I’m home now. Well, I’m as good as home. I’m at my Grandparents in Suffolk. It’s only a week since I left Mongolia, but memories fade fast and this is perhaps my last blog. Overlaid with the flight home (business class, naturally), then two days in Berlin and two more in Amsterdam, the freshness of Mongolia, the brittle brightness of its light, has faded.
Perhaps it’s too early for it to have sunk in, but frankly it doesn’t feel strange. I haven’t experienced culture shock, though I’d been expecting to. It could be that the days in Berlin and Amsterdam tempered the contrast between Mongolia and here, or perhaps it was just so different that I can’t find terms of reference for comparison.
I found in Mongolia a reality so wildly different from Europe that perhaps they’re simply incommensurable. Maybe it’s a mental rift analogous to Levi-Strauss’ ‘savages’: the ones with whom communication is possible have already been ‘spoilt’ by Western contact and are no longer truly primitive, but those ones who were (then) ‘uncontaminated’ were simply so different that mutual understanding was simply impossible. Maybe I just I can’t meaningfully hold in my head such disparate experiences as Mongolia and home in order to compare them.
I was conscious, whilst there, that everything felt normal. Accustomed to hundreds of miles of nothing, I was rarely in awe of the emptiness, rarely surprised by the remoteness or lack of anyone or anything. The beauty was there, but I grew used to it. The traditions of nomad hospitality struck me as, well, just common sense almost. In almost no time after my arrival, Mongolia and its terms of reference had become my norms. Toilets don’t exist, people don’t have running water, everyone eats nothing but cheese and airag in summer, such is life. It’s so normal it no longer feels ‘deprived’ or ‘poor’ or whatever Eurocentric expectations or ideas we might have. It just is.
I had to work to mentally translate events and customs in Mongolia to counterpart equivalents back home to be able to fully appreciate them. I had to imagine a friend cycling across London to pick me up from Heathrow at 5am to fully appreciate Begz’s hospitality. The practise of simply stopping at nomad’s ger and receiving food and drink (albeit of the cheese and airag variety) automatically and without hesitation just never felt extraordinary. But imagine driving down the M1 one day and spotting a nice farmhouse just about the time you’re starting to feel peckish. You pull off the motorway by simply driving over the embankment and across the field, halting outside the door. The family stop whatever they’re doing, comes to greet you and welcomes you inside, making small talk before offering you tea and a few sandwhiches. An hour or so later, you realise you need to be getting on and they fill up your flask with tea for the journey. That’s what it’s like. And in these terms, isn't it extraordinary? You forget roads ever had tarmac and are simply grateful when the stones stop and the track is less bumpy.
I’m now slowly beginning to appreciate the change, the contrast, but it isn’t with Mongolia in itself. It lies in the difference between the state of travelling and the state of home. Rather than the physical differences becoming apparent, it’s the mental. It is, most fundamentally, a sense of loss that I feel myself coming to terms with.
Travelling is existentialism at its most pure: the sense of freedom, of creation, of becoming. No one has asked, but it is in that spirit that I chose the (slightly pretentious) title for my blog – No Yesterdays on the Road. It’s taken from a quote by William Least Heat-Moon, that archetypal evocateur and observer of the small town and the rural in America*.
“What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do - especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”
The sense of freedom inherent in travelling alone (perhaps in what I in my middle-class conceit consider authentic travelling, as opposed to tourism) is not just being by yourself, not just not having no one to tell you what to do, nor anyone to curb your self-centred impulses but, for me at least, arises because there is no one to define your role. When you meet new people, old locals or fellow travellers, you can, in a classically existential manner, create yourself. (This incidentally gives originally unintended extra meaning to the idea of authenticity in travel, though when I first considered it, in Great Expectations, I explicitly ruled out that conception of the term.) You become of that moment, no longer constrained by the roles you played or the opinions others formed of and about you. This is freedom, glorious freedom. I am a relatively independent person, both by accident and design, and this almost Nietzschean will-to-creativity, an untethered freedom of spirit to create itself, speaks to me deeply.
Returning to Britain I can already feel the well worn grooves of who I am here. It is not that they are intrinsically bad, it’s not a matter of being too good for them or somehow superior to those who live their lives of ‘miserable ease’. Not at all. There is no condescension in what I feel – if it sounds like there is it is only because I can’t write well enough. It is just the familiar roles are precisely that – familiar. Perhaps what is scary, what drives my instinct to get out again, is the sure knowledge that the slow fingers of day to day life will creep in again. That I will run my groove until, inevitably, I forget there was anything other than the groove I’m in, the roles I’m playing and I am just those and no more. I will have lost that freedom and, with it, part of myself. Not just the parts that somehow my life here doesn’t reveal, because the self is more dynamic than simply a shape with faces hidden from view., but the very possibility of creating new faces, and in creating, explore more fully the rest.
Now this is all very overblown. And, yes, I know, I know the value of old friends and close family, of the just plain friends, or even acquaintances, of having strong and close relationships with people who really know you. It is precisely this dilemma that settling home reveals. That to travel is to experience real life, and yet real life is lived at home. The mundane grooves of polished roles are precisely what make up real life. That real life happens at home is evidenced by the fact that as much as I love it, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life travelling. I don’t want to wander lonely as a cloud, totally free, because I know myself well enough to know I would be unfulfilled. Life lived in travel feels so raw, so simplified, so direct; it’s a passionate reality - the concomitant of freedom possibly – that leaves a powerful impression. But ceaselessly experiencing the deep emotional swell is not sufficient for a long life full of meaning (however to the contrary it feels whilst travelling).
It is, ultimately, not that I struggle with one particular, difficult feeling upon returning, but that I struggle with the conflict, the duality of emotional reality. Travel is eventually unfulfilling because it offers only one side of the argument: the chaotically new, the constantly creative, the ever evaluative, the ticklist of experiences - the emotional sea. But without any travel, for me home offers only the offer side: the comfortable familiarity, the practised roles, unquestioning habit, the ebb and flow of day to day routine - the emotional shore. Thrown into stark contrast, it’s the anarchic collision of the two that is the source of the listless sense of dislocation that I feel - caught in the breakers between the sea and the shore...
Not that I’d ever have it any other way, of course...
*If, like me, you are something of an Americophile and you haven’t read either of his classics (Blue Highways – a cult classic – and River Horse), then I’d recommend them, especially if you like slow, philosophical observations of the less-explored.
