Tiger pause
Travel author has plenty of lessons for life in isolation
All the Way to the Tigers
Mary Morris Nan A. Talese
Mary Morris’s new travel memoir, All the Way to the Tigers, which tells the intertwined stories of an accident that she had in 2008 and a journey she took in 2011, has turned out to be relevant to what’s happening now. There’s the tiger obsession she has nurtured since girlhood, when she had a recurring dream of a giant feline at the foot of her bed.
Long before Tiger King came to distract us, Morris tells us, the tiger surpassed the dog, the cat and the horse as the most popular animal in the world. The intuitive equation between tigers and power is the reason the Sanskrit word for tiger is the source of the name Viagra, and the Chinese character for emperor copies the marking on a tiger’s brow.
“Tigers are the last truly wild thing ... They are solitary apex predators. There is something about that I deeply identify with.”
The “solitary apex predator” gene she shares with tigers led Morris to take a journey to India alone. She made her mark on travel writing in 1988 with Nothing to Declare: Memoirs of a Woman Traveling Alone.
“I had planned to literally become a nomad, travelling the world ...” Instead, Morris broke an ankle and had to stay off it for three months. While stuck in bed reading, she found a riveting phrase in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. “He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers.”
“All the way to the tigers” was the very definition of a place that was just too far.
The two stories, one of confinement and one of intrepid exploration, are woven together — along with plenty of tiger trivia — in 112 brief chapters.
“There’s something my mother told me when I was 19 years old and sailed off to Paris on the S.S. France for my junior year abroad. Her parting shot to me was, ‘You take yourself with you wherever you go,’” Morris said. “She and I did not have a perfect relationship, but I knew she was telling me an ancient truth. And it’s one that applies whether we’re stuck at home or we’re out in the world doing what we want.”
The day quarantine began, she opened a journal, and has made an entry every day since. “Order a journal,” she suggested, “write your thoughts down. Put the pain to the page. Also the funny things, the everyday nonsense. Keep making it interesting for yourself.”
“Even if travel isn’t your livelihood,” she recommends looking ahead and dreaming an exquisitely mobile future in detail.
The most important thing, she said, is not feeling sorry for yourself. And share quarantinis with friends and family at the end of the day.