We’re most transported when we’re least distracted. And we’re most at peace – ready to be transformed, in fact – when most deeply absorbed. I’d much rather converse with one sight for 60 minutes than 60 places for one minute each. When I travel with the Dalai Lama – as I’ve done for 10 recent Novembers across Japan – I’m convinced that the wide-awake responsiveness he brings to every last convenience store and passing toddler is partly the result of the three hours he spends at the beginning of every day in meditation. Destinations can only be as rich as what we bring to them.
During this new season of the virus, I’ve been spending many happy hours on the tiny sunlit terrace outside my apartment in Nara, Japan, with the poet laureate of lockdowns, Marcel Proust. I think of him also as the patron saint of travellers, precisely because he was confined by severe asthma to spending three years alone in his cork-lined bedroom. What allowed him to read with such acuity the small print of every crowded soiree? To recall with such fresh immediacy a long-ago gaggle of young beauties on a beach? To record with wakeful precision the sight of a loved one asleep? That time in solitary, I suspect. It was Proust, I never forget, who reminded us that the point of every trip is not new sights but new eyes. Once we have those, even the old sights are reborn.
"the point of every trip is not new sights but new eyes."
I think, too, of the preternatural vividness of Emily Dickinson. Not leaving her house for 26 years brought her to such a high pitch of attention that she could see South Pole and North – and wild nights and heaven and carriage-rides with death – just by standing at her window. It was through going nowhere that she made everywhere seem wondrous.
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