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| note on travelling 8.28.02 | ||||||||||||
| One of the things I like about traveling is how the blurry white moon of time is telescoped into a focus it usually doesn't have.� You see the craters, colors, ridges and hills of your experience because you are traveling, planting important footsteps of experience never to be repeated.� To complete this silly little moon analogy, you are walking on time, rather than just under it, in the sleepy milky glow it usually exudes.� Every thing you do is loaded with significance because it is part of a narrative of travel, and you might remember it later, whenever you need the charm of foreign place names to alleviate some present dullness in your life.� The days become historic (with regard to your personal history, at least) so the documentation must be more complete than usual.� This general increase in mental absorption is parallel with the increase in the numbers of photographs taken.� Your mind and the camera see the traveled-through world as worthy of recording. | ||||||||||||
| Now that my travels are, for a while at least, over, and I'm swimming again in the relative redundancy of repeated days (this is a fancy way of saying I'm kind of bored), I've started to think about whether it might be possible to preserve the feeling of travel even staying at home in the town you?ve lived in most your life.� It is the intensity of travel that makes it so appealing, the variety of thought and action the road imposes.� But is the intensity a result of variety, of the variety a result of the intensity.� I mean, look long and closely enough at anything and you are bound to see things you didn't notice before: a foreign landscape hidden from you by scale rather than distance. | ||||||||||||
| So what would happen if the most ordinary experiences were processed mentally like a travelogue?� For instance:� August 28th: today I traveled in an automobile down 69 highway, noticing the open greenness of the scenery outside my car window, to a shopping complex where, despite the number of tourist attractions, I went into a bookstore.� Immediately I noticed the minute but distinguishable cultural differences between people who work at a bookstore and those that worked at the pet store I visited yesterday.� The accent and language of a man in a suit talking on a telephone struck me as particularly interesting... | ||||||||||||
| You get the idea.� To make the point even more clearly, the same technique could be applied without even leaving the house:� August 30th, today I decided to leave the kitchen at 9:20 AM and travel into the living room.� A whole new barrage of impressions and experiences awaited me.� The colors here are different, of course, and because there are more windows the light seems more cheerful than in the other room.� I didn?t have a chance to speak to many natives here, although my father did pass through a couple times from the library to the stairs leading down to the basement.� One of the most interesting facets of this room is a large orange and white cat that crawls over my knees when I sit on the couch.� So far culture shock from this new environment is minimal, but everything around me seems different from the world of the kitchen I was in before, and my bedroom before that.� Or even more:� August 30th, 8:25 AM:� I rolled over in bed, and the view lying on my left side rather than my right afforded me material for intense speculation, which I would never have had if not continually presented with the intense variety of experience, thanks to my travels from one position in my bed to another... | ||||||||||||
| Of course, eventually one could end up writing page after page of observations about the difference between a closed eye-lid and one that is open.� The conclusion, anyway, is that the style in which you process and record experience, rather than the experiences themselves, are paramount in keeping yourself entertained.� I'm glad I visited all the places I did, but the most valuable thing I've returned with from my two years or so in Europe is to see time, regardless of place, as well worth observing and recording. | ||||||||||||