did not belong, I have been a perfect stranger. I asked myself whether my sense of otherness was the human condition. It certainly was my condition. As with most people, my outer life did not in the least resemble my inner life, but exotic places and circumstance intensified this difference. Sometimes my being a stranger was like the evocation of a dream state, at other times like a form of madness, and now and then it was just inconvenient. I might have gone home, except that a return home would have made me feel like a failure. I was not only far away, I was also out of touch. It sounds as though I am describing a metaphysical problem to which there was no solution – but no, all of this was a form of salvation….when I mentioned this notion of being a stranger to my friend Oliver Sacks, he said, “In the Kabala the first act in the creation of the universe is exile.” That makes sense to me.


The English writer V.S. Pritchett spoke about this condition of otherness in his autobiography, how it was not until he began to travel far from his home in south London that he began to understand himself and his literary vocation. He said that he found distant places so congenial that he became an outsider at home. Travel had transformed him into a stranger. He wrote, “I became a foreigner. For myself, that is what a writer is – a man living on the other side of a frontier.”

For various reasons, it is now not so easy to be a foreigner (I am using the word in a general sense). Yet it was very easy for me less than forty years ago, when I was an impressionable teenager and amateur emigrant. Then, a person could simply disappear by traveling; even a trip to Europe involved a sort of obscurity. A trip to Africa or South America could be a vanishing into silence and darkness.


“Connected” is the triumphant cry these days. Connection has made people arrogant, impatient, hasty and presumptuous. I am old enough to have witnessed the rise of the telephone, the apotheosis of TV and the videocassette, the cellular phone, the pager, the fax machine, and e-mail. I don’t doubt that instant communication has been good for business, even for the publishing business, but it has done nothing for literature, and might even have harmed it. In many ways connection has been disastrous. We have confused information (of which there is too much) with ideas (of which there are too few). I found out much more about the world and myself be being unconnected.
And what does connection really mean? What can the archivist – relishing detail, boasting of the information age – possibly do about all those private phone calls, e-mails, and electronic messages. Lost! A president is impeached, and in spite of all the phone calls and all the investigations, almost the only evidence that exists of his assignations are a few cheap gifts, a signed photograph, and obscure stains. So much for the age of information. My detractors may say, “You can print e-mails,” but who commits that yackety-yak to paper?


One of the paradoxes of otherness is that in travel, each conceives the other to be a foreigner. But even the most distant and exotic place has its parallel in ordinary life. Every day we meet new people and are insulted or misunderstood; we are thrown upon our own resources. In the coming and going of daily life we rehearse a modified version of the dramatic event known as first contact. In a wish to experience otherness to its limit, to explores all its nuances, I became a traveler. I was as full of preconceived notions as Columbus or Crusoe – you can’t help it, but you can alter such thoughts. Non-travelers often warn the traveler of dangers, and the traveler dismisses such fears, but the presumption of hospitality is just as odd as the presumption of danger. You have to find out for yourself. Take the leap. Go as far as you can. Try staying out of touch. Become a stranger in a strange land. Acquire humility. Learn the language. Listen to what people are saying.

[Too many times I find myself re-reading these words, as well as a nice little book called “The Art of Travel” and too many times I find myself seeking out other people that have a passion for being away, like I do. It is difficult to find these kinds of people, but when I do, it is as if my entire life has been leading up to that exact moment where I can share the most mundane story about some place in the world, and it seems to be exactly the thing the other person needed to hear – our stories interconnect and it is with that connection we begin to build our next adventure, our next trek and find the next person in line.]