Going elsewhere may currently be complicated, but we can still immerse ourselves in distant realities
We may now be able to look forward to unquarantined travel to and from amber-list countries, but as the colour coding indicates, it will be some time before access to the rest of the world can be taken for granted again. Perhaps, for environmental reasons, it never should have been; it is also true that many people, for reasons of income or nationality, have never viewed the world in this way, or have travelled in circumstances that are less about choice than traumatic necessity. But for some decades, the option of sticking a pin in a map and then turning up there for a week or two has been, theoretically at least, generally available, and over the last months many have viscerally missed travel – missed that moment of stepping off a plane or ferry or train into a different reality; the sudden smell and sounds of elsewhere, of an expansion of perception.
But perhaps we can return to a type of travel that is sometimes forgotten – specifically, that of the imagination, through travel writing. From Herodotus to Marco Polo, through James Bruce and then, in the 20th century, everyone from Patrick Leigh Fermor and Rebecca West to Bruce Chatwin or Wilfred Thesiger, writers have always taken their questing intelligence out into the world and brought back idiosyncratic and evocative trials and marvels. Of course, it could be argued that until recently this writing has mostly been by men, privileged and white, striding out into the world and naming it, staking claims. But at its best this writing understands the complexities of such a position (think of Orwell and his elephant). And it is not always the powerful westerner doing the describing: for instance, VS Naipaul’s evocation of the English countryside in The Enigma of Arrival, which is called a novel but closely tracks his own life.
