My Year With Proust - Day 77

"During this month - in which I went laboriously over, as over a tune, though never to my satisfaction, these visions of Florence, Venice, Pisa, from which the desire that they excited in me drew and kept something as profoundly personal as if it had been love, love for another person - I never ceased to believe that they corresponded to a reality independent of myself, and they made me conscious of as glorious a hope as could have been cherished by a Christian in the primitive age of faith, on the eve of his entry into Paradise.  Moreover, without my paying any heed to the contradiction that there was in my wishing to look at and to touch with my organs of sense what had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by my senses at all - though all the more tempting to them, in consequence, more different from anything that they knew - it was that which recalled to me the reality of these visions, which inflamed my desire all the more by seeming to hint a promise that my desire should be satisfied.  And for all that motive force of my exaltation was a longing for aesthetic enjoyments, the guide-books ministered even more to it than books on aesthetics, and, more again than the guide-books, the railway time-tables.  What moved me was the thought that this Florence which I could see, so near and yet inaccessible, in my imagination, if the trace which separated it from me, in myself, was not one that I might cross, could yet be reached by a circuit, by a digression, were I to take the plain, terrestrial path."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, p. 411

What struck me as I was reading this section was the thought that growing up I don't know if I had a mystical location that fired my imagination, which seems like an odd admission from someone that so many of my friends equate with foreign travel.  Hoosiers are such odd creatures; we just don't leave the state.  If you're from Indiana and have traveled widely you're viewed with some suspicion, much like admitting that you don't like basketball (which I also don't like). The supposition is that it's some recessive gene popping up or you were adopted from some other state.  As I think I've discussed before, my brother Eric still lives in Indianapolis and can't imagine why anyone would not want to do the same.  I think his dream is that I'll move there and get a house in his neighborhood, not only so that we could spend more time together (which, truthfully, would make me very happy) but also because he'd be freed from making excuses for my unexplained absence from the state.  Growing up it was just inconceivable that we would leave the state, and this even showed up in our choice of colleges (all four of us matriculated in state). Since we had such a limited physical universe I more than made up for it by developing a far broader intellectual and literary universe, and my mystic places were literary ones: 221B Baker Street or the Shire or Winesburg, Ohio. Maybe the closest to an actual location was Tahiti, but even that related to Somerset-Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence and thus it never was truly tangible and more aesthetic.

Now, to be fair, I suppose I've more than made up for it since then, and, as I've detailed in other posts, have visited many of the places that came to hold a mystic place in my imagination.  When I went to Yemen I only told two people about it, Laura, my girlfriend at the time, and David, my best friend, and they were both angry/worried and either actively or gently encouraged me not to go.  However, I could not not go, especially since I was living in Abu Dhabi and it was a ridiculously short flight. Essentially, they were echoing the concerns of the Yemeni ambassador, who I had to meet to get my visa, "why DO you want to go to Yemen?"  Undoubtedly, part of it related to the fact that I'm a historian and who has more history than Yemen?  However, there was that mystic sense of the place that haunted my imagination, and even if I knew in my heart of hearts that it would not end of being that place (although, truthfully, it was, and more so) I still had to go.  Zanzibar, which I'll be revisiting now in about four days (yikes) had much the same pull, although with very few of the concerns that hung over the Yemen trip.  Ancient Indian writers on aesthetics talk about rasa, which has several meanings, but at its heart calls for an immersion, almost on the genetic level, with a piece of art. They would not understand that classic western sense of the need for a scholarly distance, much discussed by Kant and Hume, between the viewer and the piece of art.  Instead, with rasa you really need to become one with the piece of art.  I think I must have the same view toward foreign travel, at least with the places that rise to the level of Yemen or Zanzibar in my imagination.  So, in a sense I could explain to the Yemeni ambassador, and my friends, why I wanted to go to Yemen, but I also couldn't explain why I wanted to go. I don't think it's that way with all the places that I want to go, but it is still true of those mystic places.  I HAVE to be there, to be a part of it.  What is left?  Now that's another post altogether.