On the Importance of Travel: A Selection from Susan Neiman’s Why Grow Up? (2016)

“In the fourth century of the Common Era, Augustine introduced a metaphor: ‘The world is a book, and those who do not travel know only one page.’ Augustine read widely, to follow his own metaphor. The man who recorded his life as a sinner and went on to become a saint was born in today’s Algeria, moved on to Carthage, and lived in Rome and Milan before returning to his homeland to become bishop of Hippo. It’s an estimable itinerary, particularly when compared with others. Even Kant, as we saw, wrote that travel is a good means of broadening one’s knowledge of the world, though it’s hardly surprising that he wrote less enthusiastically about it than others. He also wrote that the right to visit other countries should become a condition of perpetual peace. His Lectures on Pedagogy suggest that schools begin with geography when teaching children, and point out that even small children are fascinated by maps.

One can’t help but wonder: when reading Emile did he have a moment of envy? It’s not an emotion we have reason to ascribe to the sage of Königsberg, though he did describe himself as a melancholic. Could he have sighed with longing when he reached Book V, where Rousseau insists that Emile must travel through Europe for two years, learn two or three of its principal languages in addition to his native one, and see everything there that is truly of interest, whether in nature, in government, in the arts or in men? For Rousseau was explicit: ‘I hold it to be an incontestable maxim that whoever has seen only one people does not know men; he knows only the people with whom he has lived.’

This remains as true in an era when we can watch Korean rap videos as it was in Rousseau’s time. Indeed, perhaps more so: globalization gives us the illusion of knowing other cultures far better than we do. Nor is cultural ignorance confined to the less educated. I’ve met educated Americans who were firmly convinced that the German subway system, which doesn’t require travellers to present a ticket to ride, could not possibly work (it does, relying on an honour system with occasional controls); educated Britons who couldn’t imagine Nazis as ordinary people who might eat apple crumble (they did, and they also drank, slept and defecated like anyone else); educated Germans who were quite certain that Americans were incapable of understanding irony (how should an ironically functional American respond to that?). The fact that some of them were professors is not only a comment on the self-incurred immaturity of scholars . . . .

What counts as rude and what counts as vulgar, which gestures are threatening and which are encouraging, what is kind and what is overbearing will likely be different from one land to the next. If you do not travel you are likely to suppose your own cultural assumptions to make up human reality—for you can only recognize what those assumptions are if you have lived in a place that runs on different ones. Travel is as important for learning about yourself and your own culture as it is for understanding others.

So Rousseau holds travel to be a crucial part of coming of age. But ‘To becoming informed, it is not sufficient to roam through various countries. It is necessary to know how to travel.’ To travel simply to inform oneself is too vague an aim; young people should have a palpable interest in becoming informed. Emile is told to travel in order to study different forms of government, so that he may decide which one he wants to live under. This is not, Rousseau warns, a matter of studying ‘the apparent form of a government disguised by the machinery of administration and the jargon of administrators’ but of going into the country and seeing the government’s effects on people’s lives. (Had the aforementioned American professor observed the way subsidized public transportation actually functions in Germany he could hardly have remained convinced it was impossible.) Emile should examine the ways in which ordinary lives are affected by different political systems, so as to choose a home for his future family ‘where one is always permitted to be a decent man’.

Rousseau is explicit not only about the goal of Emile’s travels but equally about their form. Having crossed the Alps by foot himself, he was adamant that no other kind of travel is better:

‘To travel on foot is to travel like Thales, Plato and Pythagoras. It is hard for me to understand how a philosopher can resolve to travel any other way and tear himself away from the examination of the riches which he tramples underfoot and which the earth lavishly offers to his sight. Who that has some liking for agriculture does not want to know the products peculiar to the climate of the places he has passed through and the way in which they are cultivated? Who that has some taste for natural history can resolve to pass by a piece of land without examining it, a boulder without chipping it, mountains without herborizing, stones without looking for fossils? . . . I see all that a man can see, and depending only on myself, I enjoy all the liberty a man can enjoy.’

Other means of travelling earned Rousseau’s scorn and pity; those who do not walk, sit ‘sadly, like prisoners, in a small, closed-up cage’. . . .

Rousseau was not the last philosopher to cross swathes of Europe by foot. Simone de Beauvoir did it often, both with and without Sartre, and her descriptions of the experience are as rapturous as Rousseau’s. In 1934, for example, she ‘walked solidly for three weeks, keeping away from main roads and taking short cuts through woods and fields. Every peak was a challenge. Eagerly my eyes drank in the magnificent scenery—lakes, waterfalls, hidden gorges and valleys. I carried all my possessions on my back, I had no idea where I would sleep each night, and I was still on the move when the first star pierced the sky . . . . Often I could not bear the thought of being cut off from grass and trees and sky: at least I wanted to keep their scent with me. So instead of taking a room in the inn, I would trudge on another four or five miles and beg hospitality in some hamlet, and the smell of hay would drift through my dreams.’

I can’t shake a feeling somewhere between envy and melancholy when reading such lines, or de Beauvoir’s descriptions of exploring the Coliseum in the Roman starlight, seeking traces of Shakespeare and Dickens in London, playing Greek music on the deck of a boat from Santorini. Their journeys were frequent, long, and intensive in ways that are nearly impossible to replicate now. Those journeys, said Sartre, not only made him wild with delight; they gave him an extra dimension. Such travel undoubtedly brings you closer to everything you left home to see, be it the glories of the natural world or the curiosities of those who people it. But the Coliseum was jammed last time I saw it, and it’s hard to find places where you could walk for three weeks without running into barriers (or shotguns, if you tried to do so in some parts of the United States). Several northern European countries guarantee the right to roam with few restrictions; Scotland, Norway and Estonia are among the nations whose laws protect public access to land. But with increasingly less of it available, and increasingly more travellers to share it with, few of us will be able to imitate Rousseau and de Beauvoir even if we’re so inclined. Travel on foot, like Rousseau’s second-best option, travel on horseback, largely belongs to the past. . . .

It’s easy to hear the grumble: this is all very well for those who can afford it, but few people have the means for that kind of travel. Neither Rousseau nor the young de Beauvoir could afford to travel in style, and each of them told stories of being stuck in foreign towns without a sou, dining on bread and onions or sleeping in abandoned huts. Travelling without money is one thing the internet has made easier since their days. If you’re willing to work for food and lodging, you can pick tea in India, teach Ugandan orphans to dance, staff the office of a chocolate factory in Guatemala, plant grapes in Albania, dig with archaeologists in Siberia, construct sustainable farms in Morocco. Those looking for tamer stuff can care for the very young or very old in Cornwall, or tend a restaurant garden in southern France. These are a fraction of the possibilities found in a few minutes’ search of a single website, and they are open to people of any age. All it costs is a ticket to get there and the decision to reject the voices that tell you such journeys are impossible. Perhaps they do not want you to understand where you came from: for that’s the greatest gift that travel will give you.”—Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age (2016)