A Journey Around My Room

Traveling

LIN YUTANG WAS a constant traveler. In The Importance of Living, he bemoaned the fact that traveling had once been a pleasure but now had become an industry. The problem was that people didn’t really travel anymore. What they did was “false” travel.

According to Lin, there are three types of false travel. The first is to journey abroad with the idea of traveling to improve one’s mind; Lin was of the belief that it’s actually quite difficult to improve your mind. He ripped into “the institution of tourist guides, the most intolerable chattering kind of interfering busybodies” he could imagine. He wasn’t particularly interested in who did what when, and couldn’t understand why adults would subject themselves to being herded about and lectured at like schoolchildren. He was also dubious about the quality of information that most guides provide.

For Lin, the second type of false travel is to travel “for conversation.” That is, taking a trip so that you can bore your friends with stories of it afterward. The American humorist Robert Benchley, who wrote for The New Yorker from the mid-1920s until the 1940s, was also irked by this habit and had a great method for disarming it, based on the assumption that “very few travelers know anything more about the places they have visited than the names of one hotel, two points of interest, and perhaps one street. You can bluff them into insensibility by making up a name and asking them if they saw that when they were in Florence.” He employs this method when “confronted by Mrs. Reetaly who has just returned from a frantic tour of Spain, southern France, and the Ritz Hotel, Paris.” She brings up Toledo; he asks her if she “pushed on to Mastilejo,” a town whose name he has made up on the spot. When she admits she didn’t, he tells her Mastilejo is “Toledo multiplied by a hundred. Such mountains! Such coloring!” Soon they are onto the real town of Carcassonne. Benchley continues his strong offensive, inventing sights right and left, quizzing her as to whether she saw “the hole in the wall where Louis the Neurotic escaped from the Saracens” or “the stream where they found the sword and buckler of the Man with the Iron Abdomen.” Before he can continue much longer, Mrs. Reetaly is beating a quick retreat, and that’s the last Benchley needs to hear of her vacation.

Lin’s rant against travel merely for conversation included his disapproving feelings on the topic of picture-taking. Lest we think it’s a new thing to bemoan the fact that no one today can eat a meal before photographing it from every angle, Lin wrote about how he had seen “visitors at Hup’ao of Hangchow, a place famous for its tea and spring water, having their picture taken in the act of lifting tea cups to their lips. To be sure, it is a highly poetic sentiment to show friends a picture of themselves drinking tea at Hup’ao. The danger is that one spends less thought on the actual taste of the tea than on the photograph itself.” He went on to note that “this sort of thing can become an obsession” and decried tourists so “busy with their cameras that have no time to look at the places themselves.”

The third type of travel he despaired of and considered false is any trip undertaken by anyone who is interested in traveling according to any kind of schedule. “Bound by the clock and run by the calendar as he is at home, he is still bound by the clock and run by the calendar while abroad.”

Lin proposed a true type of travel, the goal of which is to become “lost and unknown.” In his eyes, the true traveler “is always a vagabond, with the joys, temptations, and sense of adventure of the vagabond.” He writes, “The essence of travel is to have no duties, no fixed hours, no mail, no inquisitive neighbors, no receiving delegations, and no destination. A good traveler is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.”

It’s often just when I think Lin is being his most flip that he surprises me. What he goes on to say is that the true traveler has no attachments, and therefore must have compassion for everyone. He quotes a Chinese nun: “Not to care for anybody in particular is to care for mankind in general.” He argues for travel to strange cities and also for nature travel, urging his readers to “travel to see nothing and to see nobody, but the squirrels and muskrats and woodchucks and clouds and trees.” He tells the story of an American woman taken by Chinese friends up a misty mountain. There is so much mist, nothing can be seen, and yet her friends make her climb ever higher. When they get to the peak, the only thing they can make out is “the outline of distant hills barely visible on the horizon.” The American woman protests, “But there’s nothing to see here.” And her Chinese friends reply, “That’s exactly the point. We come up here to see nothing.”

In Lin’s view, you must possess the capacity to open yourself to seeing what’s in front of and around you all the time, not just when you are on a special trip. He gives us a sizable translation from a Chinese philosopher who expands on this, explaining that seeing the beauty and grace in the most majestic mountains means nothing if you can’t see beauty and grace in “a little patch of water, a village, a bridge, a tree, a hedge, or a dog….”

A travel book that takes this philosophy as far as it can go and then further is that remarkable little book beloved by both Machado de Assis and Lin Yutang: A Journey Around My Room. (I read it in a translation by Andrew Brown.) As I mentioned earlier, this book was written in 1790 by a young French officer named Xavier de Maistre, who had found himself in some trouble over a duel (illegal) and was sentenced to house arrest. In the centuries before ankle-monitoring bracelets and the like, the authorities relied on the honor of young noblemen to fulfill their sentences after they had misbehaved. De Maistre, then twenty-seven, was a man of honor and did, indeed, stay inside his Turin room for the full forty-two days the court had ordered. With nothing else to do, he wrote a guidebook to his room, visiting over the course of those weeks various bits of furniture, paintings, his bookshelf, letters he’d kept, and his own memory of a charming and slightly rakish life—albeit one studded with war and loss as well.

De Maistre makes a case for traveling around his room as the truest kind of travel—and also the most democratic type of travel that has or will ever exist.

“The pleasure you find in traveling around your room is safe from the restless jealousy of men; it is independent of the fickleness of fortune. After all, is there any person so unhappy, so abandoned, that he doesn’t have a little den into which he can withdraw and hide away from everyone? Nothing more elaborate is needed for the journey.”

His journey costs him nothing. He exclaims that this kind of travel will be “lauded and feted” by those who have modest amounts of wealth, but will be even more popular among the rich. He tells the reader why he thinks this is so: precisely because it doesn’t cost anything. The rich are rich because they like to save money. He also points out that room travel is a great way for the sick to journey, just as it is for those who are scared of robbers, precipices, and quagmires.

Like all good travel writers, de Maistre begins his book by giving us the lay of the land and the route he intends to take:

My room is situated on the forty-fifth degree of latitude, according to the measurement of Father Beccaria; it stretches from east to west; it forms a long rectangle, thirty-six paces in circumference, if you hug the wall. My journey will, however, measure much more than this, as I will be crossing it frequently lengthwise, or else diagonally, without any rule or method. I will even follow a zigzag path, and I will trace out every possible geometrical trajectory if need be. I don’t like people who have their itineraries and ideas so clearly sorted out that they say, “Today I’ll make three visits, I’ll write four letters, and I’ll finish that book I started.” My soul is so open to every kind of idea, taste and sentiment; it so avidly receives everything that presents itself!…And why would it turn down the pleasures that are scattered along life’s difficult path?

This is just the kind of travel beloved by Lin Yutang.

De Maistre is a charming storyteller, and he also employs a small cast of characters to break the boredom—his manservant and his dog appear from time to time. And he has theories, lots of theories, including an odd riff on Plato: While Plato theorized that we are all comprised of our self and another, de Maistre believes we contain a soul and a beast, and that the two often work at cross-purposes.

At the same time, de Maistre is nothing if not indolent. Sometimes he can barely be bothered to leave one piece of furniture for another. Sometimes he travels around the room by sitting in an armchair, leaning back so that the front legs come a few inches off the floor, and then shimmying side to side so that the chair creeps forward. He’s like a bored six-year-old.

But just when you think the book is nothing but a charming divertissement (such as when he urges his readers to decorate their beds with calming pink and white linens), or a parody of the great travel books of his age—works written by soldiers who had returned from years in Egypt, for example—there comes a surprise.

There’s a chapter about a friend of his, a fellow soldier, who died not in battle but of illness in our author’s arms in their winter quarters. He misses the friendship dreadfully, and one of the most moving passages in the book is the trip he makes across his room to his desk in order to visit his old friend’s letters.

Another surprise comes when our traveler ponders people with more luxurious digs. It seems at first like other flip and offhand sections of the book. But then comes this passage:

And why would I bother to consider those who are in a more agreeable situation, when the world is swarming with people who are more unhappy than me? Instead of transporting myself in my imagination into that superb casin [villa], where so many beauties are eclipsed by young Eugénie, if I wish to consider myself happy, I need only pause awhile on the roads that lead there. A heap of unfortunate folk, lying half naked under the porches of those sumptuous apartments, seem on the point of expiring from cold and misery. What a sight! I wish this page of my book could be known throughout the world; I would like it to be known that, in this city—where everything breathes opulence—during the coldest winter nights, a host of wretches sleep out in the open, with only a boundary stone or the threshold of some palace on which to lay their heads.

Here you see a group of children huddling close together so as not to die of the cold. There it’s a woman, shivering and voiceless to complain. The passers-by come and go, quite untouched by a sight to which they are used.

Just as many travel writers before and after have done, de Maistre brought light to the injustices he witnessed, though in this case they were literally on his doorstep. His point: you don’t have to travel the world to see the ways we mistreat one another; it’s as close as the street outside our windows.

But when he wants to be awakened to what is going on in the world far from his window, and learn more about the human condition, there is another destination in his room that he can visit—his bookshelf, which is filled mostly with novels and a few books of poetry. These take him out of his room while allowing him to stay in it, and expand his experiences a thousandfold. He writes, “As if my own troubles weren’t enough, I also voluntarily share those of a thousand imaginary characters, and I feel them as vividly as my own.”

The day finally comes when de Maistre is allowed to leave his home, but he describes that day as the one on which his true imprisonment, which is like being “shackled in chains,” resumes: “The yoke of business is going to weigh down on me once again; I will no longer be able to take a single step that isn’t traced out for me by propriety and duty.”

It’s only in his room, with his memories and books and his window, that he feels truly free.

After reading A Journey Around My Room, I vowed that I would take a trip to my room every few months, and these have been some of the happiest days I’ve spent. It’s an incredible luxury to be home and not sick, to wake up with no agenda other than to wander around the apartment all day. I can lie on the sofa and look at the light as it plays across a glass table. Or see the way it catches on a cracked ceramic vase. I can play with the shells I’ve brought back from the beach. I can admire our hearty little African violet. And I can visit my books, flipping through this one and then that to light on a passage.

This only works if I remain totally unplugged. The rules for such a day are simple—no electronics at all (except for music).

I’m finding that on a slow, lazy day, when I’m a traveler in my own home, just about anything I touch is new to me, as I see it differently than I have before, but each object also brings back memories, as I recall how I came to have it. On these days I spend touring my apartment, I almost always visit the letters I’ve saved, especially those from David Baer, my friend who died when we were in our twenties. As de Maistre writes about the letters from his friend, “What an intense, melancholy pleasure it feels when my eyes run over the lines traced by someone who is no longer alive.”

De Maistre’s A Journey Around My Room was a huge success in his life. Years after he wrote the book, he decided to follow it with a companion volume, a sequel of sorts, A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room. This is a shorter and more philosophical work. In it, he journeys to the stars, simply by staring out his window at the spectacular beauty of the night sky.

He writes that he understands that most people don’t see the stars because they are sleeping when the stars are out. But what he can barely comprehend is why anyone awake and wandering around at night would forget to look up and marvel at them. His theory is that since people can see the sky so often, and all for free, they can’t be bothered to look.

De Maistre writes (in a tone of righteous indignation) that if he were the sovereign of some country, “every night I would have the alarm bell rung, and I would oblige my subjects of every age, every sex and every condition to go to their windows and look at the stars.”

But then he engages himself in an argument with Reason, who insists on exceptions to the decree. What if it’s raining? Or too cold? Or there’s a chill? And shouldn’t the ill be exempt? And lovers, too?

All good points.

As for us, now, we live in a world that is largely without stars. The light pollution all around us, in every city around the globe, makes them hard to see. On most nights, you can’t view them from a room in New York or Hong Kong or London. You can barely see them in many of the world’s smaller cities and towns. You might have to go far into the countryside to see the full grandeur of the night sky.

But de Maistre’s principal point remains unchanged. Even if the stars are obliterated by light, there are beautiful things to see all around us, and we can’t be bothered. But it’s not because we are ill, most of us. Or because it’s too cold. Or because we are blind with love. Or even because we spend so much time looking at little screens. It’s because we are often so busy and distracted and self-absorbed that we can’t be bothered to see what is right in front of us, in our rooms, on our streets, in the air.

The fault is not in our stars—or in our screens—but in ourselves.