There are two main classes of pleasure to be derived from travelling. The first is visiting cities and lands for the first time. The second and more subtle pleasure arises from going there again.
No one can forget the first sight of the Venice, with the water shimmering between the crumbling and delicately-faded palazzi. The first glimpse of New York, all futuristic towers reaching high into heaven, is breathtaking and indelible. To walk along the silk road to China in Samarkand, passing the great ruined madressehs with their glistening tiles, is to take footsteps in time, and ones that will remain forever in the memory.
That first shock is understandable enough. As you stand there, repeating to yourself that you are really in Leningrad, Florence, Cabourg, that this is the place you have read about, imagined, and that there is no other; this huge bridging of expectation and reality is itself such an experience that inevitably it remains with you for ever.
For some people this is enough. The terrible cry of "I have seen Paris" and therefore lived sates the desire to travel, to see. For others this is all that they must expect. After all, there can be no greater folly, and no greater disappointment than returning in the hope of reliving those first pristine experiences. If you do, you instead become aware of only the flies, or the rain, or the chemical works on the horizon - all things which were present before, but which were swept aside in that first burning vision.
But for those willing to take the risk and persevere in the acquisition of a new travelling skill, the return to a loved and remembered site has its own special rewards.
There is again that unreality of the experience: it is hard to believe that you are really where you are, so outside mundane experience does it lie. But allied to this there is a strange haunting familiarity, a familiarity deeper than the knowledge acquired passively from books or friends. It is the fruit of the seeds of that first trip. A fruit that can only be enjoyed by those who return. It enables you to see a city or valley with eyes which are wiser for their previous knowledge, and which allow you to seek out those loved aspects, the better to latch on to them, cherish them; or alternatively, to find new depths in half-familiar surroundings, to expand on that first knowledge.
Such were my feelings on returning recently to Aldeburgh. To see the neat main street, the houses along the sea-front, the pebble beach; all of them were at once old friends but strange. Strange because I had not seen them for so long, and yet they had an inevitability about them that was striking. I allowed myself - my memories allowed me - the luxury of wandering at once without direction, and at the same time in the sure knowledge that nothing had changed. The cinema was still there, the Moot Hall, the fishing boats on the beach. And as I passed slowly round the town, I felt that I was walking through my own past. And like that past, the town seemed out of time, both old and new.
(21.6.86)
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