Book’s meaning resonates down the years
IAM just revisiting a modern literary classic – Ted Simon’s outstanding Jupiter’s Travels, in which he recounts his epic four-year journey around the world in the mid-1970s, on a rattly Triumph motorcycle.
It’s famously a journey through his mind, and the human condition, as much as across the face of the globe. And as with so many such benchmark books, I find I draw anew from it whenever I pick it up fresh after some years. As I experience life, so my perception of what he’s saying slightly changes. I’m minded of a dear departed friend, painter Bob Clement, who painted the same landscapes repeatedly… often yearly. He once explained to this simpleton that it wasn’t necessarily that the landscape had changed, but rather how he saw it. And for me, so it is with the reading with the wisdom of experience, such as Ted Simon’s tale.
As such, I stumbled on a line which he’d written five decades ago – which we’ll come to directly – revealing a prescient insight into what humanity is doing. Reading the line, and considering the simplicity of its cutting observation, then reminded me of something I noticed long ago. People – generally fellows, but not always – who’ve been travelling along the dusty roads of distant places for some years eventually gain wisdom, insight, and life skills, beyond levels we can easily grasp. I’m not talking about the six-month gap year ‘finding yourself’ overseas experience, spent on an Australian beach – as good a thing as that is for young people. I’m talking about throwing yourself on the mercy of life in remote regions, developing countries, and places off the tourist trail, travelling at length with little more than what you wear on your back.
Obviously, while they’re travelling, such people aren’t paying mortgages, raising families, furthering careers or achieving any of the little steps most of us are measured by. But they are getting an exposure that furnishes them with a profound depth of understanding of humanity. Their body language becomes honed, through the simple necessity of having to make themselves accepted in a new situation with every move. It’s more than the obvious – like ditching the sunglasses, so strangers can see into your soul via your eyes – it’s an ability to act disarmingly, and present no threat.
They often pick up bits of the wisdom of varying cultures, philosophies and religions, but without getting drawn down a singular avenue.
I met a young Frenchman when I was adrift myself, walking across Canada. He’d been on the road for several years, living out of a backpack, and I would guess could have stepped into just about company, or faced any trial. His ‘take’ on life and open manner was of a different order of magnitude. Odd strays have rocked up here over the years – is there some secret sign on the gate, I wonder? – and one or two have shown an accrued experience that had made them deeper characters at a level that’s hard to explain. Others you might recognise. Well, TV adventurer/anthropologist Bruce Parry, or former MP Rory Stewart, both showed some of it, after they’d been to the ends of the earth – although in the former, he then seemed to have been unable to square the circle with what he saw back in civilised parts, and the latter was left too nice a guy for front-line politics, to our great loss.
It’s certainly true that exposure to big events, especially conflict and human suffering, can itself have a very similar effect, but I reckon there’s a subtle difference. That often skews, or perhaps hardens, minds. Equally, just ageing will bring a depth of perception to most of us as we roll along life’s highway – it’s not by chance that so many cultures gave reverence to the wisdom of ‘elders’. I often use the opinion of my elders as a steer. But I reckon there’s another layer, difficult to nail down, yet quite profound.
So what was the line in Ted Simon’s book? Having ridden from the North African coast right down through to South Africa, he’d passed through sub-Saharan cultures where locals tilled their crops by hand and lived in mud huts as they had for thousands of years, and on to seething cities further south, and their adjoining shanties and townships. Looking back – but not, I feel, singling out Africa – he observed: “I could only see ever-increasing numbers of people determined to seize on the resources of the earth and pervert them into greater and greater heaps of indestructible concrete and plastic ugliness.” He wrote this almost 50 years ago, and it could hardly cut deeper yet. Will we ever learn? Seemingly not.
As I experience life, so my perception of what the author is saying changes