Picasso: “I travel in my head”

From previously unpublished excerpts of a 1978 interview with Susan Sontag by Jonathan Cott, published in Harper’s, 2013 August, p. 19.  Boldfacing mine.

Jonathan Cott: For a lot of people who know your name and love your work, you have a special mystique. There are particularly a great number of women I know who admire you enormously.

Susan Sontag: But what you call mystique used to be called reputation.

Cott: I think in your case it’s reputation and mystique, because you’re not a public celebrity who gossips in the media about whom you’re going out with.

Sontag: Well, what serious writer ever did?

Cott: I could go through a list.

Sontag: But those people have destroyed themselves as writers. I think it’s death to one’s work to do that. Surely the work of writers such as Hemingway or Truman Capote would be on a higher level if they hadn’t been public figures. There is a choice between the work and the life. It’s not just a question of whether you’re going to give interviews or talk about yourself; it’s a question of how much you live in society, in that vulgar sense of society, and of having a lot of silly times that seem glamorous to you and to other people.

Cott: But think of the Goncourt brothers, who wouldn’t have written what they did unless they frequented parties almost every night in Paris during the Second Empire. In a way, they were extraordinarily brilliant and high-class gossip types.

Sontag: But they were also social historians using both the novel and documentary forms. Even Balzac did that. The problem, however, is a little different in the twentieth century, since the opportunities are so much greater. Somebody once asked Picasso why he never traveled abroad. He went from Spain to Paris and then moved to the south of France, but he never went anywhere. And he said: I travel in my head. I do think there are those choices, and perhaps you don’t feel them so much when you’re young — and probably you shouldn’t — but later on, if you want to go beyond something that is simply good or promising to the real fulfillment and risk-taking of a big body of work, you have to stay home.

Source: Robert D. Kaplan, “Being There: Put Down Your Smartphone–the Art of Travel Demands the End of Multitasking,” in The Atlantic, 2012 Nov, p34f; http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/being-there/309108/:

 

…The real adventure of travel is mental. It is about total immersion in a place, because nobody from any other place can contact you. Thus your life is narrowed to what is immediately before your eyes, making the experience of it that much more vivid.

It isn’t just the landscapes that are overpowering, but the conversations, too. Real conversations require concentration, not texting on the side. The art of travel demands the end of multitasking. It demands the absence of bars on your smartphone when you are in a café with someone. That’s because travel is linear—it is about only one place or a singular perception at a time.

…

Travel is like a good, challenging book: it demands presentness—the ability to live completely in the moment, absorbed in the words or vision of reality before you. And like serious reading itself, travel has become an act of resistance against the distractions of the electronic age, and against all the worries that weigh us down, thanks to that age. A good book deserves to be finished, just as a haunting landscape tempts further experience of it, and further research into it. Travel and serious reading, because they demand sustained focus, stand athwart the nonexistent attention spans that deface our current time on Earth.

A traveler’s must

Pico Iyer writes:

Visiting a new town is like having a conversation. Places ask questions of you just as searchingly as you question them. And, as in any conversation, it helps to listen with an open mind, so you can be led somewhere unexpected. The more you leave assumptions at home, I’ve found, the better you can hear whatever it is that a destination is trying to say to you.

While in Venice a few months ago, I asked myself (and it) whether its art stood in the way of other things, like modernity and convenience. And with each turn I took, Venice asked me why I didn’t just accept its art for what it was. Returning to Tibet a few years ago, I wondered whether its magic was in the land or in my head. I haven’t quite worked it out, but asking the question made me more focused while there and led to deeper questions that I’m still asking back at home.

With that in mind, here are the things that I always do in a new place to set the conversation in motion.

1. Savor every moment of your first few hours. First impressions really are worth a thousand others. I often scribble a hundred pages of notes when I visit somewhere new. But then, when I get home, it’s always the first page or two―the taxi ride in from the airport, my first foray out onto the streets―that captures something vivid and essential before my ideas and prejudices begin to harden. So stay away from e-mail, CNN, and anything that reminds you of home and just soak the place in.

2. Embrace the prospect of being a tourist. Some snooty types will tell you that they’re “travelers,” not tourists. But if being a tourist means wanting to see all the attractions that make a town unique, then what’s so bad about that? Take the three-hour city tour on your first day in Atlanta so you know where things are and what you wish to return to. When traveling abroad, visit the shops recommended by tour guides, if only to see what’s available from people who speak English. Don’t be shy about asking a local stranger how to find the national museum; she may just offer you a guided tour along the way.

3. Devour the hotel literature. Don’t ignore the glossy magazines placed on your desk or lists of sightseeing activities in the guest-services brochure. How else would I have known that Baltimore is home to the unique and haunting American Visionary Art Museum? Or that I could walk with lions in Mauritius? Where else could I have found out that there are six different kinds of operator-assisted phone calls in Bhutan―Urgent, Lightning, Distress, Important, Immediate, and Most Immediate―and they all seem to be treated about the same?

4. Run an errand for a friend. She’s asked you to get, say, macadamia popcorn on Maui or to track down that wise monk she once met in Phnom Penh. The very search for what someone else wants or values (and it doesn’t really matter what it is) will lead you to places you would otherwise never see.

5. Take in a performance or a sporting event. A ball game or a symphony is transporting and doesn’t require you to speak the language. And watching opera in Beijing or soccer in Rio will be nothing like seeing opera or soccer at home. It would take a mighty effort to get me to Swan Lake in Santa Barbara. But put me in Beirut and I know it will be a night to remember.

6. Check out a bookstore. It’s a great way to learn about the interests of the locals. On almost any street in New Delhi, for example, a bookshop is bulging with works on palaces, textiles, spirituality, and the Kama Sutra; in Salt Lake City, the offerings are somewhat different. And in a store like the independent-minded Elliott Bay Book Company, a local institution in Seattle, you’ll find a universe so compendious that it seems to be an anthology of the city’s distinctive grace notes. Poking into even the smallest of these places not only opens a new door to a city but also offers the promise of a good read to keep you company at night.

7. Ride a bus to the end of the line. It isn’t wise to do this everywhere, but riding the bus to even the next six stops can be useful. At the very least, you’ll see something of the city, get a front-seat view (literally) of what the Romans do in Rome, and end up in surprising destinations. I did this in Miami once and found myself in a spicy part of Little Havana that nobody would have mistaken for South Beach, and yet it seemed to capture the essence of the city.

8. Read the daily newspaper. Almost every big city anywhere has an English-language paper, and even papers you can’t read will startle you with their pictures and their different types of tiny print. Whether it’s pages of “matrimonial” ads in The Times of India or headlines in the Key West Citizen (300-POUND MAN SMASHES HEAD IN WALL), newspapers always tell you much more about a place than they think they’re telling.

9. Go to McDonald’s. In Kyoto, you could see chicken tatsuta burgers, corn-potage soup, and, in autumn, moon-viewing burgers on the menu, and your fellow diners might be dressed in Vivienne Westwood or Dior. In Bolivia, the McDonald’s I visited was so exotic that society ladies sipped their McCoffees under the watchful eye of a security guard. Even in Manhattan, the Big Mac outlet I stumbled into one morning at 3 a.m. was home to an unexpected but very New Yawky kind of camaraderie. The food is cheap and semipredictable, of course, but it’s all the ways in which the place is surprising that you will take home with you. What else are we looking for in travel (and in love and in life) but a tasty mix of the strange and the familiar?

10. Get lost. (In the nicest sense.)

Social Tourism

Arthur Frommer offers up a suggestion:

7) Unlike many of the European nations that encourage what is called “social tourism” (tourism by the poor), we in the U.S. have tolerated a complete absence of policies easing travel and vacations by the poor, a lack of admission discounts for low-income people, a failure to permit poor people to make at least one free use of Amtrak each year for vacation purposes or to enjoy free admission to the national parks or publicly-owned museums. Persons in poverty should be enabled to enjoy the mental and physical respites that might enable them to overcome their poverty.

What we can do about it: An educational program is badly needed that will alert our population that we have failed to devote any consideration or discussion to social tourism in the United States

Read more: http://www.frommers.com/blog/?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&UID=3ec3ac40-db8a-4d10-a884-acf9ccad0879&plckPostId=Blog:3ec3ac40-db8a-4d10-a884-acf9ccad0879Post:bf835595-ead7-43f6-b056-38aa859e2c8b&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest#ixzz0cMj29YQP

Washington Irving Comes Home

from Washington Irving’s A Tour of the Prairies:

At length the long anticipated moment arrived.  I again  saw the “blue line of my native land” rising like a cloud in that horizon where, so many years before, I had seen it fade away.  I again saw the bright city of my birth rising out of its beautiful bay; its multiplied fanes and spires, and its prolonged forest of masts proclaiming its augmented grandeur.  My heart throbbed with pride and admiration as I gazed upon it, I gloried in being its son.

But how was the wanderer to be received, after such an absence ?  Was he to be taken, as a favored child, to its bosom;  or repulsed as a stranger, and a changeling?

My old doubts recurred as I stepped upon land. I could  scarcely realize that I was indeed in my native city, among the haunts of my childhood.  Might not this be another of those dreams that had so often beguiled me?  There were circumstances enough to warrant such a surmise.  I passed through places that ought to be familiar to me, but all were changed.  Huge edifices and lofty piles had sprung up in the  place of lowly tenements; the old landmarks of the city were  gone; the very streets were altered.

As I passed on, I looked wistfully in every face : not one  was known to me, not one!  Yet I was in haunts where every  visage was once familiar to me.  I read the names over the doors :  all were new.  They were unassociated with any early recollection. The saddening conviction stole over my heart that I was a  stranger in my own home!  Alas!  thought I, what had I to expect after such an absence!

Let not the reader be mistaken.  I have no doleful picture  to draw; no sorrowful demand to make upon his sympathies.  It  has been the lot of many a wanderer, returning after a shorter  lapse of years, to find the scenes of his youth gone to ruin and  decay.   If I had any thing to deplore, it was the improvement of  my home.  It had outgrown my recollection from its very prosperity, and strangers had crowded into it from every clime, to participate in its overflowing abundance.  A little while was sufficient to reconcile me to a change, the result of prosperity.  My friends, too, once clustered in neighboring contiguity, in a moderate community, now scattered widely asunder, over a splendid metropolis, soon gathered together to welcome me; and never did wanderer, after such an absence, experience such a greeting.  Then it was that every doubt vanished from my mind.  Then it  was that I felt I was indeed at home, and that it was a home of  the heart! I thanked my stars that I had been born among such  friends; I thanked my stars, that had conducted me back to  dwell among them while I had yet the capacity to enjoy their fellowship.

Quotes

While bachelors are lonely people, I’m convinced that married men are lonely people with dependents.  -Kurt Vonnegut, “Little Drops of Water”

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?  -Michael Torke, composer

Traveling is a very troublesome business.”  -Charles Dickens’ Household Words magazine