Falling in Love With the World

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again--to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

For me, the first great joy of traveling is the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. In that regard, even a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet (in Beijing) or a scratchy revival showing of Wild Orchids (on the Champs-Elysees) can be both novelty and revelation: in China, after all, people will pay a whole week's wages to eat with Colonel Sanders, and in Paris, Mickey Rourke is regarded as the greatest actor since Jerry Lewis.

The sovereign freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. Indeed, the first lesson we learn on the road is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal.

We travel, then, in part to shake up our complacencies; to see all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom face at home. When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, when you stumble through the back-streets of Manila, your notions of the Internet and a "one world order" grow usefully revised. Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology.

And, of course, in the process, we get saved from abstraction ourselves. We see how much we can bring to the places we visit, and become a kind of carrier pigeon, transporting back and forth what every culture needs. I know that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California. But more significantly, we carry values and beliefs and news to the places we go. In many parts of the world, we become walking video screens and living newspapers, the only channels that can take people out of the censored limits of their homelands.

Travel unveils to us, in short, all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. In a truly foreign place, we travel to moods and states of mind, hidden inward passages that we seldom have cause to visit in the normal run of things. Though a teetotaler, who usually goes to bed at 9:00 p.m., when in Thailand I stay up till dawn in the local bars; in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.

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