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picked up a nice book a few days ago, though. benson again. interesting to compare her hundred-years-ago environment to our own
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When I was young, I travelled by mistake, but now I do it on purpose. I go about the world now with three real brass-studded wardrobe trunks instead of two shabby suitcases, with real letters of introduction and letters of credit instead of precarious samples of my intellectual wares, with a real helpful husband instead of in dangerous loneliness. We grown-up travellers are either tourists or empire-builders; continents are things to observe intelligently or to take root in---never things to stumble over.
I used to think that rootlessness meant lack of prejudices---that being foot-loose meant also being mind-loose---(in the best and most refined sense). But now, as an empire-builder myself, I do not believe that travel broadens the mind after all. It seems to me that the further away from the Strand you go, the more your mind shrinks. Often the Empire-builder Home At Last from Vast Spaces has a mind that has shrunk to a mere button. An excellent working button, of course, but small and bony. This button it is that sticks in the cogs of Progress and puts the wheels out of gear. Perhaps Progress is the wrong word; Change would be better. The use of the word *Progress* instead of *Change* crowns novelty with a kind of halo and suggests that there is necessarily virtue in everything new. This is an easy thought, but not always a true one. Actually there must be *some* new ideas that are bound to fail and *some* old ideas that ought to survive. There must be *something* in Diehardism, though it is sad that in the Diehard's view it is always the other fellow who ought to die. ``If I had my way, I'd prop 'em all against a wall and shoot `em. . . .'' This, the Diehard's creed, is heard, I maintain, in the far corners of the earth much more often than in the Strand. If you hear it in the Strand, it is usually said by a homecomer, a colonel of the Indian Army, an Australian shepp expert, a Canadian lumberman, a New Zealand hospital sister, an escaped remittance man from the Argentine, a militant missionary from Africa. *Some one* should die, I admit, and, if necessary, die hard; no doubt an excellent case can be made for propping people up against walls. All I maintain is that this talk of walls comes somehow ill from the lips of persons who live in the Vast Open Spaces. In their minds, at least, there should surely be no walls to prop people up against. If it were true that travel broadens the mind, the mind of the traveller should afford free unhedged pasture for tolerance. But it is not true. For genuine tight-laced insularity, give me the Vast, Unshackled Open Spaces. Freedom, like Charity, begins at home---in the Strand. All the tolerant smiles in the Strand, if placed end to end, as the statiscians say, might reach as far as Heaven. But they would not reach as far as Singapore.
When I crossed seas and visited empire-builders and economic pioneers in their own Vast Spaces, it seemed to me that old heads were always fitted on to young shoulders---shoulders that ought to have been too busy squaring up to adventures ever to allow the heads to acquire that elderly habit of wagging. When I say Vast Spaces, of course I mean Bubbling Well Road, Shanghai, or the Peak Club, Hongkong, or the Army and Navy Stores, Calcutta, or Oakland, California. Travel has a way of shrinking the Vast Spaces, too. But even when there is a little space to spare---on the trackless sea, for instance, or among the sands of the Sahara Desert---that space echoes with voices saying, ``I simply don't know what the world's coming to . . .'' or, ``Say listen, who won the Great War, anyway?'' or, ``Just look at these modern dances---downright immoral . . . they ought to be stopped''.
(cont.)
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Outside of the cities of the world there seem to be really no young people. There are persons between eighteen and forty years old who are either there to get rich or else to do their duty or else to marry other young persons. But there are scarcely any young minds. Scarcely any people who could put the world on its feet at once if only the Prime Minister or the President of the United States would come to them for a new idea, scarcely any people who would dare to suggest that there might be two points of view about a strike, scarcely any people who write bad poetry or shingle their hair or keep their hats on to France. The fox-trot may or may not be as beautiful and as refined as the minuet, but surely somebody in every drawing-room all the world over ought to be willing to lose his temper in the effort to prove that it is. Temper should surely be lost in the cause of to-morrow---not only in the cause of yesterday. Loss of temper is a small sacrifice to keep the world alive. But pioneers in the Vast Spaces of which I speak, never lose their temper, except at bridge, or when the waiter brings a Gin-and-vermouth instead of a Gin-and-bitters, or when the mail train is late. Every bar in the uttermost ends of the earth is full of old young men, with or without beards, saying, in unison with Edward Lear's unwilling ornithologist, ``It is just as I feared. . . .'' The political, moral and social comments on, and solutions of, modern problems that appear in the correspondence columns of the newspapers of Further America, or the outer fringes of English-speaking civilisation, would have seemed stuffy to the late Queen Anne. Rash admirers of Mr. Bertrand Russell dodge about the Limitless horizons in constant danger from lynching.
I suppose the truth is that pioneers and far-away people live so much on change that they hunger for stability as a man fed on sweets might long for bread. Home, they insist, must remain Home still, and they pray to their gods to keep it alive, till they reach it, the Home they remember. ``New things must always fail, and even if they were to succeed, they would still be new and would make for a cold utopian home-coming for us at last.''
Travel, then, I suggest, shrinks and fades the mind as an inferior laundry shrinks and fades the silks that are so bright and ample when we wear them first. People who want to keep their minds broad, flexible and bright, should stay at home---should, above all, keep clear of God's Great Open Spaces. I am myself a melancholy illustration of my own contention, since it is a fact that Life Between the Lone Horizons has left me stiff with unreasonable prejudices. One of these prejudices is that the hermit who deliberately selects the exclusive society of a million trees, an intermittent grizzly bear, a patch of willow-weed and a pair of chickadees, is simply selecting the society of his intellectual equals. Of course the hermit might retort that he is, on the contrary, selecting the Best Society possible---that, in fact, of the Landlord of the Great Outdoors Himself. In this case I can only bow to the hermit's lofty taste, but I must say I am sceptical about the intimacy he claims. A man should not claim friendship with his Social Superiors unless he is really on what I may call ``back porch'' terms with them. Now it always seems to me that this is rather the attitude of the chickadee to the hermit than that of the hermit to his Creator. The hermit puts on his spiritual silk hat and the patent leather oxfords to go and call on the Lord of the Manor, finds Him not at home, and comes back to see a family of field mice making themselves at home on his back porch. Like to like. . . .
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i think there's something in this, though it could be defined a bit more precisely, the driving factors singled out, when approaching from a "modern perspective"
to me there are two of these factors at work. the first is a stagnation of ideas, which, rather like inbreeding, comes from a lack of inter-population drift. travellers, when in countries they do not understand, are cut off by barriers of language and custom from interchanging with locals. and this effect also applies in small towns and communities, almost by definition
the second factor, which she mentions here, is the feeling of being cut-off, alienated, or somehow "homeless", which occurs not because "the inside is small", but rather because "the outside is big". this again obviously can apply to a traveller in an unfamiliar land, though it need not necessarily apply to a small town or community if its members do not have a sense of a community beyond their own that is fundamentally "other". this factor breeds fear
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this impression, that reactionary fear and the stagnation of ideas, are things grown *away* from city life, was prompted, i think, by the time she happened to live in. a point when people still conversed openly with and felt they knew their neighbours, or even passers-by, forming a comfy boundary against "the other", but when global travel had opened up a pathway for exchange of ideas between countries rather like genetic drift.
there's a quote, heard it first, i think from rabih alameddine, though maybe he picked it up elsewhere, describing the modernists as living in something like "a period when time no longer stood still, but when it hadn't yet sped up so much that no one could keep track"
bertrand russell (who she mentions here) talks a lot about the transition into this period, having lived through it. late in his life he was recorded in a few interviews talking about it, that transition. super interesting and worth an evening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb3k6tB-Or8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpohrKaos2o
this in-between liquid-y phase gave communities within cities, and in particular communities of academics at the hearts of those cities, enough people to provide a good base population, but not so many that communities were over-flooded with faces and people could not keep up, as well as a steady stream of ideas, but not so many that nothing could be properly thought through
of course it's not so clean as that, as each person's "ideal" is different, from others or from the self at younger age, and the new boundaries between countries allowed the possibility that they might be closed, creating a great new *other* to fear. in general, though, it was something of an apogee
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a strong sign, i think, that that western world had been accelerated beyond that peak and to a point where very few people could keep up with the world changing around them, is one that DFW lived through and talked a lot about:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGLzWdT7vGc
that is the pretty much universal adoption of irony in us television in the 80s/90s. this follows on the heels of, and is, i think, a broader manifestation of, punk, and its core obsessions of self-isolating from society and condemning "posers". people for whom the world no longer "makes sense". who feel like they're floating with nowhere to tie themselves down, and so retreat into themselves
very much like that traveller in a foreign country that benson mentions above
this effect has only grown with time, eventually consuming everything. for most people now, "home" is nowhere. and with so much fear and such a restricted thought pool, it's natural to grab at whatever comes to hand as something to fight for, and to fight against
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something very interesting about this spread is how it managed even to fossilise much of that academic community from above. so that now there are reactionaries who attack perceived reactionaries in a reactionary manner. who are intolerant of perceived intolerance and dehumanise perceived dehumanisers and so on
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people attack people because people are easy to see, and to shout at
or, if they don't exist or aren't to hand, at least to build an image of
something solid that can be hated
this transience is something that can't be fought so easily
and we live in tiny rooms, all adrift
https://catandgirl.com/one-panel-every-250-years-since-30000-bc/
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