12 gânduri de la Pico Iyer ce dezvăluie dorul de călătorii

Pico Iyer este unul dintre cei mai cunoscuți și apreciați scriitori contemporani de călătorie. Dorul de aventură l-a animat de mic, după cum mărturisea. Născut în Marea Britanie, la Oxford, din părinți indieni, a ajuns la șapte ani, cu familia, în California, moment în care a început să simtă vraja locurilor necunoscute și îndepărtate. La nouă ani, a ales să meargă la școală în Anglia și timp de o decadă a călătorit singur cu avionul între Europa și America.

Este o încântare să-l asculți – este invitat deseori la conferințele TED Talks – și să-i descoperi scrierile pline de povești spuse cu savoare. Nu cred că au fost traduse în limba română, eu nu am găsit, însă cărțile lui pot fi găsite în limba engleză, limbă în care scrie, de altfel. Dacă nu l-ai descoperit sau ai citit destul de puțin Pico Iyer, pe website-ul lui – picoiyverjourneys.com se numește – găsești numeroase articole, inclusiv fotografii făcute de el.

Pentru a-ți face poftă să mergi și să explorezi mai mult lumea călătoriilor lui Pico Iyer, am adunat o mini-colecție de 12 gânduri, fragmente din scrieri și conversații. Înițial, m-am gândit să le traduc, însă m-am răzgândit și le-am lăsat exact cum le-a scris el, adică în limba engleză.

În tot ceea ce scrie, dezvăluie sentimentul lui față de dorul de călătorie și nevoia de liniște, cât de mult ne poate schimba și influența călătoria (în bine, să sperăm), de unde vine această vrajă eternă, de ce călătorim.

12 gânduri de la Pico Iyer ce dezvăluie dorul de călătorii

I really began to feel that if you were lucky enough to walk around the candlelit temples of Tibet or to wander along the seafronts in Havana with music passing all around you, you could bring those sounds and the high cobalt skies and the flash of the blue ocean back to your friends at home, and really bring some magic and clarity to your own life. Except, as you all know, one of the first things you learn when you travel is that nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it.
The art of stillness

So, in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still.
The art of stillness

And for more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul.
Where is home?

And I’ve always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign is that it slaps you awake. You can’t take anything for granted. Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked “on.” Suddenly you’re alert to the secret patterns of the world. The real voyage of discovery, as Marcel Proust famously said, consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes. And of course, once you have new eyes, even the old sights, even your home become something different.
Where is home?

Where you come from now is much less important than where you’re going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It’s the place where you become yourself.
Where is home?

It’s not our experiences that form us but the ways in which we respond to them.
The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.
Why We Travel

So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake.
Why We Travel

Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love. We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation. We even may become mysterious — to others, at first, and sometimes to ourselves — and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far as when he doesn’t know where he is going.”
Why We Travel

Travel, then, is a voyage into that famously subjective zone, the imagination, and what the traveler brings back is — and has to be — an ineffable compound of himself and the place, what’s really there and what’s only in him.
Why We Travel

…home lies in the things you carry with you everywhere and not the ones that tie you down.
The Man Within My Head

There are, of course, great dangers to this, as to every kind of freedom, but the great promise of it is that, traveling, we are born again, and able to return at moments to a younger and a more open kind of self. Traveling is a way to reverse time, to a small extent, and make a day last a year — or at least 45 hours — and traveling is an easy way of surrounding ourselves, as in childhood, with what we cannot understand.
Why We Travel

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