Return Journeys

You hear that it's almost always a mistake to go back: a great place can't possibly be as good the second time round. And yet I think it's understandable to try - if you feel more alive somewhere else, why not go for the repeat? Isn't that how addictions begin, and isn't the ultimate addiction the feeling of belonging?

It's really a question about where travel takes us. I'm sure movement in itself is able to change who we are, and how we think about ourselves. A new context and a less stable routine are more than enough to unsettle how you live. But sometimes there's more to it than that. In rare instances, you feel more yourself in a new place - that is, more connected to a side of yourself that your old life doesn't bring out. It takes strangers or a new place to do it.

What happens, then, when you go back to the new place to find the feeling gone? Most often, the place hasn't changed, the people are the same, and you are just as convinced about who you really are. The implication is that an important part of what you experienced the first time round was simply novelty: you were new to them, and they were new to you. Take the surprise away, and suddenly what you thought was belonging was in fact just excitement - one of the least replicable sensations.

There is another possibility. You return, and feel the same sense of belonging, but this time embellished by the pleasure of recognition. This is where travel is at its best, I think, because the second journey is richer than the first, but only so because of the first. Without the first encounter, there couldn't be this kind of return. You would just be coming back.

Castle Hill

Dag Hammarskjöld's last essay, "Castle Hill", was written in New York in 1960, and travelled with him during his final diplomatic mission, to Congo in 1961. On the night of his death on 17 September 1961, he left the typed manuscript with his belongings in Leopoldville, while the work he gave himself to do on his last flight (to the Northern Rhodesian town of Ndola) was his Swedish translation of the 1923 German philosophical text Ich und Du.

Hammarskjöld was by work and intellectual disposition an internationalist: he spoke several languages fluently, he was greatly admired by people from many different nationalities, and he excelled as a diplomat - his quiet, sometimes awkward style was paradoxically rather good for someone who had to adapt to a wide range of situations. People liked and trusted him.

But, all the same, I think it's fitting that his final written work was about home, and that during the last days of his life he had with him on a manuscript about his childhood. In a sense, he was travelling back to his hometown of Uppsala the moment he left New York with his copy of "Castle Hill" - writing his way home.

The essay is organised around the seasons, and begins in June, when the students are away and the town is temporarily given over to large families, old ladies, and the park bands that keep them entertained. In early autumn, the banquet hall of Uppsala Castle appears, and now becomes a fully-developed part of the story of the town, rather morbidly as well: it is a catacomb:

I remember it deserted. The summer lingered on in the smell of sun-dried wood from huge rafters. In the high window embrasures you could find, in the September sun, the feather-light bodies of swifts that had flown in by mistake during the games and chases of June and had never found their way back.

There is a famous Anglo-Saxon text about life and death that compares life to the bird that for a fleeting moment flies into the banqueting hall before once again returning the cold outside. In Hammarskjöld’s re-working of the theme, the swifts have perished in the hall, and yet returning is one of Hammarskjöld’s main themes. In a way, it’s a theme for all university towns, where students return year after year. But, as a royal town, Uppsala yearns for another return, to grander times: when the weather conspires to remind the town of its former days of glory, there are traces of the Vasa dynasty that made a regal home within the red-walled Castle on the hill:

The higher the snowdrifts piled up on the north side, the greater the distance seemed to be to the town, the more stubbornly the red Vasa walls towered and the deeper became the blue of the night perspective in the old state apartments, where modern furnishing vanished in the gloom. The winter restored the Castle to its days of greatness.

And, during the spring graduations, the university town is where, in old age, former students reassess their lives:

In the afternoon you can see them—the jubilee doctor, still with the laurel wreath on his brow, and the young one who has just received his degree and is looking forward to his lectureship. There are fifty years between them. One goes over the hill in order to see, once more before leaving, the town where he has spent many a long year laying the foundation of his life’s work. The other, about to encounter the town of his youth, measures the distance between what he once hoped for and what he achieved. How many return as victors?

Perhaps the answer lies with the swifts, which, if not returning as victors, are at least allowed to pass their final days in the old banqueting hall.

Craft: A Clive James Piece (in Rome)

Here is a breakdown of one of Clive James' travel pieces, his 1979 "Postcard from Rome", which is available in full on James' website here. My idea is simply to show how he structures the "Postcard", as I think the structure is a very workable one. More specific observations are given in bullet points between each of (what I perceive as) James' section breaks.

1) Get the reader there (5 paragraphs): The flight; the author's previous visits to Rome; and arriving (the airport, the luxurious hotel).

• Note the transition sentence at the end of paragraph 5-it moves the piece to the next section while signalling the theme of the piece, that is, not being able to see Rome without seeing its history: "My waiting readers were subsidising this luxury. Could I justify their confidence? What can you say about so old a city in so short a space?"

2) The first morning (3 paragraphs): An icy Rome; a re-visit to St Peter's; the Aspian Way, which is "as cold as Caligula's heart".

• The now-and-then device (here I am now, this is what happened then) is kept running through the "Caligula's heart" line. But paragraph 8 comes alive when James adds one of his asides: "Hilarius Fuscus has a tomb out there somewhere. Apart from his name he is of no historical interest, but with a name like Hilarious Fuscus how interesting do you have to be?"

3) Meeting a local (2 paragraphs): A guided tour of the Catacombs; other tourists.

• The next transition sentence, once again joining travel and movement back in time, is at the end of paragraph 10: "The people buried here all died at once, on March, 1944. For the whole story you have to go to Anzio, about thirty-five miles down the coast."

4) Anzio/World War 2 (4 paragraphs): The Allied landing; German retributions for local resistance; the layers of Anzio's troubled past; the Volsci (which serves as the transition from this section).

• Note how the change to the present tense in paragraph 13 allows James to cast back even further, and quickly deliver an entire history of Anzio.

5) A second case study (3 paragraphs): Sophia Loren; money exchange charges; Loren's latest film.

• The focus on Sophia Loren's latest film gives the piece more current content, at the same as giving James the opportunity to bring theme more explicitly to the fore: "Everything in and around Rome is saturated with time."

6) Roman problems (3 paragraphs): The Opera; corruption charges; the murder of ex-Prime Minister Moro.

• In paragraph 17, the desciption of the opera concentrates on the audience, because the piece is keeping to its focus on social (rather than artistic) issues, and the further development of the socio-political life of Rome that we are about to get.

7) Back again (6 paragraphs): The Middle Ages; the Renaissance; the Church; Rome as a consumer city; Rome as Empire/Mussolini.

• In this section, James doesn't try to do much more than fill out the history lesson that he's hinted at earlier. It is saved from being over-expositional by two techniques: sharp, analytical one-liners punctuating the lesson (e.g. "Italy's besetting weakness is government without authority"; "When Rome ceased to be the capital city of an international empire, it reverted to being a provincial town"; "Rome is a good place for madmen to dream of building empires. It is a bad place from which to govern Italy") and an effect of forward momentum that James creates - mainly through the way the lesson pulses back and forward in time - and the feeling in the reader that this is all leading towards something (and that the various pulses will form to a single point).

8) The point of all this, then (1 paragraph): "...the city of Rome is left with nothing but its heritage".

• The problem for Rome turns out to be James' problem in writing the piece: there is just too much past, and it is building up. "Outside the portico when I arrived, the body of a man was being hauled out of an abandoned car and loaded into a grey plastic bag. He was a tramp who had frozen to death in the night. A policeman signed for the corpse. Dirt, litter, decay. Raffaello Sanzio of Urbino was here once."

9) James tries (a little) to cheer us up in the final two paragraphs, but concludes that history has been too much, and "the thing to do when you feel like that is to pack up and catch a plane to London."

(A second Clive James study is available here.)

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Letter from Columbia University, New York, by Sam Martin

Columbia University is a campus of symmetry. Two libraries draw the axis upon which the university sits. To the south, there is the Nicholas Murray Butler Library, or simply Butler, a square building housing history, literature and philosophy texts, among others. On top of a façade of columns are the names of philosophers, chiselled into the rock: it starts with Homer, Herodotus, and Sophocles, and goes all the way up to Milton, Voltaire, and Goethe. In front of the library sit two fields, and in the corner of each field, a flag pole. A red flag indicates the field is out of bounds. A white flag indicates it is open for use.

Over a road and up forty or fifty steps is the second library. The Low Memorial Library has a column façade, too, but behind and above it sits a dome, which, despite the fact that it was designed as an homage to Rome’s Pantheon, reminds me a little of a yamaka, what with its flatness and position towards the back of the building.

In June and July of each year, when, every night, you can feel the heat of the day escaping the city streets like steam out of a manhole, (drifting, washing over you), Columbia hosts a series of summer programs. I was here for six weeks, to learn how to be a publisher, and to spend a little time in the world.

Our class of one hundred lived in five floors of dorm rooms. There was one man to every four women. Most of the men ended up on the tenth floor, together, but I was down on the seventh, sharing the men’s bathroom with a couple of New Yorkers, a Californian, a Texan, and a boy from Iowa who didn’t look a day over twelve. Every morning when I came into the bathroom to shower, he was there, standing over the sink shaving, with this startled look in his eyes like he couldn’t quite believe he was doing it. He wore his fringe down and straight across his forehead, about a half an inch above these big, startled eyes.

So the girls outnumbered the guys, and it was intimidating, at least for the first few days. At lunch on day one the men formed a posse at one of the tables, like boys grouping together for a game of Cowboys and Indians. We talked about basketball. I like sport, but I don’t really like basketball: as a man of five foot seven inches (on a generous day), I have never really embraced the sport of tall timber. So I kept up with the conversation without really engaging in it, instead spending the time wondering if I would be stuck talking basketball for the next six weeks.

Like all these courses, it took a week or so for people to settle into groups, to work out who was a friend, and who wasn’t really anything. In the meantime, I took long walks around the neighbourhood. Columbia is in the north west of Manhattan, in the suburb of Morningside Heights. It is bordered by 114th Street to the south and 120th Street to the north, and occupies the space between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.

On my first weekend in the city, I walked to Central Park, not knowing that a few projects stood along my chosen route. New York City Housing Authority provides public housing for low to moderate income residents. You can tell a project in Harlem because it’s boxy and brown, and usually made up of multiple identical buildings. It’s often ringed by a black metal fence and a vibe that’s ever so slightly off. Not a bad vibe, necessarily: just a quietness. The sound of the city reduces to a low hum as you walk past the front gate. There’s often a plastic bag flying in the air, a la American Beauty.

It was to be my last weekend of solitude. It is difficult to stay friendless when you’re spending twelve hours a day with like-minded people, even more difficult to stay alone. I fell for someone, as I inevitably would, around the beginning of the third week, when everyone was starting to get familiar. I had met her once before, on the second day, when we went as groups of three to talk to an expert about our resumés. She was in my group, on account of her surname being next to mine. She introduced herself as we waited outside, and we practised shaking hands. I thought her handshake was pretty good, and told her so. In the session, the expert asked me what I thought of the girl’s one-paragraph biography we’d had to write for class.

“It’s not bad,” I said, “but this second sentence is a little convoluted. Plus, I’d be worried that the bit here about how you ‘feel most at home walking the beaches of Cape Cod’ sounds a bit too much like you’re angling for a date. You know. Long walks on the beach and all that. It’s a bit of a cliché.” Three weeks later, in her dorm room, as we lay on her narrow single bed with just the sound of the air-conditioner blasting into the hot summer night, she told me she had left that meeting thinking I was an arrogant wanker, although, being American, she didn’t say wanker, she said “douche”, which I think has more punch to it anyway. I told her I had said it to sound and feel important, because that was usually how I told myself to behave.

The next morning, we sat in front of the Low Library, about halfway up the stairs. Our heads rang, and felt warm and prickly. I was eating a bacon, egg and cheese bagel. She was eating an egg-white and bacon sandwich on rye, and was leaving in an hour to take the train back to Cape Cod for the Fourth of July.

“Looking forward to that feel of the sand between your toes, I bet,” I said.

“You know, only one kind of person stays in New York on The Fourth.”

“Who’s that?”

“Losers with no friends or family.”

“But I’m an Australian.”

“It’s still no excuse.”

I swallowed the last bite of my sandwich, and rubbed my greasy fingers on the sandstone step beside me. It was cool, still early. The sun remained hidden for now behind the buildings in the east. I looked over at her. She sat wearing a pair of sunglasses I’d found on the dancefloor the night before. They were reflective aviators, and they sat halfway down her long, thin nose. Her skin was tan and taut. She didn’t look at me, just looked straight out. Then she spoke. “I’ll be busy this weekend, with my feet on the beach and everything,” she said, still looking straight ahead. “So I probably won’t be thinking about you at all.” She kept looking straight ahead. After staring at her for a few seconds, at her eyes behind the sunglasses, I turned and pulled myself away, followed her gaze down the stairs, down the path between the two fields of green, and up the columns to the names of old men.

The Library at Holland House

Earlier in the year, when I was visiting southern Germany, I had a meeting with someone in the University of Tubingen's Academic Services office. On her wall was a large print of a bombed out library: the photograph, she told me, was taken in London during World War 2, and apparently it really is the case that the people in the photograph have come in to borrow books. (I've since learnt it was taken in 1940; the photographer is unknown.)

In any case, I've decided I'm going to buy the print and put it on my wall, too.

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The Castle in the Pyrenees

Tomorrow morning (4 Sept) I am at the Brisbane Writers Festival, where I will be in conversation with Jostein Gaarder, the author of Sophie's World (1991) and now The Castle in the Pyrenees (originally published in Norwegian in 2008, the English translation this year).

The Castle in the Pyrenees tells the story of a middle-aged couple who meet, after thirty years apart, on the very same hotel balcony (in a fjord in Western Norway) where their intense relationship had ended all those years before, because of a mysterious event, one they promised never to mention again.

Steinn and Solrun have since married, and had children, but after meeting on the balcony they begin an email correspondence, one that leads to a discussion of spiritual beliefs, science, cosmic consciousness, and also, eventually, the mysterious event they had vowed to leave behind them. They have quite different views on all of these topics. But as the correspondence progresses, they seem to draw nearer to each other's position, and they also come closer to facing what troubles them most about their shared past.

It's a thrilling and beautiful work. Like Sophie's World, the novel is a vehicle for philosophical and scientific ideas, but the characterization of Steinn and Solrun is rich and humane: thirty years on, they are still in love, and as unable to escape their feelings for each other as they are the event that divided them. They have never recovered from their break-up, and at the same time they have never really broken up.

The ideas are wide-ranging, but arise naturally through the relationship between the characters. Stein is a scientist who explains the past and his beliefs through the material language of his field, which is climate change; Solrun is convinced that there is life for the soul after death, and wants Stein to believe in something that science doesn't acknowledge.

I got to meet Jostein Gaarder at the opening night of the festival, and the two of us tried not to discuss the novel in too much detail, as far as we could saving the best for tomorrow. But I'm hoping the session will be as much fun as our conversation on the opening night, because the topics deserve it: the relationship between environment and spirituality, storytelling and perception, and love and belief.

Jostein's certainly managed to bring these together in his novel.