Remember when entering a debate meant counter-arguing an idea to reach a new level, and not just raising the tone in a tantrum so you could finally call the other party an imbecile? Or pedophile?
I decided to resurrect those good times, those of interesting discussions, healthily provoked by the brilliant writer Julián Fuks. In his most recent column on Ecoa, from UOL, he writes: “You won’t even be able to leave the house by traveling the whole world.” I already felt provoked!
Almost ten years ago we discussed in this same space what it means to travel. I’m not sure if we’ve come to any solid conclusions myself, but I think we can agree that what we seek as a tourist is always an experience we don’t have at home.
The new, the different, the adventure of the unknown — all this is, for me, the fuel of any journey. Yet perceptively, Fuks, recently revisiting Montreal, realizes, not for the first time: “The streets of the world are more and more alike.”
Still, due to advances in technology, the author regrets the concern “that we are all too close, that we no longer know how to distance ourselves, about not becoming inaccessible to excessive and constant appeals”.
These are reasonable arguments and, I confess, have crossed my mind as well. The first of them, that the cities are very similar, seems to be a contemporary sensation, but it is the result of a long civilizing process.
The same that makes Hoi An, in Vietnam, a branch of imperialist China. Or Ephesus, today in Turkey, a shadow of the glorious conquests of ancient Rome. That connects Andalusia to the Middle East. Oh! And also what makes us feel so at home when we go from Salvador to Lisbon — or even to Goa, India.
Conquering, for imperialist or capitalist reasons, means marking territory… but also giving some space to local culture. At least the most successful assimilations. And I like this.
But then there’s the issue of isolation, also raised by Fuks, and my defense is to say that this only depends on a very personal decision. It is up to each of us to choose to disconnect.
Yes, I’ve had “blackouts” and communication in Papua New Guinea, Namibia, the Gobi desert (Mongolia) or even in the middle of nowhere in Patagonia. But have you tried turning off your cell phone for 24 hours in Paris, New York, Tokyo?
What a pleasure it is to reconnect the next day and see that, of the 376 WhatsApp messages (and as many emails and directs), only three or four are really worth responding to!
Fuks, a writer with a nomadic soul, knows this. Which doesn’t stop him from nudging us with his remarks about the visit to Montreal: a fascinating city, which I haven’t been to for some time, and which offers, you see, in its cosmopolitan streets, a salvation for such concerns.
“I feel that something in me calms down,” writes Fuks in his last paragraph. “All the streets in the world may look alike one day. People don’t.” And he concludes: “There is something in people that resists.”
In the book about my first trip around the world, from 2004, I ended by writing: “I don’t travel to see monuments. I travel to see people”. And in a way I see that both I and Fuks, who is someone I have long respected and admired, have come to more or less the same conclusion.
What really takes us far from home is never where we go, but who we meet there. And, of course, how we choose to engage with them.
It is from there that friendships, loves, families, communities, cities, countries, civilizations are born.
