Andy Clark - Being There 汉译

Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men a centrifugal tendency. In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> 

Only while traveling can we appreciate age. At home, for Americans at least, everything must be young, new, but when we go abroad we are interested only in the old. We want to see what has been saved, defended against time. 

When we travel, we put aside our defenses, our anxiety, and invite regression. We go backward instead of forward. We cultivate our hysteria. 

It is our best selves that travel, just as we dress in our best clothes. Only our passport reminds us how ordinary we actually are. We go abroad to meet our foreign persona, that thrilling stranger born on the plane. We are going to see in Europe everything we have eliminated or edited out of our own culture in the name of convenience: religion, royalty, picturesqueness, otherness and passion. We cling to the belief that other peoples are more passionate than we are. 

There’s an imposter in each of us—why else we put on dark glasses and try to speak and look like the natives of another place? At home, we impersonate ourselves; when we’re abroad, we can try to be what we’ve always wanted to be. In spite of all the recent talk about roots, many of us are tired of our roots, which may be shallow anyway, and so we travel in search of rootlessness. 

Traveling began when man grew curious. The influence of the church, the traditional pattern of life, the lack of money and leisure had all restrained curiosity until the seventeenth century, when under pressure of scientific discoveries, the physical world began to gape open. It was then that people began to travel in search of the profane.

 Travel arrived together with sophistication, with the ability to see through or beyond one’s own culture, with the modern faculty of boredom. Something of the Crusades survives in the modern traveler—only his is a personal crusade, an impulse to go off and fight certain obscure battles of his own spirit. 

Of course, one of the most common reasons for traveling is simply to get away. Freud said that we travel to escape father and the family, and we might add the familiar. There is a recurrent desire to drop our lives, to simply walk out of them. 

When we travel, we are on vacation—vacant, waiting to be filled. The frenzied shopping of some travelers is an attempt to buy a new life. To get away to a strange place produces a luxurious feeling of disengagement, of irresponsible free association. One is an onlooker, impregnable. 

We travel in summer, when life comes out of doors, and so we see only summery people, nothing of their sad falls, their long, dark winters and cruel springs. The places we visit are gold-plated by the sun. The flowers and trees are like bouquets thrown to history.