On the joys of room-travel

How travel literature, during a lockdown, can teach us to rediscover the familiar spaces that we take for granted.




IF OUR lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes — then our travels. They express, however inarticulately,a number standing of what life might be about, outside the constraints of work and the struggle for survival,” writes Alain De Botton in The Art of Travel(2002).

Yet, as a beleaguered world tries to overcome a pandemic, cooped up at home in a city under lockdown, if there’s anything one is certain of it is that travel will never be the same again. Now, with families spread across continents, ageing parents on their own in cities where one cannot reach at will, the distance one had taken for granted seems yawning. How does one learn to live with something one has no control over? Or, reconcile oneself to a world spinning uncontrollably into the unfamiliar and uncertain territory?

“We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty,” writes Pico Iyer, in Autumn Light: SeasonofFireandFarewells (2019), a meditation on the reassuring comfort of familiar routines and how death reminds us to take nothing for granted. “Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light with in that truth,”he continues. Sometimes,the answer can lie where we seldom choose to look. Away from the exotic, and amid the scatter of our everyday lives, in the depths of our homes. It’s a space where we return daily to recuperate but which, given the frenetic pace of our lives, is the one place where we linger the least.

Over the last few weeks, people have, even amid the gloom and panic, remarked upon the stillness of their days, recorded their pleasure in registering bird calls that suddenly seem louder, more remarkable in cities that are choked with pollution for a greater part of the year. Home is central to who we are, be it the cities that we carry with in our migrant souls or the spaces that we in habit currently, that we mould to represent best who we are as a people. For the middle class, reliant often exclusively on the services of others to keep their homes running, this crisis and necessary confinement, could, perhaps, afford a moment for introspection, on how dependent we are on the kindness of those less fortunate than us, and, to whom we are often not grateful enough.

In his At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010),Bill Bryson writes, “…it occurred to me, with the forcefulness of a thought
experienced in 360 degrees,that that’s really what history mostly is: masses of people doing ordinary things.Even Einste in will
have spent large parts of his life thinking about his holidays or new hammock or how dainty was the ankle of the young lady alighting from the tram across the street. These are the sort of things that fill our lives and thoughts, and yet we treat them as incidental and hardly worthy of serious considerations.”

DeBottonspeaks of XavierdeMaistre, a Frenchman, who introduced a mode of travel in 1790, that has never been extolled
in history — “room-travel” — in The Art of Travel. Maistre called his account, Journey Around My Bedroom, recommending it, not as a means to underplay the heroism of those men who went on voyages into the unknown,but for those,who were, perhaps,
bereft of the means to undertake such a journey. “Millionsofpeoplewho,before me, had never dared to travel, others who had
not been able to travel and still more who had not even thought of travelling will now be able to follow my example,” Botton quotesMaistre in the book.

Amodern-day equivalent to this would, perhaps, be something that all great travel writers advocate — mindfulness — or an ability to fully focus on the present, and, to be able to, therefore, let go of our hubris and deliberate on the joys that such slowing down begets, despite the inconveniences one may encounter along the way. DeBotton calls this ability to approach a place with humility, the“travelling mind set”; it is the potential of “being alive to the layers of history beneath the present”, remembering it for posterity, for tomorrow is a new country.

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