A final note about my recent reading of Tristram Shandy before I move on to other works I've read.
If you read the Wikipedia article on the novel, or any description of it for that matter, you'll learn that although it purports to be a story of the narrator's life, the narrator spends very little of the hundreds of pages in discussing his own trajectory through time and space. Mostly he talks about other people's experiences in a very nonlinear, almost chaotic, fashion.
The exception, as these articles points on, comes near the end of the book when the narrator spends a series of about a dozen chapters discussing his travels in France. Here the book takes on an almost conventional form, as we follow him across the English Channel, through Picardy to Paris, down to Lyon and then cutting across Gascony.
We are treated in scrumptious linear detail to the narrator's difficulties in trying to arrange transportation down the Rhone from Lyon, and later to his joy in fantasizing about living among the peasants and taking a local wife in a small rural town. Then, in the midst of this immersion, his narrative eventually drops off in southern France and at some point later he is back in England without any mention of how he got back.
Besides the fact that his aforementioned travel difficulties seemed so very familiar to me from my own experiences vagabonding around Europe and Asia with a backpack, even two centuries, later, there arose a deeper familiarity with these chapters that comes from the fact that their linearity and clarity of narrative stands so much in stark opposition to the rest of the book.
It struck me that it is an example of how travel experiences clarify memory. There are times of my life when I was living in one place, doing nearly the same thing for months and even years on end. My memory of those times is indeed very nonlinear. I can't tell you what I did at any given time during that stretch. I have a jumbled bag of memories in no particular order, attached to people and places.
But during my travels, ah that is very different. Even three decades later, I can tell you what I did almost every day during the three months I spend in Europe in the summer of 1985, from the Isle of Skye to Izmir. I can tell you where I stayed, and the people I met. It's all burned into my brain still, and in sequential order. Give me a date during the summer of 1985, or 1990, or 1992*, and I can tell you exactly where I was, and what I was doing. For certain other years I might not being to do the same even to save my life.
Even the fact that Shandy's narrative of his travels in France seems to end right in the midst of the most intense part of his voyage, dancing with the young woman in the village, felt very familiar.
Among my stored possessions are several travel journals I recorded during my first set of travels to Europe in the Eighties and early Nineties. In looking through them (something I have not done since I wrote them) one would find that they are kept rather meticulously for the first phases of the trip, but that at some point, typically after a couple months, the writing drops off to become less frequent, and with shorter entries written in hasty hand, until at last the narrative ends altogether before the end of the voyage is recorded, as if leaving me in some faraway place from which I never returned.
This used to bother me, the fact that I did not complete these journals in the way I started them, but at some point I came to peace with it and realized it was the way things had to be. If your travels are truly vibrant, then at some point, when you are long past that initial chaotic phase of amusing adversity in arranging tickets and finding lodging, one finds oneself so deeply embedded in the moment, so far outside one's realm of ordinary experience, that putting it all down in words, at least in that moment, becomes nearly impossible. All the time one would spend writing that down at the end of the day feels like cheating oneself out of precious moments that could be used to absorb one's surrounding, and the fellowship of one's companions at that instant. The discipline to do so becomes impossible because it feels counterproductive.
In other words, the drop off is a sign of success.
*These are by no means the only times of intense travel memory, but they are the times I kept the kind of travel journal I mentioned. This blog is an example of doing the same thing in online form. I have often neglected it during the times it might be most useful to follow, for example during the fall of 2014 during our trip through Europe that started in Iceland. In the end, online composition cannot be compared to the paper-and-ink version in any case.
No comments:
Post a Comment