“Why We Travel” by Pico Iyer and Anne is Headed for Bad Bunny in Poland

If you travel, why do you go where you go? I’ll bet your reasons are different from Pico Iyer’s, as explained in his essay “Why We Travel.” We pick out some lines for discussion below as well as look toward Anne’s trip to Poland that will include attending a Bad Bunny concert in Warsaw.

“Why We Travel” is an essay by Pico Iyer published on Salon.com on March 18, 2000. Click here to read it. 

Before I read Iyer’s piece, I jotted down some thoughts I have on my own travel: 

1. I don’t seem to be able to enjoy traveling without doing a research project first. From the Charlotte concert we went to (train, where to eat, stores to walk through) to walking around Savannah or going to Maui.
2. Parts of my travel preparation: multiple books, lots of Google Earth scrolling, following social media accounts, and lots of Google Doc notes. 

• Also: I’ve presented on multiple trips to the family and they’ve picked 
• Also: I write out the directions for the bus before I travel to an away basketball contest 

3. I’ve become more fearful / anxious. Maybe why? daughters and wife, getting older. 
4. I have right next to zero travel abroad experience. 

If I could go anywhere this summer, where would I chose?

My daughter Izzy asked me if I could travel to any country, where would I go?

• I said Switzerland, and here are the reasons I could think I would want to go to Switzerland:

1. Wherever I’m going with my family, the connections formed doing something such as waiting to board the plane can’t be underrated. Speaks to that cliche, the journey not the destination. 
2. I’ve seen the beauty in pictures or videos, and I’d like to walk within it all myself. 
3. Experience a place different than I’ve been before. Look how it’s done here, whether that’s Queens, Winamac Indiana, Charleston, Miami, Phoenix, LA, Maui, or London. 

Here’s the opening paragraph of the essay. There’s a lot to discuss in it: 

• We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. 

Some lines I chose from the essay to discuss: 

1. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal.
2. Our only exchange like this is money? I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.
3. The idea of seeing with new eyes: By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes.
4. Anne, you probably don’t know what you will do? On the most basic level, when I’m in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.
5. Reminds me of Geoff Dyer bringing in Nietzsche on habits: This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear” — disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide.
6. The metaphor that travel is a love story: All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
7. What do you call yourself? I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman.
8. What have you brought back from previous trips? The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center. (Torg remembers his French Broad Trip, the mushroom hunt with his father) 

What new reasons in this essay might there be to travel? 

1. We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home.
2. holidays help you appreciate your own home more
3. All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips,
4. So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake.

This piece of loaded with references to what other writers say. Sometimes it’s a quote and other times the author refers to just talking with someone. 

• I counted 22 references to what other writers said.  In the piece. This sort of thing impresses me that the writer is familiar with all of those facets of the conversation within travel writing.

Anne, does reading this and discussing it change your thinking at all about your trip? 

Trump is the United State President. Does that impact how you think about your trip? 

• I think those here for the World Cup are finding that we all aren’t Trump or Trump Disciplines. 

What’s your prep like for a trip like you are taking? Buying guidebooks? Working on notes? Working on an itinerary? 

Some notes on the author Pico Iyer: 

• @PicoIyer on X. Click here for profile. 
• From Wikipedia: English born in Oxford son of Indian parents, both academics, moved to California when father started teaching at Univ of California at Santa Barbara, studied English Lit at Magdalen College Oxford, taught writing at Harvard and then started writing at Time, has lived in Nara, Japan since 1992 and has a Japanese wife, I counted 18 books written on his Wikipedia page 

For today’s episode, I almost picked a chapter from this book: 

• Michael Palin wrote a book called New Europe in which there is a chapter about him travelling to Poland. I almost bought it and had us read that. 

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