Travelling alone
WHEN we travel for pleasure, there are many who would like to plan their travels in as much detail as possible, meticulously structuring their travel plans around a timetable often provided by travel companies. There is almost no room for spontaneity. It is this kind of planned travel that Dr Samuel Johnson, who is regarded as one of the greatest figures of 18th-century life and letters, was so critical of when he remarked: “Nothing is more hopeless than a scheme for merriment.”
Renowned Austrian novelist, playwright and journalist Stefan Zweig wrote a collection of wonderful essays on travel in Journeys, where he lamented the rise of modern travellers who, with their “mathematical organisation”, think of everything in advance, trying hard to prepare for every contingency.
The chances of encountering mysteries and serendipitous discoveries in such planned travels are remote. The whole purpose of travelling is to leave the comfort of one’s hearth to experience the unexpected and, as Zweig put it, to embrace the “breath of capricious chance and engrossing precariousness”.
While conducted tours certainly have their advantages for one who likes structure, predictability, convenience and a sense of safety, Zweig and other travel writers tell us that this kind of travelling is antithetical to awakening the philosopher in us. For Zweig and his kindred spirits, genuine travel is actually a journey into one’s soul, which one usually engages in solitude, unplanned and spontaneous.
Travelling in groups is nothing compared with the freedom that one enjoys to think, to feel, and to be able to do as one wishes when travelling alone. You can wake up when you want, eat when you feel like it, venture out when you desire, explore what your mood fancies, or you may even choose to do nothing but savour the solitude in the new surrounding.
Most importantly, you don’t have to please or accommodate someone else’s priorities. In his famous essay, On Going A Journey, William Hazlitt wrote: “One of the most pleasantest things in the world is going a journey; but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone.” In the same essay, Hazlitt reminded us that the ultimate goal of going on a journey is “liberty, perfect liberty . . . We go on a journey to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences, to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others.”
Although Hazlitt could be quite sociable, he was also known for his saturnine moods marked by bitter sarcasm and insensitive remarks, which were often a source of great annoyance to his friends. When Hazlitt was not in a congenial mood, he found relief by going on a solitary journey.
It was only in these solitary journeys that Hazlitt could find joy and rediscover things: “The long-forgotten things, like ‘sunken wrack and sunless treasuries’, burst upon my eager sight, and I begin to feel, think, and be myself again. Instead of an awkward silence, broken by attempts at wit or dull common-places, mine is that undisturbed silence of the heart which alone is perfect eloquence.”
Like Hazlitt, Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore Tagore often went on solitary journeys to revive his flagging spirits. In many of his letters to CF Andrews, Tagore wrote about his enjoyment of solitude in the lap of Mother Nature, which provided him the solace that he needed.
In a letter, which Tagore wrote in May 1914, he stated: “The hills all around seem to me like an emerald vessel brimming over with peace and sunshine. The solitude is like a flower spreading its petals of beauty and keeping its honey of wisdom at the core of its heart. My life is full. It is no longer broken and fragmentary . . .”
In a letter to Andrews, which Tagore wrote when he was visiting Srinagar in October 1915, Tagore described the pure joy he experienced in the majestic beauty of Kashmir: “When I sit in the morning outside on the deck of my boat, before the majestic purple of the mountains, crowned with the morning light, I know that I am eternal.”
In another letter to Andrews written in February 1915, Tagore extolled the virtue of solitude: “The cure for all the illness of life is stored in the inner depth of life itself, the access to which becomes possible when we are alone. The solitude is a world in itself, full of wonders and resources unthought of.”
I believe the key to becoming one with the nature and to be able to enjoy nature’s splendor during one’s travels is to be able to be in the present moment.
This means that these special moments as explained by Hazlitt, “are sacred to silence and to musing, to be treasured up in the memory, and to be freed the source of smiling thoughts hereafter”. It’s only when we engage in being still that we begin to discover that our journey is replete with new colours, sights, and beauties, which would have otherwise escaped us.
All the advocates of solitary journeys show us that great joy comes from going on a solitary walking tour. Solitary walking tours really get us back in touch with our selves. In his essay, Walking Tours, Robert Louis Stevenson argued that solo walks are best: “Now to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.
“If you go in company, or even in pairs, it is no longer a walking tour in anything but name; it is something else and more in the nature of a picnic.” These kinds of walks, in my opinion, are contemplative by nature, where one engages both the eyes and the mind. Certainly, these walks can’t be undertaken in a hurried manner or in the company of others.
There are many literary figures who have written extensively on the joys of going on a walk alone. Charles Dickens, Stevenson and Henry
Thoreau are some of the prime examples. European philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kant and Rousseau were all prodigious walkers.
Then there were the meandering poets who loved to stroll in and around Paris. According to the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin the poets took a tortoise on their strolls because that ponderous creature would set the right pace for their walks.
Sadly, with the emergence of all kinds of modern technologies many of us seem to have lost the art of mindful walking where we can be still and contemplate. Instead, we choose to run around from place to place in such a hurry that we have no time, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s words, “for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought”, which a solitary journey always promises.
There is a philosopher in all of us, but we seem to forget this fact due to the myriad cares of modern life. We have chosen to worship the modern god of speed, which was once considered unrefined and vulgar especially when it came to travelling.
It is only when we break away from the herd mentality and, instead, choose to go on our own solitary journey that we can discover not only the exterior world but also that which lies within us. I have come to realise that slow, solitary travel is like meditation that is based on our profound sense of curiosity where we find new ways to see the world and challenge our sense of what we know.