Speaking of Travel

In praise of not knowing

I like myself more when I’m travelling. I like the open-minded, inquisitive and adventurous version I find when travelling. The world becomes a new and expansive place, filled with glittering possibilities. What’s round that hidden corner? What if we look inside that shadowy courtyard? Take a ride to the place we can’t pronounce? 

Rather than be deterred by not knowing a language, I’m intrigued by misunderstandings and  incomprehension. I enjoy sitting on a bus or in a cafe and hearing the music of foreign languages around me. I’m attracted and astonished by the speed of conversations, at their intensity of emotion, and by the apparent importance of everything. It’s closer to music than speech because I can’t understand its component parts so simply let the rhythms and cadences swirl around me. It’s like being part of an orchestra and being the only one who can’t play an instrument. Some people’s nightmare, I suspect, but I love listening to language tuning up, the symphonic rhapsodies of friends talking, the intermezzos of gossip, the lullabies of secrets being shared. Language without meaning takes on a new melodic dimension.

In her poem Questions of Travel, Elizabeth Bishop asks:

'Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?'

‘Watching strangers in a play’, in a language I don’t understand, alerts my other senses to fill the gaps. I observe more closely; I notice gestures, shrugs, eye-rolls and attribute an imaginative significance to them. I smell the perfume of language: the way its sweetness can be overpowered by the dark stench of disapproval or a scented flash of anger. Language also has a taste: two Spanish girls on a train home sharing stories of their day at school - their words taste of churros, creamy chocolate and vanilla. The old man who sits alone on the corner of an Albanian square muttering to himself - his words are bitter coffee and stale cigarettes. Japanese women chatting in an onsen - their phrases are delicate honey and they whisper like steam escaping from a pot of sencha tea. 

We lived in Bulgaria for a few years and I have a memory of coming home on the bus from the local town to our village. It was a dark, cold evening in mid-winter and fresh snow lay thickly in the fields. The bus was packed with villagers who had been working in town or shopping at the market. There was a general hubbub of conversation and I gradually understood some of what was being said around me. I suddenly realised my neighbour was complaining about her angina and another was saying he’s running out of wood because of the long winter. Far from this being the pleasure I might have anticipated, I was unreasonably appalled by the sheer ordinariness of their conversation. When I didn’t understand it, I could imaginatively attribute the most profound wisdom about life’s deepest meanings to my neighbours’ discourse, so to discover they’re only talking about heart trouble and fuel was an unwarranted disappointment. It took me a long time to recognise that hearts and heat are in themselves a deep wisdom.

When travelling, hotel rooms or apartments can quickly and easily become home. They accommodate and welcome us. Make yourselves at home, the freshly laundered linen says; come in, you’re most welcome, the complimentary sachets of coffee recommend; sit down and relax, suggests the couch which is a shade of blue we’ve never seen before. We’re here for you, say the dull prints of what might be local scenes; we have a secret to share, says the ornament of a tiny red house on an otherwise empty white shelf. We will immediately forget you when you leave, they say, so you can travel to your next place, unencumbered by memories of us. An unspoken pact of welcome and forgetfulness prevails - we’re simply passing through.

Perhaps this ‘passing through’ helps remind us of the brief intensity of our lives. Go there while we still can and fall in love with the cafe on the corner that serves the most delicious coffee we’ve ever tasted. The sun shines in ways we've never seen before: a dusky pink or burnt yellow according to the time of day. Dust settles in new rays of light that feel like evening. We can try on other lives while we’re there, to see how they might have fitted us. Imagine rushing across the cobbled square to work, nodding to neighbours in the next apartment, celebrating birthdays in the local bar, or just staying here until it becomes familiar and then moving on?

When we’re travelling, Lavinia Greenlaw says, ‘Anything is going to happen.’ So, you see, I can’t possibly stay at home because somewhere out there anything is happening and I want to be there when it does.