From China to Peru: A Memoir of Travel

Preface

preface This book is personal memoir as well as an account of travel. Each chapter opens with a bit of autobiography, segueing into the travel piece that follows.What I say of myself isn’t freestanding but ties one chapter to another, and the essays on travel have more than the unity of what comes next.Taken as a whole, they offer a reading of what we are like, gathered from observation of the world we live in. In each chapter time moves between present and past. I begin in the present but return to the past, creating a multilayered account of place and history.As in my earlier book TheThree Romes, I am writing nonfiction stories.Though they don’t have a moral, they have an intention, describing the psychology that moves us.All the fact is true, reflecting firsthand experience, but the experience is filtered through characters, including the speaker. I watch what happens when the characters meet the experience and draw conclusions from the way they react. The quotation I lead off with, from Dr. Johnson, suggests that observation , as wide-ranging as possible, comes first. But I haven’t gone around the world “to count the cats in Zanzibar,” and I aim to throw a little light on the places I’ve traveled to, including their mysterious soul. Seeing the world up close isn’t guaranteed to make the heart beat faster. So much humdrum goes with traveling that I’ve wondered more than once why I ever left home.To remind me where I’ve been, I take notes and keep a record of my itinerary. But a skeptical voice whispers in my ear, wanting to know if the jottings in my notebook and the lines on my map add up to a meaningful pattern.When I sit down to write,this question is before me. Travel writers for the Sunday paper find a pattern in their daily routine : for example,“I breakfasted this morning on the Boul’ Mich, wrote a few postcards, and took the Metro to the Luxembourg Gardens.” I have a garden in my own backyard, and to justify the expense of spirit that goes x preface into traveling, not to mention the out-of-pocket expenses, I want a pattern with more to it than that. But even the daily round has a shape beneath the surface, though detecting it isn’t easy.While the frothy stuff on the surface bobs along the stream of time, things of worth sink to the bottom .Thereabouts I take up my position. I was a lot younger when I began to travel. Things I did then are beyond me today. I no longer aspire to ski the Mont Blanc, and I use a jigger to measure my drinks. I thought it important to see the Antarctic— and don’t mind that it’s safely in the past tense. But though the face I show the world is craggier than it was, the places I write about are preserved in memory, where neither moth nor rust can get at them. In this respect the written word beats the life every time. Many friends and acquaintance bore a part in making this book. I single out George Core, without whom nothing would have got done, and the late Staige Blackford, a model editor, always helpful, never obtrusive. Most of the pieces brought together here appeared first in the Virginia Quarterly Review under his editorship. Annie Dillard included one in her Best American Essays 1988, one comes from the Michigan Quarterly, another from the Iowa Review. My thanks to the editors of these publications. All the pieces I reprint have been revised, but I haven’t sought to update them. Khomeini and the cold war were still going strong when I went to the Gulf, and in my time in Peru the Shining Path terrorists were threatening to take over the country.The Saudi Arabia today’s papers are full of is and isn’t the one I describe.Al-Qaida hadn’t yet been heard from, but the enmity between Jew and Arab was already an old story, like their enduring sameness. Instead of keeping abreast of current events, my book aims at detecting what was true yesterday and is likely to remain true tomorrow. Though it seems to tell of a man traveling alone, in fact I had company, my wife. She was the director on top of the flies who got me...