The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [2]
The book that follows, eighth in a series of annual compilations from Travelers’ Tales, is an orchestra of travelers plucking at the strange harmonics of the world, and each one of them showing that we are part of one humanity.
It is a cliché to say that we are all kin, but it is true. Even if we hail from different clans, travel makes you certain that kinship is true not only in sentiment but in fact. The writers and explorers herein, and thousands of others not in this volume, partake of a kind of travel that Paul Theroux wrote about recently, “of the old laborious kind, [which] has never seemed…of greater importance, more essential, more enlightening.” This is especially so in a time of great upheaval, natural and political, which makes it clear once again that we never were in charge. If we seem to merely persist without volition or direction (and it’s not for want of trying), and politicians and our fellows disappoint us again and again, we are still free to fall in love with one another, we can still choose to explore the luminous world, become more conscious of blossoming around and within, ply the Golden Current in our raft of cells and cosmic material.
As I sit here this spring day, I’m listening to music by Moro, whose memoir Kin to the Wind recounts an improbable and deeply inspiring 1960s journey around the world as a young troubadour, traveling with no money or guile but with an open mind, heart, and his guitar. A little earlier than Moro, Swiss traveler Nicolas Bouvier wrote in Turkey in an account of his 1950s travels, The Way of the World (L’Usage du Monde): “I dropped this wonderful moment into the bottom of my memory, like a sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again…the bedrock of existence is not made up of the family or work, or what others say and think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love.”
When did you begin?
JAMES O’REILLY
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA
Introduction
Seeing the World Anew
PICO IYER
Ten people walk into a crowded room, and every one of them comes out with a different story; the Rashomon effect plays out in all our lives pretty much every day. Someone sees the Donna Karan sunglasses and the Paul Smith stripes, and reads the strange figures in the room accordingly; someone else starts to talk to as many people as possible, and learns who they are from whether they like Massive Attack or Sigur Rós. Someone else starts to talk about “golden” and “blue” and “light-filled” auras. The travel writer is the one who can do all these things at once—listen more closely, see more deeply and bring some personal question into the room—so that we feel that we’re seeing a shadow story, a secret narrative visible to few, and everything is at stake.
There are a hundred ways of describing good travel writing, but really they all come down to much the same thing: does the piece make you see the world anew, while offering you a place or a feeling you instantly recognize? Does it—as a Jan Morris essay does—take in all the surfaces so attentively that you catch not only the way a place looks, but the way it thinks, and mutters, and hides from itself? Does it—as Peter Matthiessen’s writing might—take on the qualities of an allegory, the story of a soul looking for the gold it’s lost? Does it—I’m thinking now of V.S. Naipaul—have such an ache of unsettledness that you can feel that the writer himself is on the line? The great travel writer makes you see yourself anew, too, by introducing you to things you perhaps never allowed yourself to observe.
Not long ago, I was driving through the Outback with my old college friend Nicolas: the most brilliant student of our generation, thirty years before, but so individual and restless that we were sure he would end up somewhere dark (he left the university, physically, after only