Posted by The short life of the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, who died in 1989, can be described as a life of “restlessness”. His books such as In Patagonia (1977), Songlines (1987) and What Am I Doing Here? (released posthumously in 1989) are odes, or homages, to a sense of restlessness in life, the need to keep moving, to learn, experience and discover about the world, and waste no time.
All good travel writers live outside the normality of life, they don’t operate along standard predictable lines. Tomorrow is always a new start, and for Chatwin, that was certainly applicable. He was an “outsider”, a pilgrim here on a journey passing through life in this realm. His published biography suggests his choices weren’t always perfect, but that’s fine, we are just here are on a journey, and mistakes are entirely acceptable.
Travel is a way of opening the mind to new possibilities, new ideas, breaking pattern, and as Oliver Wendell said, “when a human mind is stretched by a new idea, it can never go back to its original dimensions”.
This is the true purpose of travel. The essence is to experience but never get attached. Travellers (as opposed to tourists) intrinsically understand this concept: when you leave home you may never return.
The central, underlying principle in travel books is that ‘abroad’ is always a metaphysical blank sheet on which the traveler could write and rewrite the story (of their life, or whatever), as he or she would wish it to be.
One of the most important attributes in being a “traveller” is to leave behind the domestic environment, like religious pilgrimage travelers did in years gone by. Emotional and psychological ties with family and friends are temporarily or permanently severed. Abandonment of excessive material possessions has always been a prerequisite.
Hermann Hesse describes this well in his novella Wandering:
Once again I love deeply everything at home, because I have to leave it. Tomorrow I will love other roofs, other cottages. I won’t leave my heart behind me as they say in love letters. No, I am going to carry it with me over the mountains because I need it always. I am a nomad, not a farmer. I am an adorer of the unfaithful, the changing, the fantastic.
One thing is for sure: the traveler is an escapee from ordinary existence, and his goal is the development of his soul, spiritually and intellectually, in a way and at a speed that is not possible to the average man.
Chatwin understood this. His life was short but eventful. The self that sets out is never quite the one that returns. The best travel books are the ones that show the changing nature of the soul as the journey progresses, in contrast to those writers that come home exactly as they had departed.
There is no better way to summarize travelling than the eternal statement of Pascal:
Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.
14 March 2024
[Book review: Bruce Chatwin – “In Patagonia”; “Songlines”; “What Am I Doing Here?”; Hermann Hesse – “Wandering”]
Piers Morris Blogspot 