Quick, quick, Oslo

I went to Oslo today.  This is not a metaphor.  I drove to Heathrow at five o’clock in the morning, and arrived at six; I checked in at seven, and flew off at eight; I arrived in Oslo at eleven, and left again at six in the evening, arriving back in England at seven.  I was in Oslo for six hours, and travelled for around the same length.  But the question is, was I really in Oslo?

The physical facts are clear; but the mind is not so impressed with the mundane.  It possesses a kind of deep continuity, an in-built resistance to change.  I was at home this morning, and this evening too; therefore, the mind would argue, what seemed to be Oslo in-between was in fact something else – a dream, an illusion, a fantasy.  This effect might be called a kind of mental momentum.

And yet the aerial view of the green land, the thousands of sparkling inlets, the tiny settlements and the fragile network of roads seemed real enough; as did the airport and the drive through central Oslo.  Though even then I felt disoriented: how could I possibly be in Oslo?  Nor was this the first time I had had this difficulty with travel.

Of Oslo I had no pre-conceptions, nor would I have had any chance to test them since my visit was cursory and perfunctory.  But visiting say Venice for the first time is quite different.  There you are encountering your dreams face to face; you meet the reality behind a thousand conjectures.  Perhaps even more so than for the flying visit to Oslo, that crucial first sight of Venice is not of this world.  It is almost impossible to come to terms with the fact that you are in Venice, the Venice.  I distinctly remember saying to myself “this is Venice” in an attempt to locate myself in that new and fabulous landscape.

The problem is that we carry around within us a very strong map with a large sign marked “you are here”.  Changing that map is not easy.  When we are in Venice, the map is still marked London.  The same is true when we are in Samarkand or Delhi or New York.  It seems so incredible that we are there that it is easier to believe instead that it is a kind of heightened and extraordinary vision granted in ordinary but invisible surroundings.

So travel begins to require a real effort on the part of the sensitive traveller.  They must practise gaining a sense of a new place, of being somewhere other.  They must learn to use the expected and unexpected features of a topography as handholds which allow them to clamber – however unsteadily – onto the moonscape of fresh experience.

There are ironies here.  The best traveller always retains a sense of how a place is different.  To do that they must measure against the yardstick of their home environment.  And yet to be truly in another place, they must shift maps, and so lose that yardstick.  Furthermore, we only truly know a place when it is literally familiar to us; but at that stage it is no longer strange, no longer special.  So the end result is that we cannot for the life us think why we wanted to go there.  At least I still want to go to Oslo – or rather, to go to Oslo really.

(13.8.87)

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