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By Root 873 0

as much as we are, growing multiple and diverse, newly complex, as the entire planet, so it seems, is on the road or spinning on its axis. An American and his Polish girlfriend are looking for the Mona Lisa; a Canadian and her African lover are watching her mother receive news, in a cyber-café among the mosques of Africa, of a death in the family. Women are traveling to ski resorts with their eighty-three-year-old fathers, and young men are going all the way to Hiroshima or My Lai to say sorry, after a fashion, for what their country has done. In a meticulously crafted piece like Michael Shapiro’s account of rafting down the Colorado River, even that most famous of poster images, the Grand Canyon, is made human and mysterious and new.

When a piece of travel writing is truly transporting, it works a small transformation in our lives, so that we are carrying around with us not just a new pair of eyes, but a fresh heart and an awakened conscience. And many of these essays take me back to some of the great works of travel-literature, old and new, that have permanently altered the way I think about the world. I cannot hear the words “Iraq” or “Afghanistan” today without calling up the hallucinatory intensity and horror of Dexter Filkins’s accounts of both in his recent work of combat reportage (and therefore travel literature), The Forever War; and when I try to think of how to make sense of war and the peace we need to cultivate within, I call upon the clarifying priorities and gift for essentials of the great poet laureate of journeying in one place, Thoreau. My favorite travel writers tend to be ones whose first and foremost interest is not in travel: they’re closet anthropologists, personal historians, readers of texts or even just observers of the treacherous human heart and the cycles of history (think of John le Carré or Derek Walcott). A travel writer, for me, is someone like Elizabeth Gilbert, who can at once find a wise man, a lover, and a new life in Bali, yet also take the time and trouble to excavate much of the island’s bloody history of violence and slavery.

Occasionally, nowadays, you’ll hear people say that travel is dead, since we can access almost anywhere from the comfort of our living rooms and find Louis Vuitton stores in the shape of suitcases in Shanghai. Pshaw! As these pieces often memorably show, travel will last as long as we have difficult loves, unsolved memories, haunting questions, restless hearts and legs. Nicolas is still tracking the empty wastes at the center of Australia; his new wife Alison is still trying to find a way though the tangles of history; and I am still revisiting the interior of their land, and of their memories, and planning how I might somehow return there. The travel writer shines a light on something we never thought to look at—“gray, moss-covered churches, and gray, moss-covered cemeteries, and gray, moss-covered monuments,” in Mieke Eerkens’s beautiful essay—and then the light comes on in our eyes, too, and we can see its “hidden beauty.”

Born in Oxford, England, to parents from India, raised in California and long settled in Japan, Pico Iyer has always been interested in the places where cultures collide and conspire. His first book, Video Night in Kathmandu, explored the West playing itself out in ten countries in Asia; his second, The Lady and the Monk, tied together the Western dreams of Japanese with the Japanese dreams of those from the West; and his third, Falling Off the Map, traveled to isolated places from Paraguay to North Korea and Iceland to Bhutan. In the years since, he has been looking at what travel is doing to a world and humanity on the move, in an age of immigration and exile, as described in such works as The Global Soul, Sun After Dark, and The Open Road: The global journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. His next book, on Graham Greene, will look at what fears and hopes we can legitimately carry out into the world.

CAMERON McPHERSON SMITH

The Way of the Mist

He discovers how to vanish.

I’VE BEEN KICKED OFF ICELAND’S VATNAJÖKULL ICE