Both writing and traveling require imagination, the ability to see the unseen, a voracious curiosity for the world around you. You have to have a love for gossip, the need to pry into other people’s lives & into the way the natural world works. And, by extension, the need to excavate the past to understand the present. History — which is essentially intellectually-sanctioned gossip, when you come to think of it — is what defines who we are, what makes every place & the creatures that inhabit it unique.
But, most importantly, both endeavors force you to observe the world around you and encourage a particular form of observation that is often aimless & done in silence. The Japanese word boketto describes this aptly. There is no equivalent word in English or any of the other languages I’m familiar with. It signifies the act of staring into space, of gazing vacantly. Related to it are boketto-miru, which means ‘to gawk’, and boketto-suru, which roughly translates to ‘being spaced out’. As in sitting at Eduardo Galeano’s customary table by the window at his favorite cafe in Montevideo while watching a minister from Pepe Mujica’s cabinet chatting with two other people at another table.
As in sitting on the verandah of a cottage in the Quaker-founded Monteverde Reserve in Costa Rica, watching heliconias & orchids dancing in the downpour & barely noticing the Frenchman next door doing the same. As in watching the fog roll in from the Pacific while sitting on a bench on the grounds of a hermitage seemingly hewn into the steep slope of the Santa Lucia mountains rising out of the ocean near Big Sur. As in sitting on a parapet by the La Aurora cable-car station in a relative poor comuna above Medellin — the kind that Pablo Escobar once ruled over — feet dangling over the wall, looking at the shimmering lights of the city in the valley below, while local families mill about, stealing furtive glances at the stranger amongst them, children asking their parents in hushed tones if I’m a foreigner. As in standing at the railway station of Villefranche-sur-Mer, looking out into the sea and finding myself agreeing with the Impressionist masters that there’s something magical in the quality of light in this part of the world.
All of them describe the immersive, wondrous, clueless and meditative qualities of observation & the contentment that accompanies it. This meditative, contemplative aspect of boketto is best exemplified in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts, one of the most poetic renderings of travel memories I’ve read. Without boketto, there is not much to feed the imagination. And without imagination there’s not much to feed life.
The related word, boke, means simple-mindedness, of being unaware. But in photography (often written as bokeh) this helpless trait is turned on its head to represent the out of focus areas in a picture, the areas that direct one’s attention, by their deliberately diffused presence, to the subject in focus. The more blurry & soft the transitions between elements in the background covered by the boke, the more aesthetically pleasing the photograph is, the more “3 D”-like qualities it imparts to the main subject. Photographers spend hundreds — even thousands — of dollars on lenses in pursuit of the perfect boke.
To travel & to write is to wander through that kind of boke and feeling elated at the serendipitous discovery of an interesting subject when it unexpectedly & suddenly heaves into view. Like an addict, with every discovery, I want more. I want to wander farther afield: to hear another language I don’t understand, to fumble with another unfamiliar currency, to meet people who haven’t seen many people like me, to photograph more obscure landscapes. The more I wander, the more insistent the wanderlust becomes. Movement, whether physical or imaginary, is life-affirming. It is our natural state, an elemental instinct. Bruce Chatwin, known for his restless wanderings around the world — and sometimes embellished retelling of those travels — believed it’s in our genes to wander. Humans have been nomads longer than they’ve led settled lives. And even since we’ve ‘settled down’ we’ve moved across vast stretches of ocean & land. For humankind stasis is suffocating, even fatal.
When I’m not actually traveling — which is most of the time — I dream of the places I want to go to, and long for the places I’ve been to. In Portuguese there’s a word for this nostalgic longing: saudade. “When I’m not there I long for it,” Teju Cole, the Nigerian-American writer, writes in Blindspot. “But what I long for is the feeling of being an outsider there, and soon after, the feeling of leaving again so I can continue to long for it.”
I suffer from near-constant saudade.
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I haven’t written much in over a decade, but I have continued to be a voracious listener of stories. One of life’s great pleasures is listening to someone tell a story, be it about themselves, about someone else, an incident nearly lost in the fog of memory, or a tall tale they’ve made up. To write you have to be able to listen and imagine the world from the narrator’s perspective.
Traveling, like writing, is about listening to stories: of places and people. It is not just about taking selfies at monuments & walking along famous boulevards or drinking pina coladas at beachfront resorts. Teju Cole, in an interview on National Public Radio, said, “A place can easily be reduced to its cliches. But the reality is that these are places where people live and have ordinary human emotions and have the burden of history on them.” The real reward of traveling is in understanding both the collective history of the place and the personal stories of those who live there. Without these, all we see are buildings — some old and crumbling, some modern –, soulless museums, anonymous residents, gaudy souvenir shops & touts who hustle to make the next sale to an eager, camera-toting visitor. The more I travel, the more these tourist spots resemble each other and start to meld into one another.
So when I travel I wander aimlessly away from tourist destinations, in neighborhoods where people live and gather. Most people in the world are kind to strangers and will accommodate their awkward attempts at finding their way around and forgive the odd faux pas. So I seek out locals who will spend a few minutes talking to me. And a surprising number do: more so in warmer places than in the colder latitudes. They generously tell me about their town, their country, their lives. We discuss politics, the places I’ve been to, the history of peoples and their migrations, but also more mundane matters like what the best transportation options are to go to my next destination. Sometimes they show me around. Occasionally they invite me home to meet their families. There have also been a few instances when people I’ve met along the way have told me about personal problems, things they wouldn’t tell their friends and family very easily, the anonymity that an itinerant stranger provides serving as a convenient, temporary confessional.
But the benefits of that anonymity cuts both ways. It liberates you, the traveler, to reinvent yourself continually, unfettered by the constrictions of your normal life, to be open to possibilities, to be more accepting of your vulnerabilities & inadequacies, to entrust yourself in the hands of strangers, therefore to be more humble and receptive to someone who might reveal to you a little bit more about yourself. You have the luxury of starting over in a new place, even if only temporarily.
But it comes at a cost: dislocation. Cole writes: “Not only am I displaced when I’m at home, I’m doubly displaced when I travel.” Like him, I’m displaced many times over. A childhood spent moving every couple of years, learning & forgetting more languages than I know, getting used to the feeling of being the outsider looking in. While the disadvantages of a peripatetic childhood are all too obvious, being an outsider no matter where in the world I am gives me an uncommon vantage point that comes from being simultaneously at home & not fitting in. It is only with age that I’ve come to appreciate the power of this perspective. I’ve been fortunate in more ways than one, but the fortune I cherish the most — or rather, I’ve co-opted — is my status as a perpetual outsider who, by virtue of his otherness, is forced to gawk at others. Sometimes open-mouthedly, but most of the time in a slightly more socially acceptable manner.
Which brings us back to the word: boketto-miru.
