Consider this poem:
Water is taught by thirst.
Land — by the Oceans passed.
Transport — by throe—
Peace — by its battles told—
Love — by Memorial Mold—
Birds, by the snow.
The intensity of vision comes from meditation and expectation, by "throe" — a pang. This view of existence borders on the mystical. Denial, fantasy, imagination, eager anticipation, expectation, all these mattered more to her than the thing itself. Another of her denial poems contains the line "sumptuous Destitution."
She does not say: Stay home and the world seems wonderful. "Home is a holy thing — nothing of doubt or distrust can enter its blessed portals," she wrote in an 1851 letter to her brother. And "Duty is black and brown — home is bright and shining." And again, home "is brighter than all the world beside."
Travel Wisdom of Freya Stark
English by nationality but born in Italy (in 1893), where she died a hundred years later, Freya Stark was conflicted by nature, though good-humored and appreciative in her travel. An accomplished linguist and a wonderful descriptive writer, she traveled throughout the Middle East, Turkey, and Arabia. Her books include The Valleys of the Assassins (1934), The Southern Gates of Arabia (1935), and Winter in Arabia (1940). She wrote, "I have met charming people, lots who would be charming if they hadn't got a complex about the British and everyone has pleasant and cheerful manners and I like most of the American voices. On the other hand I don't believe they have any God and their hats are frightful. On balance I prefer the Arabs." Stark herself was famous for her hats, which she wore to cover a disfigurement of scalp and ear, resulting from a painful accident in childhood. ¶ She was one of the singular discoverers (and photographers) of traditional cultures and old ways. In her first book, The Valleys of the Assassins, she speaks of "the old days how bad and how pleasant, the new how good and how dull."
***
Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
— Riding to the Tigris (1959)
***
One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy private pattern of one's own and I suppose that is the difference between travel and tourism.
— Riding to the Tigris
***
The Turks, with the most splendid, varied and interesting country in the world, are naturally anxious to obtain tourists, and their difficulties in this respect are caused chiefly by the quite phenomenal badness of their hotels.
— Riding to the Tigris
***
We English rely for success almost desperately on the breaking of rules, and it will be a poor day when we forget to do so, for this idiosyncrasy may rescue us in a deluge of the second-rate. It incidentally gives us an advantage in the understanding of traditions other than our own which more logical nations find difficult to master.
— Riding to the Tigris
***
"How can I know what I think till I hear what I say?" The quotation came into my mind, and another one from Mr. Gladstone, who is supposed to have remarked that he never met anyone from whom he couldn't learn something, but it was not always worth while to find out what it was. Perhaps to find out what one thinks is one of the reasons for travel and for writing, too.
— Riding to the Tigris
***
Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or a penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles. The fear of an unbroken tête-à-tête for the rest of his life should, you would think, prevent any man from getting married… Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while, like a wave lifting us into new seas, the history of the world develops around us. I was thinking these thoughts when Husein, out of breath and beating the grey mare for all he was worth with the plaited rein, came up behind me, and asked how I could bear to go on alone for over an hour, with everyone anxious behind me.
— The Valleys of the Assassins
***
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman [traveler] is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised. When the police stopped our car at Bedrah and enquired where we were staying, the chauffeur, who did not know, told him to ask the lady.
"That is no good," said the policeman. "She's a woman."…To be treated with consideration is, in the case of female travelers, too often synonymous with being prevented from doing what one wants.
— The Valleys of the Assassins
16. Imaginary Journeys
WHAT IS STRIKING ABOUT MANY NARRATIVES of imaginary journeys is the great number written by actual travelers who know the world. In most cases such elaborate fictions are created by writers who have ranged widely. Samuel Butler sailed from Britain to New Zealand and back, Henri Michaux traveled through South America and extensively in Asia, Jan Morris has been practically everywhere on earth. Italo Calvino, born in Cuba, raised in Italy, traveled to the United States and returned to Cuba for a while, lived in Paris, and ended up in Italy. As travelers they were better able to invent journeys and create imaginary countries that were wholly credible, and their fictional travel is clearly based on their own travel.
"A Christian culture could more easily believe in the existence of the monstrous than of the perfect or near perfect," Susan Sontag wrote in "Questions of Travel," in the collection Where the Stress Falls. "Thus, while the kingdoms of freaks appear century after century on maps, exemplary races figure mostly in books of travel to utopia; that is, nowhere."
Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels are obvious choices for this chapter, since Crusoe's desert island was imagined by the widely read Daniel Defoe, who had traveled throughout Europe but never to the landscapes of his masterpiece — Brazil or the Caribbean. Jonathan Swift sailed back and forth from Ireland to England, and created Brobdignagian giants as well as tiny Lilliputians and Yahoos for Gulliver's various voyages. But these books are so well known I decided to omit them.
None of the fictions I've chosen are utopias. I find there is always something bloodless and unbelievable about a utopia. Its contrary, dystopian fiction, with its messy lives and its decaying buildings, more often has the ring of truth. What these books of imaginary places have in common is an element of satire — often a characteristic, or even the whole point, when the subject is an imaginary journey.