Hilary's blog

A taste of beauty Prologue: Before writing the final, I read through all of my blog posts from this semester to refresh my memory. I decided to essentially rewrite my first post, but instead of framing it simply as a memory, I reworked it to display the travel epiphanies I experienced and incorporate some of the books we’ve read. It is a personal essay, and hopefully reflects how much I’ve grown over the past semester. Enjoy!

       I used to think “epiphanies” were cliché. Silly comments made to make someone feel special. After all, life is all about learning, and learning is a process, not a “sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something,” as defined on dictionary.com. How is it possible that in a single moment, everything can become clear?

   That was before I spent a month on a kibbutz in Beit Shean, Israel. Suddenly, I found myself speaking like all of those people that frustrated me so much, and I finally understood where they were coming from. I was introduced to a new lifestyle, and I didn’t want to leave it.

Travel; according to google.

trav⋅el
 to go from one place to another, as by car, train, plane, or ship; take a trip; journey: to travel for pleasure; to proceed or advance in any way.

In the spirit of Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, I thought the best way to begin this blog post was to define this term that we been examining over the course of this semester, and have come to use so loosely. Over the past three months, we have read and blogged about this concept of travel, and yet still, this book introduces us to a whole new way to read this definition. From Daisy Miller to Evening of the Holiday, all of the books we’ve read have been framed by a location, and experienced through the eyes of a Westerner. This book challenged the model we’ve become accustomed to, but mentioning little about England, the place where Z seems to be located, and is written through the mindset of a girl experiencing Western culture for the first time.

On Holiday

“His idea of her, she thought, was as superficial as her own impression of this countryside; he saw her on holiday, and not as she actually was – someone with parents, bills, ailments, someone who did the shopping and went to the dentist and was accountable to friends. (44)”

   
Though this passage appears early on in the novel, at a point when Sophie realizes Tancredi is in love with her, but is not quite sure she feels the same way, it ended up being the most valuable lesson I took from the story. Just like Death in Venice, The Evening of the Holiday is more of a story about love and self-realization than explicitly about travel, as say Daisy Miller or The Sheltering Sky. This passage however acts as a bridge between the two genres and suggests that perhaps the two themes are more intertwined than one might think.

   
In this passage, Sophie equates herself with the place she has traveled to. Out of context, they are both beautiful and unique. But when put in their place, are they really anything out of the ordinary?

   It seems that Sophie is suggesting that when we are removed from what we are used to, we become an entirely different person. There is no way to escape our heritage, or connect on a deeper level with anyone we meet abroad. In order to really know someone, or know a place, we must know everything about them, from how they spent their days during childhood to who they associate with in the place they call ‘home.’

What is comfort?

    In Özlem Görey’s I refuse these givens’: Embracing Multiplicity of Identity in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich, he brings up an interesting point about the self and the other. In most of the travel novels we have read, the traveler is the self, and the natives of the country the other. The tourists/travelers are uncomfortable with what they encounter and therefore relate everything to what they are used to. They reference the native as someone foreign, and take away their voice in the situation. While Colin and Mary begin their journey as true tourists, referencing everything around them as “the other,” they quickly get too comfortable in their situation and fall into Robert’s lare. Consequently, they become the “other.” Their voices are literally taken away, and they are stripped of their humanity, and used as objects in Robert and Mary’s sex games.

When Life Just Seems to Pass You By    Even after reading the majority of the articles posted about Death in Venice, I still maintain the first thought that came to me about Gustav Aschenbach when I began the novel, and after I finished; this guy is having a mid-life crisis. We’ve talked about travel as a form of escapism and of discovery, and Aschenbach’s trip to Venice seems to be a combination of the two. He’s not there to change the world or make a political statement, but rather is in desperate need of a change. Aschenbach has reached the point of his life where everything is just okay, and as he notices the people around him, he begins to see his own life flashing before his eyes. He decides to go to Venice after seeing a guy on a train who seems a little bit different, and “grew aware of a strange expansion of his inner being, a kind of restive anxiety, a fervent youthful craving for faraway places… (5).” Basically, the main drive for his travel was simply that he wanted to feel young again. He falls in love with Tadzio, because this young boy symbolizes the youth that Aschenbach has lost and can no longer recognize on his own.

G-d On Screen

      As identified in John Leonard’s 1982 New York Times Review of The Mosquito Coast, this novel brings up a whole new element of travel that we have yet to discuss, that of religion. As we follow the Fox family from New England to Central America, we are introduced to missionaries, believers, non-believers, and then of course, Allie, a category all to himself. Although it appears that Allie is trying to evade religion, much of the motive for his travel seems to stem from his desire for it; his desire to be G-d. As it is described in the review, “WANTING to be God makes you crazy. In Paul Theroux's astonishing new novel, Allie Fox - 'the last American' - tries to invent his own godhood. He will straighten rivers, make ice out of fire and turn volcanos into hibachis. The original God, that 'dead boy with the spinning top,' did not, after all, 'finish the job.' “

     Though each religion has it’s unique characteristics, they all have one thing in common; the believer acknowledges the existence of a higher being. This forces one to always be cautious and pay close attention to their actions, for they are always serving someone of a higher rank. In the examination of why one travels, it is very common, and often rewarding, for religion to act as a “center.” Theoretically, this would allow for one traveling to explore the world without getting lost, because he has faith to keep him grounded. This becomes problematic though when that higher being is oneself, as is evidenced in Allie’s experience.

Where the heart is After reading a good deal of “travel fiction,” this novel, The Heart of Darkness, introduces us to yet another form of travel; that purely for work, not pleasure. As we read Marlow’s account of his travels, it becomes clear that this is not a trip he chose, and therefore, he is a bit confused in his approach. In the first chapter we are informed that though he is supposed to be the leader of the mission and is a true seaman, he is pegged as a “wanderer.” To compare it to Dean MacCannell’s article, “Staged Authenticity: Arrangements of Social Space in Tourist Settings,” it seems Marlow is stuck somewhere between the kitchen and dining room, perhaps acting as a hostess. Though his job, going into the Congo and rescuing Kurtz, would seemingly put him in the kitchen, interacting with the most authentic, Marlow doesn’t seem to be ready for that. He does not know how to handle the natives, and instead of interacting with them and doing as they do, he looks at them instead as if they are exhibitions in a museum. As Marlow tells us, after getting word that he had acquired the mission, he felt like an “imposter,” in his own life, and he didn’t know how to act. As he says, “instead of going to the centre of the continent, I were about to set off for the centre of the earth (39).” He doesn’t know what to expect, or how to act, and seemingly would rather be the tourist, instead of the leader, or perhaps “tour guide,” that he is forced to act as.

Lost and Found Over the past month, we’ve followed characters on their journeys to invade high class Europe, canvass the desolate Sahara, and take on the endless American roads. We’ve explored the difference between a traveler and a tourist, and debated the motives of both. We’ve learned about where the concept of travel originated and how the idea of authenticity plays into that notion. However, the problem with these discoveries is that they have yet to answer the challenge of why travelers who seem so similar on the surface, end up with such different outcomes. Why does one traveler end up so lost, as in the case of Port in Paul Bowles’ The Sun Also Rises, and another end up on his way to being “found,” with promise for a future, as evidenced with Dean in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road? With the introduction of Erik Cohen’s Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences, it seems that the only way to answer this question is to look beyond the classification of just a traveler or a tourist, and explore the characteristics and mentality of the character in question. In order to understand a travelers true motives and outcome, we must look towards their center, and how it evolves over time.

Home Sweet Home ...according to Google.“…we know America, we’re at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it’s the same in each corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side.” (said by Dean to Sal, 121)

Over the past couples novels we’ve read, we’ve met a series of mobile people and tried to answer the age old question of whether they were tourists or travelers. Just when we thought we had finally understood the difference, we are approached with a whole new set of credentials in On the Road. In this novel, we are introduced to Dean, a man who seems to have no sense of home, and travels from coast to coast. While he initially appears to be a “traveler,” he then makes the above comment midway through the book, informing both Sal and the reader that all of America is his home. HOLD ON. REALLY?

The Road Less Traveled As I read through Bowles The Sheltering Sky, I kept returning to the idea of whether where we travel actually matters, or whether it is just the idea of “being on the move” that we yearn for. In the previous novel we read, The Sun Also Rises, Jake makes the statement early on that all places are like a series of moving pictures, and there is very little difference or importance of where you end up, and then in this novel, Kit essentially makes the same claim in chapter II, as she says, “The people of each country get more like the people of every other country. They have no charm, no beauty, no ideals, no culture--nothing, nothing,” referring to how everything has become the same as a result of the war.

When reading The Sun Also Rises, I was less hesitant to accept the claim, because most of the places Jake traveled were popular European locations that were beginning to become highly concentrated with Americans, and therefore it made sense that they all seemed to carry the same aura. However, in Kit’s case, I needed a little more convincing before I could accept her comment as truth. Is the whole tourist industry that has developed all a scam and are we just searching for something that doesn’t exist? Does it make a difference of whether we travel through “tourist” communities or unchartered territory?