This week's roundup of ideas center around a theme: that of travel and exploration as a metaphor for my studies. It is inspired by the audiobook I just finished, titled Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris, and the subsequent connections made across podcasts, websites and other books.
1.
It all begins with longing. When Kate Harris set out to bike along the Silk Road, she did so in response to an intense longing to explore. It is a theme that comes up more than once in her book. For example, she notes the irony in noticing posters in Asia with a scene that looks like it is set in Canada:
Across the tent, tacked to its supportive beams, a glossy poster caught my eye. It featured juicy-looking burgers, golden french fries, bowls of cherries and oranges and ice cream and foamy milk shakes, all spread on a red and white picnic blanket in a lush forest next to a waterfall. I'd seen similar posters all across western China [...]. They fascinated me, not just for the torturously improbable feast they portrayed, food that was the stuff of fantasy, unavailable for thousands of miles, but for the odd familiarity of the scene. For all I could tell, the posters showcased woodsy, rural Ontario, where my own bedroom walls had been tacked with posters of mountains and deserts, of horizons picked clean by wind. We were longing right past each other. (Chap 2)
In Susan Cain's most recent book, Bittersweet, longing is an important aspect of bittersweetness. She writes:
Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don't transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know - or will know - loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.
This idea - of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love - is the heart of this book."
2.
We are all plagued by the desire to be original. When I began my research, I hoped I was cutting a new path that would lead to new discoveries. Instead, the more research I've done, the more historians I've found who have laid tracks parallel to my own. I think this means two things: the first is that it is human nature to want to stake out one's individual merit, and to have hubristic ideas about it. It is better to discover oneself as part of a community. Secondly, venturing out with a project in mind is a good and necessary part of one's personal development. Again, Harris writes about this in her book, with the example of Alexandra David-Neel:
Refreshingly, David-Néel knew herself just fine, and what she was searching for, if anything, was an outer world as wild as she felt within. She didn't even have the luxury of a blank literary or geographic slate when it came to Tibet. Dozens of Europeans had already been there, from diplomats to missionaries to soldiers. They'd drawn maps, written reports, even owned real estate in Lhasa. That none of this deterred the Frenchwoman was deeply consoling to me, a hint that exploration was possible despite precedent, that even artificial borders were by definition frontiers, and therefore worth breaching as a matter of principle. (Chap 1)
And in her book’s conclusion, Harris writes:
But exploration more than anything is like falling in love, the experience feels singular, unprecedented and revolutionary despite the fact that others have been there before. No one can fall in love for you, just as no one can bike the silk road or walk on the moon for you.
3.
Distractions and procrastination. I'm writing through the results of the research, working through another chapter, and sometimes, as much as I like writing, I am seized by the desire to escape it. I start thinking that the story of the small town would better be communicated in a graphic novel, or an interactive website. Or what if what the world really needs right now is a comprehensive map featuring every travel writer's journey in the books they wrote? That way, I reason, if you wanted to travel vicariously without any of the discomfort, you could pick a place and see the books written about it!
Such digressions of thought are like desert mirages, and they're a normal part of writing. They do sometimes lead to interesting rabbit holes though... I discovered the website Wikimapia, for example, and Richard Kreitner's article titled “The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips” on Atlas Obscura. (He also wrote a book with selected works of fiction and their settings around the world.)
4.
On the subject of writing. Travel writing, as a genre, isn't easy to pull off, as Tyler Cowen writes in a blog post titled "Why is most travel writing so bad?" Rory Stewart, on a podcast episode of Always Take Notes, is also critical of some aspects of the genre.
[...] it absurdly inflected with a strange form of decadent asceticism, it too often relies on essentially mocking foreigners [it's] very very unaware of the actual political context of people's lives, it's anthropologically primitive, it has no real interest in the actual structures of society
Then again, every genre has its weak spots and examples of poor execution. Criticism is instructive (preferably when one isn't the subject of it!).
5.
Finally, a balance between history and the present, between thinking and doing. Thanks to Tyler Cowen's recent podcast episode I learned about Paul Salopek's years-long project of walking across the continents. The premise is fascinating, and Salopek uses his talents to highlight "slowing down and finding humanity." In one of his recent dispatches, he writes about human migration. And there was this line: "History—as scribbled by smug homebodies—often assigns these wandering souls a glib label: losers." I wonder if he's highlighting a tension between people who stay at home and people like himself who choose to venture out to see life "on the ground." I don't think one should exclude the other... Rory Stewart (back to that episode on Always Take Notes) marries both aspects.... the walking and the history:
[...] you access communities that you can's access except on foot, and you're walking at the same pace as everybody else. [...] Walking therefore exposes me to the landscape but [also] to the human components and history of the landscape. Things make sense for me as a historian by walking: the distance that Alexander the Great had to walk, or the Genghis Khan's army had to walk makes sense to me [...].
It's been a thought-provoking week! Pictures taken this week while walking the dog are on Instagram.
Happy Friday!
