A traveller’s tale
Places 2007/themanLisbon.jpg Photo: Anon. Click for source
(Dedicated to Joe, at a crossroads)
Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning out over the streets and squares, over people’s faces and gestures, always the same and always different, just like scenery.
If I imagine, I see. What more do I do when I travel? Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to travel to feel.
‘Any road, this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of the World.’* But the end of the world, when we go around it full circle, is the same Entepfuhl from which we started out. The end of the world, like the beginning, is in fact our concept of the world. It is in us that the scenery is scenic. If I imagine it, I create it; if I create it, it exists; if it exists, then I see it like any other scenery. So why travel? In Madrid, Berlin, Persia, China, and at the North or South Pole, where would I be but in myself, and in my particular type of sensations?
Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveller. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.
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* ‘Any road, this simple Entepfuhl road. . . World:’ From Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus . . . [From translator’s note.]
16 Comments:
With thanks to the splendidly anonymous photographer whose snapped graffito from a Lisbon street (where Pessoa lived) provides the illustration above. I like the way his gallery of Places 2007 (visible when you click on the illustration) argues against the theme of Pessoa’s piece, for it makes us want to travel to all those places.
Hello there, Vincent! Haven't heard from you in a while. Of course, technically this is more hearing from Pessoa than from you. I was rather suprised when this post dumped me back off in the real world at the end of those quotes. I thought that would be a jumping off point for musings of your own.
But hey, at least you're out there.
And as for travel, I would counter that sometimes a change of scene is refreshing for the imagination, as well the senses.
Sometimes I go on a fishing expedition, so to speak, baiting the hook in hopes of readers’ musings.
Indeed as you say, a change of scene is refreshing for the imagination as well as the senses. Pessoa, ‘leaning out over the streets and squares, over people’s faces and gestures, always the same and always different, just like scenery,’ feels that Lisbon has enough changes of scenery, I guess, to stimulate his own inner travel. And though his name means ‘person’ in Portuguese, there might be no other person but he who could say this and mean it; could stay in one city and touch his own kind of infinity within it.
When I go walking in this valley, or over the hills and out of it, I sometimes can’t decide which is the more refreshing for the imagination: to find some new path, or retread one I’ve taken many times before.
In either case, my true aim is to find some resonance, wherein the inner world resonates with the outer. This helps overturn Time’s tyranny of consigning our yesterdays to oblivion, forever force-feeding us with Today’s insanities, which make no sense on their own.
For then a door can open to that timeless Zone, in which every real thing is still here but is able to join a great procession of Significance, in an extra dimension of Freedom, as in those dreams where your feet lift off the ground, and you can fly.
P.S. I mention all that not only because It's apropos of this discussion of "travel", but also because hopefully it's relevant to this idea of "overturning Time's tyranny" as well.
It’s rather odd, Bryan, I was writing a post last week, now wrecked and abandoned for good, I think, prompted initially by John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, which I read fifty years ago, but then again the other day, at one sitting whilst stuck in bed with a pulled muscle. It got me thinking how this book seemed like an antecedent to the Beat Generation, leading me to think of the books which had introduced me to it, including On the Road and The Dharma Bums which in those days seemed to present new and exciting attitudes to the world, which I embraced rather too enthusiastically, in retrospective judgement. Then in May 2012 I saw the new film version of On the Road in Amsterdam. It brought back memories of the original reading, but I felt its overall morality was rather vile.
Cannery Row, which is nothing to do with travel, nevertheless embodies a much more appealing vision of life amongst the poor, the drifters and pretty much everyone but the distant capitalists. The whores have hearts of gold, even the Chinese grocer has a soft heart somewhere, though his few words of English would never give you any impression other than that he was the hardest man alive. It paints a vision of how the world could be, with Doc the marine biologist explaining symbiosis in the rock pools and the narrator demonstrating in his rather episodic story how everyone on Cannery Row manages to get along with good humour and tolerance despite everything going wrong most of the time. So I found myself contrasting these two visions; found Kerouac’s to be of no value.
So I don't know if it was just the film version (of On the Road) that was tainted with misogyny, selfish hedonism and various kinds of betrayal. I just rechecked Roger Ebert’s review, wondering what you might think about it.
I’d be interested to know what the book has to do with “overturning Time's tyranny”.
I suppose it has to do with it in the sense of that intangible pursuit. Or as it's put in Gatsby, if you prefer:
"It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning —
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
As for the movie, I didn't see the whole thing, but I don't think I cared too much for it either. I don't know if it's even possible to make a movie out of that material, but if it is, that movie wasn't it.
Also, I've always hated discussions of On the Road AS representation of the "Beat Generation." I have no interest in the Beat Generation or Beatniks or pointy goatees or whatever. That book always meant something bigger and more personal to me than a mere historical footnote. In a sense, it's not even really about the book itself, and I can't even really speak to the issue of the moral substance of the characters. That's beside the point for me as well. It was simply that the book played a pivotal role at a perfect pivotal time for me. It was a new door opened. I was sixteen. I was in love, even. And there was THIS BOOK. That's all their really is to it. So for someone to object that the Beats were "thin tea" or to decry the book's deplorable characters doesn't really have anything to do with why the book is special to me.
So let it be, dear Bryan. I'm glad you stick up for your youthful vision, and yes, the vision was in us, and let no one besmirch that.
Hmm ... I follow a Guru. Looks like he used to follow Pessoa. Time to get rid of the false God and embrace the real Man.
Yes, it is time, Ghetu. When in doubt, follow this rule of thumb.
The only good Guru is a dead guru; then you can be reasonably sure he won't try to interfere with your life.
Well, my Guru is long dead, but he still interferes in my life through his recorded speeches :-)
He will always be important to me because following him I realised, I don't need him. I can walk without a crutch now :)
Have you come across this pungent quote before?
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
"Every man's condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth."
Thanks, Ellie. Its pungency demands that I track down the essence from which it derives. Have downloaded the essay from Gutenberg.
um, not sure whether the "longish' comment arrived at your end.
However - my BEST Wishes to you and family at this festive SEASONs CHANGE.
No longish comments have arrived this end from an Antipodean source lately. But thank you for the short and sweet best wishes from your "sunny corner" of the world to this dark, wet and gale-blown other corner, where we have already started a trickle of festivities. Warmest thoughts, mate and merry Xmas!
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