towards what?
on travel, motion and being
Dear reader,
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I’m writing this on the Eurostar, returning to London after a week in the French Alps. My husband is sat with our baby—who has been wide awake since we boarded at Moûtiers four hours ago. Across the aisle, our friends sit with their own child. Unlike my daughter, she is asleep, oblivious to the fact that she is hurtling through an underwater tunnel 246ft below ground.
This is a chartered train, put on especially for customers of a particular ski company. It feels strange to be on a mode of transport where everyone has shared a near-identical experience for the past week. Walking up and down the carriages with our baby I have counted more people nursing broken limbs than I have seen people of colour. On the table up from ours, a group of university friends wearing the same university hoodie play forecast whist; in the next carriage, a middle-aged man reads a well thumbed copy of Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain.
We, the people on this train, are travelling together, moving from one place to another. The majority of us have spent the preceding days trying to move faster and more efficiently from the top to the bottom of a mountain. To varying degrees, it is an experience that people claim to enjoy and continue to seek out. Why? Why do we travel; by foot, ski or train?
For answers, let’s start with the aforementioned doyenne of nature and travel writing, Anna (Nan) Shepherd (1893-1981). The Scottish lecturer and writer travelled throughout the world, but is best known for writing about her beloved Cairngorm mountains, which she traversed ‘by dawn, day, dusk and night.’ Her preference was to walk by foot, believing that the sustained rhythm of movement induces a ‘sense of physical wellbeing’ which cannot be ‘captured by any mechanical mode of ascent.’ She describes her motive for such a lifestyle as the search for ‘sensuous gratification - the sensation of height, the sensation of movement, the sensation of speed … the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes. The pride of life.’ Reading her writing, it’s clear that she craved these sensory experiences, that they were what made her feel most alive. She describes how on one occasion:
a brilliant sun spangled the snow and the precipices of Ben a’ Bhuird hung bright rose-red above us.
How crisp, how bright a world! But, except for the crunch of our boots on the snow, how silent.
As we are getting our boots fitted shortly after arriving in Les Allues, the British member of staff says that we ‘must do the Jerusalem run’. The next day we follow his suggestion and enjoy breathtaking views across the three valleys afforded by the high-altitude piste. There is a sense that we have ‘earned’ our access to these views, despite our reliance on ski lifts. (Sorry, Nan).
So we travel and seek out motion because it enables us to experience the world at it’s most beautiful, it feeds our senses and restores our sense of wellbeing. This perspective definitely chimes with the effusive accounts offered by my fellow travellers. Out for dinner one evening I overhear men on the adjacent table boasting about the high speeds they’ve achieved over the course of their day. It was incredible! they brag.
In her novel Flights, the Polish author Olga Torkarczuk also meditates on this collective desire to be in motion. During a chapter set in an airport, a young women gives a lecture on travel psychology—the study of people in transit. ‘If we wish to catalogue humankind in a convincing way’ she opines to a disinterested crowd, ‘we can only do so by placing people in some sort of motion, moving from one place towards another.’
It’s a bold, and seemingly somewhat random claim. As the lecture progresses the woman expands a little on why she believes this to be true, arguing that a
fundamental concept in travel psychology is desire, which is what lends movement and direction to human beings as well as arousing in them an inclination towards something … By no means is it possible to ever actually attain a given destination, nor, in so doing, appease desire. This process of striving is best encapsulated in the preposition “towards”. Towards what?
There is a subtle shift in focus here. It is desire itself, not sensuous gratification which provides the rationale for why humans travel. This speaks to me, perhaps a little more sharply than Nan’s rapturous delight in sensory experiences. My experience of childbirth has blunted my cravings for sensory overwhelm.
No, as a new mother, I wanted to come on this trip because it represented something pre-natal. My desire was to engage in an activity with friends that I had done before I had a child, to experience the freedom of movement—the freedom—that occurs when you entomb your feet in plastic and attach two slicked pieces of wood to them. Perhaps what I sought was an experience which created a physical separation from my child, to whom I have been conjoined for the past eighteen months.
The lecturer in Tokarczuk’s Flights goes on to explain that people travel because we hope that by ‘moving around in a chaotic fashion’ we will satisfy our desire. We will find our ‘great love, happiness, a winning lottery ticket or the revelation of the mystery everyone’s been killing themselves over in vain for all these years’.
By the third day of the trip I noticed I was starting to feel a little dizzy. It must be this fresh alpine air! I mused, as I came back to look after the two babies at lunch. Within three hours I was doubled over on the couch experiencing vertigo, one of several symptoms that indicated I was experiencing the withdrawal effects of not taking my anti-depressants. I had left them at home.
My desire was to come on this trip and be normal again. To return to my pre-natal state, in which I wasn’t suffering from the lingering effects of post-natal depression. I wanted to experience the happiness that Tokarczuk speaks of, and was willing to suspend my common sense—and sacrifice my health—in order to achieve it. By travelling to another place and climbing to the top of a mountain, some part of me thought I would accomplish my goal.
In the final pages of The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd changes her mind. As she grew older, she explained, she began to understand that
the journey is itself part of the technique by which the God is sought …
For an hour I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy, that leap out of the self that makes man like a god. I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am.
Here, Shepherd describes what it means to travel as the whole self.
To travel, to be in motion, is to remind ourselves of our humanness, of our being. Perhaps it is also an opportunity to find out what parts of ourself we want to leave behind, and to invite that seemingly inadequate or incomplete part to journey with us.
THE BEST WRITING ABOUT TRAVEL
Forget Bill Bryson. Add these to your TBR stack and you’ll soon find yourself lost in the American midwest with Joanna Pocock, or on a bus in Nigeria with Emmanuel Iduma. (n.b. I receive a small commission from Bookshop.org for any books purchased through these affiliate links.)
FLIGHTS by Olga Tokarczuk
THE LIVING MOUNTAIN by Nan Shepherd
I AM STILL WITH YOU by Emmanuel Iduma
SURRENDER by Joanna Pocock
I’M GETTING DISTRACTED BY
PAIGE WASSEL - I adore this woman and her straight-talking advice on interiors (just because you saw it on Tiktok doesn’t mean you should paint that arch wall).
MAYBE BABY - Hayley Nahman, formerly of Man Repeller fame, is writing one of the best Substacks on the internet. For fans of irreverent humour, Jia Tolentino, etc.
EVA GREEN’S TRIAL - The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage nails why we are still obsessed with Vesper.
If you enjoyed today’s edition of The MURMURATION then please recommend it to your friends!
Take care,
Grace