Unit 6
Being There
Anatole Broyard
1. 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.
2. 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 e what has been saved, defended against time.
3. When we travel, we put aside our defens, our anxiety, and invite regression. We go backward instead of forward. We cultivate our hysteria.
4. It is our best lves that travel, just as we dress in our best clothes. Only our passport r
棒组词eminds us how ordinary we actually are. We go abroad to meet our foreign persona, that thrilling stranger born on the plane. We’re going to e 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.
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5. There’s an impostor in each of us — why el would we put on dark glass and try to speak and look like the natives of another place? At home, we impersonate ourlves; 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 arch of rootlessness.
6. Traveling began when men grew curious. The influence of the church, the traditional pattern of life, the lack of money and leisure had all restrained curiosity until the venteenth century, when under pressure of scientific discoveries, the physical world began to gape open. It was then that people began to travel in arch of the profane.
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令加瓦7. Travel arrived together with sophistication, with the ability to e through or beyond one’s own culture, with the modern faculty of boredom. Something of the Crusades survives in the modern traveler — only this is a personal crusade, an impul to go off and fight certain obscure battles of his own spirit.
8. Of cour, 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.
9. 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 dingagement, of irresponsible free association. One is an onlooker, impregnable.
10. We travel in summer, when life comes out of doors, and so we e 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 hist
ory.
11. And language — what a pleasure to leave our own language, with its clichés stuck in our teeth. How much better things sound in another tongue! It’s like having our ears cleaned out. So long as we don’t understand it too well, every other language is poetry.鹧鸪天范成大
尽字开头的成语12. Becau we travel for so many reasons — some of them contradictory — travel writing is like a suitca into which the writer tries to cram everything. At its most interesting, it’s a continual tasting, the expression of a nostalgia for the particular. It’s a childish game of playing countries, as we ud to play hou.
13. Travel writing describes a tragic arc: it begins with a rising of the spirit and ends in a dying fall. The earliest travelers went to e marvels, to admire the wonderful diversity of the world — but the latest travelers are like visitors sitting at the bedside of dying cultures. Early travelers fell in love at first sight with foreign places — but now we know only love at last sight, a kiss before dying, a breathing in of the last gasp. In some ancient societies, it ud to be the custom for the son to inhale his father’s last breath, which cont
ained his departing soul, and today’s travelers do something like this, too.
回忆歌曲
14. Travel writing has become a quintesntially modern thing, the prent regretting the past. We travel like insurance apprairs, asssing the damage. Militantly oppod to any kind of ethnic distinctions at home, we adore ethnicity abroad. Ironically, Americans need Europe more than Europeans do. To Parisians, for example, Paris is a place to live; for Americans, it’s a place to dream.
15. “I do not expect to e many travel books in the near future,” Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1946. He saw the world turning into a “monoculture,” the n of place giving way to placelessness. What Waugh didn’t foree was that travel books would change as novels and poetry have, that every slippage of culture would provoke its peculiar literature. He underestimated the variousness of our reasons for traveling.
