Travelling in time

On the temporal nature of modern travel

I have in memory an interview with Nicolas Bouvier, one I stumbled upon by chance during a sleepless night. Filmed just a few years before his passing, he spoke freely about his journey as both traveler and writer, his approach to places and to others. One phrase, in the midst of a conversation about Japan, where he lived for several years, particularly struck me. I will try and transcribe it here: 'I’ve seen caravans of tourists in temples, ladies with blue hair and eccentric glasses, spending two weeks in the country and furious that they weren’t handed the soul of Japan. But there is no soul of Japan, that’s nonsense! There is a Japanese culture, a mentality, a sensitivity very different from our own, but by no means incomprehensible. It’s simply a matter of time.”

Let us linger for a moment on this: It’s just a matter of time.

I have often reflected on the temporal nature of modern travel. There remain a few travellers who take the slow paths of yesterday’s adventurers, crossing continents over the course of months, at the whim of trains and country roads. But for most of us, our perception of time has gradually shifted, both in life and on the road. In truth, the time granted to us in life has not changed. But we have lost the taste for idleness, for days that drift by with nothing happening, for silent contemplation, for patience. In La Vie intense : une obsession, Tristan Garcia explores our modern relationship with time and how our lives have been sped up by technology and globalization. The contemporary ideal now validates its existence through intensity and efficiency: doing more, faster. But this frenetic race toward novelty, this insatiable hunger for quickly digested knowledge and experiences, leaves us, in the end, depleted, and robs us of the time necessary to let things truly take root within us.

These tendencies persist when we set foot in foreign lands. Everywhere I see guides and articles with enticing titles: 'Rome in two days,' 'Ten days in Japan' 'Berlin – The must-sees.' Lists of places to visit, boxes to tick, ready-made itineraries for those who will proudly say at the next family Christmas: 'I have done Japan.' In our attempts to maximize every experience, we alter their depth. Swept along by these vast currents of air, we pass through places, and everything simply slips away.

I am a product of my time; I, too, have travelled the globe, made these vast waiting rooms of stations and airports my own, calculated countless itineraries. Yet gradually, almost unconsciously, I began to forsake the must-see attractions and tourist sites, choosing instead to spend my days among seemingly ordinary residential neighbourhoods and forgotten villages. Not once did I feel that this time spent in the everyday had robbed me of anything, or that it had been wasted.

These lines should serve as an invitation to embrace slowness, to reconsider the concept of time while traveling. A time not bound to the actual length of our stay in any given place, but to that inner, intimate clock that gradually loosens within us, creating the space needed for wandering—the only way to truly look and see what is not overtly shown. Once this new rhythm is found, each day, each journey becomes part of a continuum of experiences, inevitably and endlessly drawing us back to lands we have already traversed. In this way, those three weeks spent in Japan do not stand as a separate span of time, closing in on themselves once the return flight is taken, but rather mark the first step in a long series, making us ever more attuned to the multitude of small, accumulated details that together form the true knowledge of a place.

Of the jungle or the taiga, I have seen little. Of the desert and the steppe, only a glimpse. And the far north remains for me a collection of scattered memories. Even of my own country, and its wild corners, I know almost nothing. Perhaps an entire lifetime, and a whole book, should be devoted to that. It would be tempting to rush from place to place, in search of new images to pin to my wall like postcards. But I feel I would lose myself in that pursuit, in this exoticism devoid of substance.

No, I believe what I must do, in the future, is return again and again to those already-seen lands that left their mark on me, and that, over time, may reveal their true nature.

References

• Nicolas Bouvier, entrevue “plans fixes”, 1996

• Nicolas Bouvier, le vide et le plein, 1964-1970

• Tristan Garcia, la vie intense: une obsession moderne, 2016