More Gripes About Other People's Writing

As everyone knows, I had a problem with “Eat, Pray, Love.” I tell people I didn’t like Gilbert’s voice, but what really goaded me was her premise. To wit: that somehow, travel can be extrapolated into memoir.

The best bit of travel writing I ever read was this, culled off a B-grade MySpace page one depressing evening: “No matter how far we travel, we stay in the same place, unless we are willing to change.”

There is a part of me that refuses to accept that people who explore the world are doing anything other than exploring the far reaches of themselves. And perhaps travel is an impetus to change, but it’s probably even more the other way around. Feel free to take a walk on the wild side of your personality, but why should that be the wild side of the world? And then, what sublime foolishness to think that somehow, the little corner of your brain you’ve carved out and mapped is the world!

But most of all, it’s the well-wishers who peeve me. The “you must do x before you die”-ers, the Bucket List-ers, you know the type I mean. The ones who wear you down with the insidious suggestion that if you’ve never stood before the bleached face of the Taj Mahal in the waning light of the moon you’ve never known love or beauty, the ones who assume that if you’ve never rafted the roaring Mekong you’ve never known breathlessness or adventure.

Maybe I’m bitter, and a little jealous. The truth is that I started traveling to escape the world I knew, which I later realized was myself, which I later realized would never happen.

Here’s another excellent bit of advice I once got about travel, from my seventh grade English teacher: “you don’t have to leave your home to do it.” I believe this. For that assignment I read “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” which may be one of the best adventure novels of all time.

This, the inward travel, is both difficult to know and probably impossible to master. I know I’m not far along that path. I also know that I could never teach or preach the way to the trailhead to anyone else. And perhaps it’s true that other authors – the infamous and insufferable Elizabeth Gilbert, for one – acknowledge that they don’t know the whole truth either. But doesn’t the very act of writing a book suggest you should be listened to, that you feel you hold some perspective other people don’t? (For that matter, doesn’t a blog? Yes, ok, you may have me there…)

The point is, in adapting the world for our own enlightenment, don’t we leach it of its complexity? Isn’t that process abrasive and wrong? The great yogis of Hindu tradition achieved enlightenment without moving. They sat in the snowmelt, or under spindly trees, or in the middle of a cattle fair – wherever, really – and in the moment between closing and opening their eyes their brains managed to span the cosmos.

That would make for one hell of a travel memoir. The rest of us, I think, should stick to plain old travel writing.