Modern Travel

How Speed and the Diminishing of Distance Have Become the Vices of All Nations

PAUL MORAND

LINDBERGH, whose conquest of Paris was as much the result of his charming and youthful personality as of his exploit, answered when questioned as to his impressions during the thirty hours spent in the air: "I was very bored." Bored at the bridging of two continents, two worlds! Then what would those travellers of an earlier generation have said, who took two months to cross the Atlantic? Speed is our one modern vice. As speed is increased, and distances are diminished accordingly, we become more and more impatient. From the cumbrous Roman chariot to the Italian coach of the Renaissance, from cabs to carriages, from railway to auto, and thence to aeroplanes,—it seems that humanity aspires to become lighter and lighter, to quit the ground and to get free of weight. Locomotion, furthermore, is one of the characteristics of the higher species. Instead of remaining stupidly on the defensive, the organism utilizes speed as a new weapon in its struggle against death. The feet are released; the lesser deity is rising from his pedestal. His intellect is enlarged, and nothing now will prevent him from becoming a god.

The old French chronicler Froissart speaks aptly of "war voyages." The term is excellent, for wars are the travels of nations. I he Great War really did set all of mankind in motion. And apropos, no people are fonder of travel than Americans. To finance at one stroke two million trips to Europe—what Rockefeller could have undertaken that? Since then, the impulse driving people to go elsewhere has abated but little. If Americans are getting more and more in the habit of visiting Europe each year, this is because the desire to breathe another air than their own corresponds to Some profound human need.

I BELIEVE that if people travel so, it is because they are unhappy. They are trying to escape from themselves: whence the so-called "pleasure" trips. One aims to transfer his boredom elsewhere, to fit his ills into a new setting. First, excursions for pleasure— next, incursions of ennui. Lucretius speaks of people who are continually "going from one place to another, as though to rid themselves of a heavy burden." To travel is to ask of distance at one stroke what time can only give us little by little.

All we need is a pasteboard ticket and the chain of our habits is broken, the saver becoming a spender and the indolent rising at dawn. But it is purely an illusion. To believe that things will he settled by our going from Chicago to Nice is to believe that pleasure is a reality. Whereas all, as we know, is vanity. However, man remains perennially gullible, and launches forth on this mad careering in search of forgetfulness. The railway station, we might say, is the intoxicant of 1927—and travel is more than a tonic, it is a drug. This attitude towards travel dates from romanticism. The English brought it into fashion, and Lord Byron in his time christened his yacht Annoyance. Should we sit passively waiting for fate and death to overtake us? On the contrary, let 11s never wait. In travelling we are fleeing from what we once called our "familiar spirit." We are outdistancing our shadow, our "double." And we do gain several days at the start. Will this make a new man of us? Regrettably, the enemy soon closes in: he is upon us, and the episode is finished.

THE sheer delight of our preparations for the journey. The marvelous hazards governing our choice. There is much less future in a lottery ticket than in a railway ticket. Chance is never bad company. This easy familiarity with casual acquaintances en route, this human solidarity which one senses more strongly in the United States than anywhere else and which comes from the fact that the strenuous migrations towards the West, the dangerous days of the "covered wagon," are still quite near, is an inestimable pleasure. One meets with it on the trains and the liners. As soon as the locomotive is under way, the nerves relax, the mind is cleared, and childhood is recovered. You are nimble and free—and life has been simplified. Once you have decided to leave your friends, they forthwith become charming, and show you a thousand kindnesses to aid the memory of them which you will carry away with you. Everyone exerts himself to be pleasant. Ah! Leave! And never take a return ticket! See that your trunks are not luxurious and heavy, but light, not forgetting that on every voyage the time must come when you have to carry your own valise. By now you are haunting the travelling bureaus; you are living at Cook's. (A curious figure, old Cook, a sort of Napoleon of travel. A Puritan, born in 1808. who saw in the new railways merely a means of advancing the cause of temperance. The first trip organized by him was to make known the Scotland of Walter Scott. A hundred years! Eight hundred miles for a guinea!) Say your adieux at home, so as to appear at the dock dry-eyed. Recall the words of the French poet, who suggests that happiness may perhaps be found only at piers and railway stations. Think of Buddha, who taught that "liberty is in the abandonment of the home." To depart! Is not that the dream of all good projectiles? Are we not, in going elsewhere, winning our suit against habit?

IF one is really travelling for instruction, one should go alone. There will be plenty of opportunities to take other trips with a companion. (Nor should we forget that the loveliest of all life's voyages, the voyage of two people towards each other, is made alone.) As to travelling with several people, I do not advise trying it for a stretch of more than two hours. The result is at best mediocre on land, and there is no denying that on the water, on a yacht, it is positively disastrous. Taine, who besides being the author of a history of English Literature was also a great traveller (did he not go all the way to the Pyrenees?) speaks with justice of those interludes—so precious to the reflective—which make up the empty hours of a tourist's day: meals table d'hôte, waiting to make connections, rising and retiring. Idling in such cases is not really a waste of time; for travel is the most agreeable, the most impractical, and the most costly way of gaining instruction: which explains why England makes it a speciality.

From now on the circling of the globe becomes a perfectly ordinary run, a hop without peril. Let us enjoy these chance confrères who, one day ago, we did not know existed and with whom we are henceforth to dine at leisure, to sleep and to laugh. They are all picturesque, like characters out of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; and all of them, if we know how to draw them out, have marvellous stories to tell. Voiture (and we find it significant that his name itself should mean "vehicle" or "conveyance") wrote that "the true Secret of health and good cheer is an active body and a mind in repose"—a condition, he goes on to say, which is supplied by travel. Give no further thought to the life you have left behind you. The act of travelling is an act of unfaithfulness—unfaithfulness not only to one's country, but also to one's age; for the traveller does more than transpose himself in space, he goes backwards and forward in time, since each people has its own rhythm, its own "tempo."

ON going to Spain, for instance, we are carried back to a hundred years. To visit China is to explore the Middle Ages. To live in Chicago is to live in the Paris or the Berlin of the year 2,000. Thus one limbers the mind, by living at all paces; and one comes to perceive that the defects of other peoples derive quite simply from the fact that they are not all going at the same speed, that they are not regulated by the same clock. Plato says that all prudent and well appointed young men should be told to move about frequently, "in order to garner from their journeys much that may be of service to the government of the Republic." Those are the words of a true philosopher. J. Atkinson aptly remarks on the correlation between criticism and exoticism, for often our praise of the countries we have visited is in effect a useful criticism of our own. Travelling entails an increase of emotional alliances and intellectual commerce among nations, and the danger of conflict is lessened accordingly. Some people are hardened by travel, but the majority become more sensitive. The day will come when war between France and Germany will seem as ridiculous as a war between Chicago and Detroit. We, on the little continent of Europe, will be the first to laugh at our tiny treaties of peace and our narrow customs barriers and our absurd frontiers, as we laugh to-day at the octroi and the toll traverse of the Middle Ages. No, to depart is not "to die a little"; to depart is to live a lot. I hope, when I am dead, that my hide is made into a valise. And when I return to my country, is it the earth which has shrunk or I who have grown larger?