Being there - again

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)

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

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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) 

Index

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)

See also Moody's Black Notebook Travels - 1989 Oslo

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