GLOBETROTTING E-Book

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 168

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'There was nowhere to go but everywhere.' Jack Kerouac Following on from the huge success of Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking and Sauntering: Writers Walk Europe, Duncan Minshull, brings together the recorded footfalls of over fifty walker-writers who have travelled the world's seven continents. From the 1500s to current times come a memorable band of explorers and adventurers, scientists and missionaries, pleasure-seekers and literary drifters recalling their experiences and asking themselves a compelling question – why travel this way in the first place? With contributions from Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Anthony Trollope, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, Vernon Lee, Sarah H. Bradford, Rabindranath Tagore, D. H. Lawrence, Isabella Bird, Katharine Mansfield, Rachel Carson, Helen Garner, Jean Pierre Clébert, Colin Thubron, William Boyd and many more, Globetrotting takes us across the streets of London, Rome, Melbourne, Cairo, Kyiv and Kabul; through the frozen wastes of Antarctica; along the pilgrim paths of Japan; into the jungles of Ghana; around the Great Wall of China.

Leseprobe

Notting Hill Editions is an independent British publisher. The company was founded by Tom Kremer (1930–2017), champion of innovation and the man responsible for popularising the Rubik’s Cube.

After a successful business career in toy invention Tom decided, at the age of eighty, to fulfil his passion for literature. In a fast-moving digital world Tom’s aim was to revive the art of the essay, and to create exceptionally beautiful books that would be cherished.

Hailed as ‘the shape of things to come’, the family-run press brings to print the most surprising thinkers of past and present. In an era of information-overload, these collectible pocket-size books distil ideas that linger in the mind.

GLOBETROTTING

Writers Walk the World

–

Introduced and edited by Duncan Minshull

Sit as little as possible.

– Friedrich Nietszche

There was nowhere to go but everywhere.

– Jack Kerouac

Contents

– Title Page –– Epigraph –– Introduction –Part One: Setting Out on Seven Continents– BAYARD TAYLOR – What a World was Seen Afoot! – LADY ANNE BARNARD – Old Soles – MATSUO BASHO – The Vast Journey Ahead – CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS – Flocks of Parrots Conceal the Sun – IDA LAURA PFEIFFER – Arrival in Rio – ROALD AMUNDSEN – Laughter and Chaff – E. J. BANFIELD – A Road is Born on Dunk Island Part Two: En Route– MARK TWAIN – A Dandy in Geneva – VERNON LEE – The Compost of Rome – JULIA PARDOE – Jog-trotting – MIRZA ABU TALEB KAHN – Dublin Girls – FRANZ HESSELL – Berlin Empathy – HERMAN MELVILLE – Constantinople, From the Top – EDITH WHARTON – Good-by to Fez – ANTHONY TROLLOPE – Kiss-in-the-ring, Port Elizabeth – MARY GAUNT – The Lonely Man’s Walk – RENE CAILLIE – Baobab Leaves for a Sore Foot – CHARLES DARWIN – Words Fail, Mauritius – WILLIAM LITHGOW – Dimples – LUCIE DUFF – Her Hand on his Shoulder in Cairo – RICHARD BURTON – Meccan Beat – RAJA SHEHADEH – Chorus at A’yn Qenya – MICHELE ROBERTS – St Olga – GEORGY GAPON – Towards the Narva Gate – COLIN THUBRON – Towards Lenin – TARAN N. KHAN – The Look of Love – MRS R. M. COOPLAND – Floral Beauties of Hindoostan – RABINDRANATH TAGORE – Soul and Stomach – BEATRIX BULSTRODE – The Passing of their God – WILLIAM EDGAR GEIL – At the Great Wall – ISABELLA BIRD – Through Old Japan – LAFCADIO HEARN – Warblings – THOMAS JEFFERSON – Why Walk? – JOHN CHARLES FREMONT – Bombus in the Rocky Mountains – SARAH WINNEMUCCA HOPKINS – Flower Girls, Rock Girls – FREDERICK WHYMPER – The Stars had Nothing Else to Do – SARAH H. BRADFORD – Follow the North Star – JAMES PHINNEY BAXTER – Quedaquae – ETHEL LYNN – San Francisco to New York on a Wager – D. H. LAWRENCE –Hay Frutas?– RACHEL CARSON – Through a Ghost Forest – FOREST WALKERS IN SOUTH AMERICA –– ERNEST SHACKLETON – Silver Pathway, South Georgia – KATHERINE MANSFIELD – Into the Bush – DORIS PILKINGTON GARIMARA – Runaways of the Western Desert Part Three: Final Steps on Seven Continents– JEAN-PAUL CLEBERT – Lulled – ESLANDA GOODE ROBESON – Never the High Grass – ALEXANDER KINGLAKE – Own Armchair – FRANCES TROLLOPE – Home Alive – WILLIAM BOYD – This Was Rio – EDITH M. RONNE – Ushered to the Pole – HELEN GARNER – Forty Minutes for the Remains of My Life – Globetrotting Gobbets –– Acknowledgements –– Permissions –– About the Author –– Copyright –

DUNCAN MINSHULL

– Introduction –

In a volume preceding this one (called Sauntering: Writers Walk Europe), Théophile Gautier wandered the ancient cemetery of Pera, Istanbul, and slowed by a tomb ‘diapered with azure and gold’. Here, he told us, he might light a ‘chibouque’, have a coffee, and gaze awhile … and so ended his rather short walking story, caught in a hundred footsteps, or less.

But it’s tempting to think what lay behind the writer’s gaze, related to things pedestrian. Was it not a gaze beyond the walls of Pera to points farther flung? To footsteps across other parts of Europe. Across Africa and Asia, the Americas and Antarctica, and Australasia too. Footsteps across all sorts of land and cityscapes, in all sorts of climes and times; be they solitary, paired, or grouped. Footsteps that suggest a host of reasons for leaving the sedentary life behind.

If Gautier’s thoughts were not expansive, were just about having a smoke in the ‘weird moonlight’ of a certain spot, then fine: let’s leave him there … loitering. But an attempt has been made to find the farther points, and they form the pages of the book you hold: Globetrotting: Writers Walk the World. The first are planted by the banks of the River Thames, and the last are laid down in a suburb of Melbourne – yes, there are many, many footsteps to come. Their trajectories are caught in extracts from essays and letters, diaries and memoirs. Plus, the rhythm of walking gets us singing on occasion, so expect a sprinkling of songs within earshot. It’s almost sixty journeys done!

Which meant this editor’s first task was to guide them towards a direction of travel; towards a narrative shape. Allowing you, the walker reader (for I’m betting you walk as much as you read), to make your way through three sections familiarly trod. At least you know where you are with the promise of ‘Setting Off’, the joys of being ‘En Route’, and the fatigue of ‘Final Steps’. And according to some writers, the world’s seven continents wait to be ‘strolled’ and ‘scampered’, ‘roamed and ‘rambled’, ‘tramped’ and ‘trotted’ in the sections mentioned. I began with Europe, put Africa second, Asia third, and so forth, to show how our footsteps move across contrasting ground; in the heat, the cold, and the temperate; in 1492 and in 2010 – as a searcher of the New World steps upon Bird Rock, Bahamas, ‘wandering for good water’, beguiled by the wildlife; and as a more recent figure records a different kind of wildlife – a human, urban one – on the streets of pre-war Kyiv.

It’s actually mid-collection when Thomas Jefferson asks the question any walker reader would ask: why do we walk?

He provides a reasonable and limited answer – for fresh air and exercise; ah, leaving the desk and taking to the road is good for everyone. But if a message is due, it’s that wherever the road leads, fresh air and exercise are only the tip of it. Early in ‘Setting Off’, barely into full stride, we learn how the world opens up on foot; and as we pass through it, our senses become sharpened. Aiming, say, for the ‘tip-top’ of Table Mountain, the sights are far-ranging (Cape Town stretching below) and near to (the little bits of leather from long abandoned boots). And somewhere else entirely: hear the sounds on the breeze: the chants of coffee-bean carriers as they lug loads around Rio de Janeiro. Old chants to clear the streets of the traffic – of the dawdlers and the dalliers, and the newly arrived.

Sights and sounds; and a smell and a touch (the ‘scent’ of sugar trees, the ‘chill’ of late night, in remote Japan). And as the senses soar, so does the mental side of walking intensify. In ‘Setting Off’, we witness how physical movement frees the mind to wander; often brightly, to those farther points. Heading north from the aforementioned Thames, a stranger describes how life on the thoroughfare overwhelms him; how this ‘human Niagara’ carries along all shapes and hues imaginable. Who are the people of the pavements? he asks aloud, slowing to a halt, taking stock, and his confusion turns to awe eventually.

Another time in ‘Setting Off’, it’s to the polar regions: to where a small group ponders the big whiteness, prior to leaving camp to map out the territories. And to be engulfed, they conclude. But the trek will imbue each man with a sense of comradeship in extremis; as if walking as one into the whiteness … into a state of equanimity … into a state of collective well-being. The leader of the group observes this special ‘spirit’ emerging: ‘If anyone thinks Wisting, Hassel, and Bjaaland took a solemn farewell from of us who stayed behind – no. They left the tents at 2.30 a.m., and vanished in their directions amid much laughter and chaff together!’

That leader was Roald Amundsen, the first to reach both poles, who traverses the sections ahead with a number of fellow explorers and adventurers. They cross the snows and the sands, and climb the peaks, for a variety of reasons: to claim land for self or nation, to find new species, to settle old scores (and regarding the last, you’ll meet a ‘fine figure of a man in sombrero and leggings’, admired by the hoboette, Ethel Lynn). They make their locations on foot of course, because whatever the age, an animal or an engine only gets you so far – then the real story begins. And don’t they know how fitting, how heroic, it can be to travel like this, even if plain necessity is the driver.

The more I guided people into Globetrotting, the more I found they spoke as types. Why walk, and who walks? Yes, there are the explorers and adventurers, with specific aims and routes; and there is someone quite the opposite – quite the polar opposite – who doesn’t hike or climb or wade. He or she is the stroller. Out and about in the name of curiosity and quirky quest. Where the walk itself becomes a creative act, the subject matter committed to the page. Théophile Gautier was one of these types; and soon Mark Twain, observing the antics of a ‘dandy’ in Geneva, and Edith Wharton, attuned to the moods of after-hours Fez. And it is Michèle Roberts strolling deeper into the ‘blue dusk’ of Kyiv – a merry, saucy, bold Kyiv – as she seeks the spirit of its historic protector, Saint Olga.

‘Let’s go … somewhere’, says D. H. Lawrence in ‘En Route’. He duly ‘strays’ for miles in rural Mexico with his wife Frieda; amused to be seen as ‘potential brigands’ by passers-by and content not to find ‘fresh frutas’ immediately, so the quest can continue into late afternoon. The novelistic eye is keen (‘Rosalino’s pink tongue swelled out his throat like a cobra’), ditto the ear (‘the deep, musical volley of Adios!’); and on such a baking Sunday as this, the journey reveals an enticing truth to the two super strollers: you should wander at ease, and live in the moment looking for oranges, because ‘the next five minutes are far enough away’.

The world is a Niagara of these types – the sightseers and the fun lovers – ambling in all eras across piazzas and gardens and waterfronts; and there’s lots of fun in following them. But it’s inevitable that for every Twain, Wharton, and Lawrence (and every Herman Melville, Franz Kessell and Mrs Coopland), other figures have taken a dark and dangerous turn. What is more, they had little choice but to go this way.

The world is also a Niagara of paraders, and pageanteers, and marchers, claiming the streets in celebration, in agitation, – or worse. For only suffering sends a mass of men, women, and children towards the Narva Gate in Moscow, singing ‘Hurrah … God Save Thy People … Death or Freedom’. And history repeats itself, decades on, same city, as larger crowds are seen to ‘shuffle’ past the sarcophagus of a dictator bathed in brilliant light; more muted this time, but exuding the Narva gloom and disquiet. Again, the people are walking to what exactly? What kind of destiny?

On a different continent, North America, the Northern Star burns brightly overhead. Fixed and friendly-looking for any adventurer or mapper to plot a course by. But the star guides another traveller: one with little choice but to flee the deep south for the urban north. Which involves ‘walking by night, hiding by day’, with repeated rendition of the Promised Land to keep all hopes alive. It is Harriet Tubman proceeding so; a ‘runaway slave’ and renowned social activist in later years. Likewise, Molly, Daisy and Gracie dart amongst the dunes and woods of Western Australia, runaways from the confines and cruelties of the government settlements. The girls proceed to track their own lodestar – row upon row of rabbit-proof fence – in order to find a spot that will suggest safety.

And what the reader will find in such accounts is something remarkable. Here the protest march and the escape are acts of desperation. Any thoughts on, or delights in, the walk are irrelevant, as only results matter. But the hard miles covered in Moscow, the Deep South, and western Australia, do recall other aspects: a growing kinship, an affinity with environment, and, in the girls’ case, an eye for the fantastical out there – was it really a ‘marbu’? asks Molly. She refers to the creature from the Dreamtime, thudding along the trail … better hide behind a banksia tree!

The ‘marbu’ is a figment of Molly’s imagination. But he’s still one guided into Globetrotting who belies an obvious type, and long may he thud. Outlier and often singular, you’ll see others like him – somewhere. Perhaps Paris, where the streets are roamed at night by a figure re-cast as ‘vagabond’. In this guise he is unbound, an onlooker of everything the city has to offer, refined and depraved. At night, in a forest clearing in Ghana, another one drinks, paces his veranda, and if he can’t make out the floorboards, knows it’s time to hit the sack – ‘the lonely man’s walk’, he admits, with a smile. Whilst Julia Pardoe decides she has to join a chain of ‘jog-trotters’, heading to a rather strange ceremony, at a point close to midnight, in the Belém suburb of Lisbon.

The vagabond, the lonely man, and Julia Pardoe. Each navigates the darkness alone. Which in certain parts of the world is truly singular; though worth it. In places lamplit, or half lit, or unlit, the senses have to re-adjust: the sights are strangely rendered, even the familiar ones, and the sounds accentuated, carrying far on the night air. The nocturnal walker reacts differently as well: is charmed and mystified; maybe lost, maybe fearful. The hours of transformation surely enthral this trio. As do similar hours for Raja Shehadeh on the hills of A’yn Qenya, Palestine; and Rabindranath Tagore on the sands of coastal Bengal; and Isabella Bird in the distant town of Lebungé, Japan.

And in ‘Final Steps’, in the twilight too, historian and adventurer, Alexander Kingslake, climbs a plateau to gaze back and consider his wanderings through the dusty quarters of Asia. There’s little of the laughter and chaff experienced in those other, whiter wastes, but you sense the contented fatigue here. It’s a fine moment to come to a halt:

I used to walk towards the East, confiding in the print of my foot as a guide for my return … But wherever we wander, we still remain tethered by the chain that links us to our kind; and so I began to return – to return, as it were, to my own gate … reaching high ground at last, I could see with delight, the fire of our small encampment. The Arabs were busy with their bread; Mysseri was rattling the cups; and two or three yards from the fire my tent stood prim and tight with its open portal and welcoming look – a look like ‘the own armchair’ of our lyrist’s ‘sweet Lady Anne.’

And I hope, reader walker you will find an armchair in a certain spot, have a coffee and a chibouque (it’s a pipe of sorts), and follow these many, many footsteps. Made by compelling types. Across the seven continents. In the daylight and the darkness. Then, who knows, some of the stories told might just persuade you to open a gate and get going somewhere in the world … after a while, that is.

Happy reading. And trotting.

Setting Out on Seven Continents

I have to report that one fine morning the desire to take a walk came over me.

– Robert Walser

BAYARD TAYLOR

– What a World was Seen Afoot! –

Skiffs from the shore pulled alongside, and after a little quarrelling, we were deposited in one, with a party who desired to be landed at the Tower Stairs. The dark walls frowned above us as we disembarked from the water and walked to an open square on the outside of the moat. The laborers were about commencing work, and there was noise and bustle in the streets, particularly when we set off to Whitechapel, part of the great thoroughfare, extending through the heart of London to Westminster Abbey and the Parliament buildings. Further on, through Leadenhall Street, Fleet Street and the Strand – and what a world was seen afoot!

Here come the ever-thronging, ever-rolling waves of life, pressing and whirling in their tumultuous career. Here, day and night, pours the stream of human beings, seeming amid the roar and din and clatter of the passing vehicles, like the tide of some great combat. How lonely it makes one to stand still for a moment, and feel that of all the strollers which divide around him, not one of them knows or cares for him. And what does he know of the thousands who pass him by? How many bearing the impress of god-like virtue, or hiding beneath a goodly countenance, have a black heart of crime? How many fiery spirits, all glowing with hope for the yet unclouded future, are brooding over a darkened and desolate past in an agony of despair? There is a sublimity in this human Niagara that makes one look at his own race with something of awe.

From Views Afoot, Or, Europe Seen with Knapsack and Staff, 1852

LADY ANNE BARNARD

– Old Soles –

It is 3,500 feet in height, and reckoned three miles to the top from the beginnings of the ascent; and the path is squinted in a zigzag way which increases the measurement of the walk. So Mr. Barrow and I, with our followers, set off. We reached the foot of the mountain on horseback, and dismounted when we could ride no more – indeed, nothing but a human creature or an antelope could ascend such a path.

First we had to scramble up the side of a perpendicular cascade of a hundred feet, the falls of which must be very fine after the rains, and the sides of which were shaded with myrtles, and sugar trees, and geraniums.

We continued our way through a low foliage of pretty heaths and evergreens; the sun was at last beginning to beat down on our heads. It made me smile to see signs of human footsteps, in the numbers of old soles and heels of shoes which I came across here and there. I suppose relics have lain time immemorial, as leather, I believe, never decays, or not for a great while. It proved that the Dutchmen told fibs when they said that few people had tried to get up this mountain.