de nos misères est le divertissement.â Diversion. Distraction. Fantasy. Change of fashion, food, love and landscape. We need them as the air we breathe. Without change our brains and bodies rot. The man who sits quietly in a shuttered room is likely to be mad, tortured by hallucinations and introspection.
Some American brain specialists took encephalograph readings of travellers. They found that changes of scenery and awareness of the passage of seasons through the year stimulated the rhythms of the brain, contributing to a sense of well-being and an active purpose in life. Monotonous surroundings and tedious regular activities wove patterns which produced fatigue, nervous disorders, apathy, self-disgust and violent reactions. Hardly surprising, then, that a generation cushioned from the cold by central heating, from the heat by air-conditioning, carted in aseptic transports from one identical house or hotel to another, should feel the need for journeys of mind or body, for pep pills or tranquillisers, or for the cathartic journeys of sex, music and dance. We spend far too much time in shuttered rooms.
I prefer the cosmopolitan scepticism of Montaigne. He saw travel as a âprofitable exercise; the mind is constantly stimulated by observing new and unknown things ... No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, however much opposed to my own ... The savages who roast and eat the bodies of their dead do not scandalise me so much as those who persecute the living.â Custom, he said, and set attitudes of mind, dulled the senses and hid the true nature of things. Man is naturally curious.
âHe who does not travel does not know the value of men,â said Ibân Battuta, the indefatigable Arab wanderer who strolled from Tangier to China and back for the sake of it. But travel does not merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind. Our early explorations are the raw materials of our intelligence, and, on the day I write this, I see that the NSPCC suggests that children penned up in âhigh-riseâ flats are in danger of retarded mental development. Why did nobody think of it before?
Children need paths to explore, to take bearings on the earth in which they live, as a navigator takes bearings on familiar landmarks. If we excavate the memories of childhood, we remember the paths first, things and people second â paths down the garden, the way to school, the way round the house, corridors through the bracken or long grass. Tracking the paths of animals was the first and most important element in the education of early man.
The raw materials of Proustâs imagination were the two walks round the town of Illiers where he spent his family holidays. These walks later became Méséglise and Guermantes Ways in à la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The hawthorn path that led to his uncleâs garden became a symbol of his lost innocence. âIt was on this wayâ, he wrote, âthat I first noticed the round shadow which apple trees cast on the sunlit groundâ, and later in life, drugged with caffeine and veronal, he dragged himself from his shuttered room on a rare excursion in a taxi, to see the apple trees in flower, the windows firmly shut for their smell would overpower his emotions. Evolution intended us to be travellers. Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been a sporadic condition in the history of man. Prolonged settlement has a vertical axis of some ten thousand years, a drop in the ocean of evolutionary time. We are travellers from birth. Our mad obsession with technological progress is a response to barriers in the way of our geographical progress.
The few âprimitiveâ peoples in the forgotten comers of the earth understand this simple fact about our nature better than we do. They are perpetually mobile. The golden-brown babies of the Kalahari Bushmen hunters never cry and are among the most contented babies in the world. They also
Some American brain specialists took encephalograph readings of travellers. They found that changes of scenery and awareness of the passage of seasons through the year stimulated the rhythms of the brain, contributing to a sense of well-being and an active purpose in life. Monotonous surroundings and tedious regular activities wove patterns which produced fatigue, nervous disorders, apathy, self-disgust and violent reactions. Hardly surprising, then, that a generation cushioned from the cold by central heating, from the heat by air-conditioning, carted in aseptic transports from one identical house or hotel to another, should feel the need for journeys of mind or body, for pep pills or tranquillisers, or for the cathartic journeys of sex, music and dance. We spend far too much time in shuttered rooms.
I prefer the cosmopolitan scepticism of Montaigne. He saw travel as a âprofitable exercise; the mind is constantly stimulated by observing new and unknown things ... No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, however much opposed to my own ... The savages who roast and eat the bodies of their dead do not scandalise me so much as those who persecute the living.â Custom, he said, and set attitudes of mind, dulled the senses and hid the true nature of things. Man is naturally curious.
âHe who does not travel does not know the value of men,â said Ibân Battuta, the indefatigable Arab wanderer who strolled from Tangier to China and back for the sake of it. But travel does not merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind. Our early explorations are the raw materials of our intelligence, and, on the day I write this, I see that the NSPCC suggests that children penned up in âhigh-riseâ flats are in danger of retarded mental development. Why did nobody think of it before?
Children need paths to explore, to take bearings on the earth in which they live, as a navigator takes bearings on familiar landmarks. If we excavate the memories of childhood, we remember the paths first, things and people second â paths down the garden, the way to school, the way round the house, corridors through the bracken or long grass. Tracking the paths of animals was the first and most important element in the education of early man.
The raw materials of Proustâs imagination were the two walks round the town of Illiers where he spent his family holidays. These walks later became Méséglise and Guermantes Ways in à la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The hawthorn path that led to his uncleâs garden became a symbol of his lost innocence. âIt was on this wayâ, he wrote, âthat I first noticed the round shadow which apple trees cast on the sunlit groundâ, and later in life, drugged with caffeine and veronal, he dragged himself from his shuttered room on a rare excursion in a taxi, to see the apple trees in flower, the windows firmly shut for their smell would overpower his emotions. Evolution intended us to be travellers. Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been a sporadic condition in the history of man. Prolonged settlement has a vertical axis of some ten thousand years, a drop in the ocean of evolutionary time. We are travellers from birth. Our mad obsession with technological progress is a response to barriers in the way of our geographical progress.
The few âprimitiveâ peoples in the forgotten comers of the earth understand this simple fact about our nature better than we do. They are perpetually mobile. The golden-brown babies of the Kalahari Bushmen hunters never cry and are among the most contented babies in the world. They also
Similar Books
