Chapter 182: Places Read, Places Traveled

A series of winding roads through the mountains descended into a canyon, with a river running along its bottom. Once there, my friend got out of the car and made his way to the riverbank. Before swimming across, he explained that it wasn’t just a waterway, but a border, separating Bosnia on one side and Serbia on the other. This was the third time he had found his way to the Drina River. The second time, he had spent four days by the water he would now traverse. The first had occurred at a remove of 6,540 miles, if you were to draw an impossible straight line from his hometown to this place. He had been reading Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina, sometime before moving countries, and glimpsed it, ever so far away. Needless to add, crossing proved less strenuous in the novel, but the fact that the experiences converged mattered; neither was quite the same without the other.

Some may prefer to read up on what they have already seen; others favor it as a prelude or preparation. On occasions, reading will kindle the desire for a certain destination. Whether research, a companion to travel, or a pilgrimage, the intersection of place and page can be enriching and tell us how and why we read.

If Andrić was born on the Bosnian side of the Drina, it was an author from the opposite shore who made a novel out of that desire to read oneself into the landscape. At the heart of Goran Petrović’s At the Lucky Hand is that ideal any reader will recognize, of being able to enter the text and wander, to sidestep the narrative for a moment and linger. Or, as happens in the book, to fall in love within a beloved landscape, in escapades along the byways of descriptions.

Petrović plays on the emotions kindled by reading about a place, where we vicariously feel something, and partake in an experience we wish to recreate after we close the cover. If his character’s visits to these emotional landscapes are a fiction, its search in reality is the sort of thing romanticism made a specialty of. Poets throughout the centuries have declaimed their feelings for the sceneries that tugged at their heartstrings, whether it is Robert Burns telling us “My heart is in the Highlands,” or Blaise Cendrars lamenting, “Patagonia is the only place left that suits my immense sadness.”

If you need to add a pinch of salt to that, you can always rely on Janet Malcolm's sharpness. Ever the brilliant deflator of illusions, she offers a counterpoint to these idyllic premises in Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey. The writer dutifully follows in the footsteps of Anton Chekhov’s fiction and makes her way to the scenery of one of his most memorable short stories. The landmark, it turns out, pales in comparison. Great literary settings can also be tacky.

“A quarter of a mile away a driver named Yevgeny waits in his car at the entrance of the footpath leading to the lookout point where Gurov and Anna sat, not yet aware of the great love that lay before them. I am a character in a new drama: the absurdist farce of the literary pilgrim who leaves the magical pages of a work of genius and travels to an ‘original scene’ that can only fall short of his expectations,” she writes.

But writing and reading about a place can possess many more nuances than fictional dreams and poetic flights or the sobering realities that are their flipside. Nonfiction in particular can capture, record, and preserve through words. J.A. Baker only ever wrote about a sliver of land in Essex, about its nature and seasons, and in particular the peregrine falcons that dwelled there and fascinated him. Yet even as he minutely sets down streams, fields, and trees with enthralled precision (he famously compressed 1,600 manuscript pages into the 60,000 words of The Peregrine), Baker is not being poetic for the sake of it. If anything, his obsession is to evoke as perfectly as he can a landscape he loves and knows is doomed to change.

“Before it is too late, I have tried to recapture the extraordinary beauty of this bird and to convey the wonder of the land he lived in, a land to me as profuse and glorious as Africa. It is a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.”

Baker, within the narrow confines of his interests, does what great travel writers do: He lends us his eyes and shares a memorable vision. He achieves a sense of place. That elusive quality can be anchored in the most humble elements, in those telling details and snapshots that capture and show, without the need to tell. As the great wanderer Nicolas Bouvier wrote, “The traveler is a continual source of perplexity. His place is everywhere and nowhere. He lives on stolen moments, reflections, small gifts, windfalls, and crumbs.”

From this whirlwind of experience, the writer bottles the minute and fleeting, the subjective in every travel. If details are one anchor, there is all the more merit in capturing something evanescent. To not only portray the colors or the topography, but also to seek to capture the “soul” of a place. Few are better at this than Jan Morris, for instance, in Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. As she entwines her varied life with the vagaries of the city’s history, the mirrored images result in portraits that are all the more convincing because there is something at stake. Places for Morris are not interchangeable, nor is the place they occupy within her.

Among Morris’s greatest journeys is that of her identity, reflected in this book. It is her homage to a liminal, intermittent place where several worlds have coexisted. The kind of city whose streets Joyce could wander while writing Ulysses, reconstructing every tiny detail of Dublin on the shores of the Adriatic. A city in flux, between countries, languages, and nationalities, which Morris first discovered at the end of the Second World War, when still called James Morris, a young British soldier struggling to find a place in the world and in a body. Writing this book, half a century later, Jan Morris doesn’t focus solely on the outward changes – to what nation Trieste belongs to over time – but on the constants. What drew her to that port hasn’t changed; she returns to find and inhabit the same sensitivity.

“I cannot always see Trieste in my mind's eye. Who can? It is not one of your iconic cities, instantly visible in the memory or the imagination. It offers no unforgettable landmark, no universally familiar melody, no unmistakable cuisine, hardly a single native name that everyone knows…There are moments in my life, nevertheless, when a suggestion of Trieste is summoned so exactly into my consciousness that wherever I am, I feel myself transported there. The sensation is rather like those arcane moments of hush that sometimes interrupt a perfectly ordinary conversation, and are said to signify the passing of an angel...For me they often signal Trieste. Ever since l arrived there as a young soldier at the end of the second world war, this city has curiously haunted me. Whatever has happened to Trieste, however much it changes, however often I go there, for more than half a century the feelings it stirs in me have remained the same, and in those moments of sudden stillness I am not simply re-visiting the place, I am reexamining myself too.”

Morris’s Trieste is hers alone, and we cannot fully partake in her half-century of longing. Each journey has its features and shouldn’t merely mimic. And yet, in between the moments of a visit, her writing informs the gaze, guides the steps, adds weight to the monuments, and makes us recognize a dialect we’ve never heard. In the transit from reading to traveling, the mark left by the words can make you think of palimpsest, those manuscript pages, of parchment or vellum, where successive texts cohabit in layers. The old text is faint, scraped, and faded. Still, you cannot avoid intuiting it under the fresh letters. The impression remains and enriches what we bring to a place.

There’s one last valuable lesson I learned from having visited a place, held a tenuous opinion, and read about it afterward. To come full circle, it was another border at times outlined by a river, called the Rio Grande, in maps in the North, and Río Bravo in those of the South. Whatever you choose to call it, between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, it is mere water encased in cement, running under a border crossing ever heavier with meaning. You can make all sorts of assumptions about a place as ubiquitous in the news cycle as it is absent from our understanding. Then I spoke to Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River, a memoir that changed how I thought about that landscape. This is what he told me then:

“The border was always a presence from my very first memories. In a way, I think that the border itself, meaning the actual line in the sand, the actual river, the actual place where there’s a fence or a wall, or a gate, or a bridge, or a door, that place almost plays an outsized role in the American imagination. It takes up maybe an undue amount of space in our political rhetoric.

“Most people who have spent time on the border or studied the border, or lived or passed through the border, come to think of the border as a much bigger zone: It’s an entire landscape, it’s an entire culture, it’s an entire middle space between these two countries, and I think that by focusing only on the line we narrow our vision to this place of intense debate and combat and violence. When we only focus on that, we lose sight that the border is also where our two cultures interact in a beautiful and healthy way, and I think we also lose track of what’s beautiful about this place also as a landscape. The rhetoric of militarization defines this place, and then it starts to imprint itself onto the lives of people there. Because the rhetoric manifests, the border manifests, the violence manifests. But the border is a living thing.

“My first access point to that was having a mother who taught me to appreciate the desert landscape. Our dominant culture in this country understands deserts as a wasteland, as this sort of disposable terrain, or as a terrain that we move through on the way to somewhere else, or as a terrain that’s hostile to our presence. In our cultural understanding, the desert is an unfriendly landscape, a violent landscape. But I grew up having that reversed for me as a child, and so I was taught to understand the landscape as this place of beauty, as a perfectly functioning ecosystem that had everything it needed for life and to sustain it.”

Places read and places traveled accumulate over time, and continue to change with experience. Each is a fraction of the ongoing genealogy of where we’ve been or dreamt of going, some of it faded and some indelible, leaving a strata of sorts. I wouldn’t know what the sum of those landscapes would look like. A possible answer might be found in Dreamtigers, written by Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote these words years after he had gone blind:

“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”

The Drine River

* * *

If you have a question, a problem in your work, if you are feeling lost, stuck, confused, at sea, searching, grappling, or baffled, email me at Michaelshapiro808@gmail.com and tell me what you’re confronting and what help you need.

It is seldom, if ever, the case that one student’s problem or question is their’s alone.

Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous, have your name or just first name included. I will include the question and then answer it as best I can.

* * *

Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture