Invitation to the voyage

Travelling offers a multitude of pleasures. Those of seeing new lands, new peoples; of covering physical distances; of leaving home behind, and with it quotidian cares; of sun, sea, sand or whatever.  But for the connoisseur there is a pleasure which is keener than all these which are achieved once the journey has begun.  It is a pleasure which can be extended indefinitely; a pleasure which is ultimately independent of the act of travel itself.  It is that fine thrill engendered by the preparations for travel.

The idea for travel may come from a thousand sources; books, friends, crossword puzzles, fortune cookies.  But once it is implanted in the mind, it has a habit of taking root, and burgeoning.  Its ramifications and possibilities spread out endlessly; almost involuntarily you find yourself forming images, painting scenes from that journey-to-be.

You begin to read around the subject.  Guidebooks, maps, travellers tales. The destination begins to shape itself; you can hear the street cries, smell the incense, feel the cold tundra wind on your cheek.  As you plan your itinerary, those place-names which were once ciphers stand before you like familiar faces.  Where the map was once a puzzle, an intricate rebus, it becomes now a necklace, where each city and forest is a pearl on the string of your voyage.

At a certain stage, your preconceptions attain the fixity of stars; it is hard to imagine how you could ever have thought otherwise. Yet this knowledge has been flowering inside you from day to day, and started from nothing. Moreover, the growth is rooted in a rich and unique soil; you. 

And so our fantastical images of lands we have yet to see are doubly precious.  First, because they represent a pure, virginal, untrammelled vision.  There are no problems.  If there are beggars in these lands, they are picturesque and touching, like something out of the Old Testament; if there are endless strikes they seem more like eternal fiestas, celebrations of the indomitability of the human spirit; if the food is tasteless and repetitive it is because our Western palates are jaded; we can learn.  The images are precious too because they are shaped by all our previous journeys.  The future affirms the past.

As we build Luxor brick by brick, and sculpt the long-eared figures on Easter Island, we draw on that huge library we carry within us, modifying our fantasies only when some external authority like a guidebook offers incontrovertible evidence on the outward form of things. Otherwise, these possible cities populate a purely internal landscape.

Which is why we may ultimately be loath to confront them with reality. It always turns out that Venice smells, or Samarkand has six-lane dual carriageways.  Dreams and truth are uneasy bedfellows. Sometimes, however seductive the invitation to the voyage may be, we might prefer to refuse it, and so, paradoxically, to retain it.  To reap the many pleasures of travel requires many courages; but none is more basic than that of daring to cross the divide which separates the imagination from the image.

(22.11.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence (After James Elroy Flecker) 

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