Evening has arrived on the river.
The reflections of the domes break up in the swirling water.
The air fills with the scent of faded flowers.
A lotus kisses the surface of a pond.
A traveler stops at a shop and orders some tea.
The wind blows through the branches where the kites screech.
Clouds rise like citadels north of the city. The sky has spread its evening sheets.
The minarets touch the belly of the cumulus clouds.
The man says that is the clouds were ticklish, it would rain more often. The steam from the tea rises skyward, and the man remembers that in ancient times, the smoke from sacrifices pleased the gods. he pulls on his narghile, and Baudelaire's verses appear in the smoky languor of the hookah. The traveler notices that he has not moved for two hours. He had not thought about tomorrow, has not delved through his memories. He welcomes the peace of the evening. Standing still on the treshold of himself, he feels the pure joy of existence flow through him.
All travelers are Monsieu Jourdain, accidental philosophers. The Greek, Epicurean and Stoic schools of thought confirmed this: philosophizing means learning how to live. And living means means going deep inside to know oneself, accept what is happening. And understand that the senses are windows. What matters is opening them. Only then can we watch with passion the scene of the sun setting over the banks of a river.
Travel is about conquering the essential. In his Travel Diary, the old Keyserling wrote that "the shortest path to oneself first leads around the world." What is the essential? It is not missing our rendez-vous with ourselves, with time, with space, with others. We are often out of touch with these things. We run after time, we are indifferent to landscape, we don't have time for others, we balk over exploring ourselves. Traveling is a way of improving ourselves.
When traveling, we scrub body and soul. We use the world, its strangeness, its beauties, like sandpaper. Movement transforms vagabond souls. If we travel to confirm that the world looks like what we imagined, and we return the same as when we left, why bother even packing? We have to take the plunge.
Traveling inspires. Problems evaporate and thoughts flood in. When we are looking for an idea, don't we get up and pace about? What is true in an office is true in the big wide world. Nietzsche called Flaubert a nihilist, criticising him for never leaving his armchair. Hulls clinging to rocks do not know the virtue of travel.
Along the way, we discover that freedom does not mean conquering distances but being master of one's time. Have you ever woken up with the prospect of an entire day without nothing to do? These are the hours, the twenty-four white flowers, open. And you, free as air, free as time. Time expands: once back, it seems as though you have lived an entire life. When traveling, the insignificant is everything. Robert Paragot, a mountain climber in the 1960's, could stand motionless on his metal piton observing lichen-covered granite crystals. He saw entire worlds within them. "True philosophy," declared Merleau-Ponty at the Collège de France, "is relearning how to look at the world." If Merleau-Ponty had been a climber, he would have scrutinized the feldspar on the rock walls.
When traveling, we welcome silence. Suddenly your soul rises to the surface (some call it "goosebumps"), then escapes through a train window, a plane window, a car. We look at the sky, the edge of a forest, we are thinking of nothing, finally able to silence the inner hubbub, "the eternal impulse to speak," which Barthes complained about. We become what we are observing. We are ready for the oceanic feeling of belonging in the world. Medieval alchemists used a lovely word in their laboratories. They spoke of "essentializing" a material to extract its vital principal. Travel is a fact that essentializes us.
Who said "to leave is to die a little"? Leaving is living a lot.
