emiliana's blog

Overwrought by a morning of hard work, I set out for a nap after a small portion of biscotti and a cup of herbal tea, as usual. Afterwards, instead of following my routine of going to the study for continuation of productive work in the afternoon, I ventured out for a short walk around the neighborhood for some fresh air.
 
I knew my neighborhood very well as I have resided here for decades, since early childhood.  I never had any desire for the outside for I had everything I had wanted at home. I dedicated my life to writing and have become the world-renowned writer. I'd gained honor, dignity, and prosperity, all of which I'd been determined to achieve.
 
During the walk, however, I saw the strangest red-haired man with a contorted face I have never seen before. Although I tried to forget about such an unpleasant sight, I couldn’t. I had hard time going to sleep even. The red creature came upon me with such suddenness and passion like a seizure and a hallucination. My heart throbbed with terror, yet with an inexplicable longing to travel.
 
For the first time in my sixty years of life, I craved for a change in scenery and a sense of freedom, and before long, I found myself sipping coffee on the train without any sort of plan of where to go or how long I’d be gone for.
 
I was not used to this new way of life for I had been used to a strict daily routine, always getting up early in the morning for a cup of tea and biscuits and morning work, light lunch and a short nap, and then the long afternoon work that ended right before bedtime. I toiled with a great amount of concentration and as a result I have become one of the most prolific writers, not to mention many honors and recognition my works have received.
 
Fortunately, however, my worry of not knowing what to do quickly got resolved when I saw the most beautiful girl in a café in Barcelona. She was playing the violin with such vitality and passion I never knew before. This is IT, I thought. I was astonished anew, yes, startled, at the godlike beauty of this girl, whose name I later found out was Daisy, as well as the dazzling intensity of life she carried herself with as she made the most glorious music.
 
From that day, no, from that moment on, I followed the footsteps of this absolute beauty and brilliance. Daisy was “on holiday,” crisscrossing all of Europe, constantly moving from one city to another; she was usually with various gentlemen or lady friends. In every new destination, she dutifully fulfilled her tasks as a tourist with an exceptionally high spirit, visiting churches, palaces, and shopping for souvenirs, and always looked for the ideal restaurants, often dining earlier than suppertime or returning back to the one she dined before.  She usually carried a map and a camera with her, and I did so too. As a tourist, I had the privilege of carrying a camera everywhere and taking as many photographs. Through the lenses, I could zoom in on her when I found myself at a difficult distance.
 
It wasn’t long till when I realized that Daisy was the talk of the town and everywhere else she went. The problem was that she had not been following the code of conduct for a young lady like herself. It was hard to tell whether she was aware of that her behavior was disapproved. She seemed careless, fully absorbed in her own life, travelling from one place to another, engaging with one gentleman than another. Whether she was purely innocent like her name suggests or somehow intentional, I had no idea. All I knew was that she enjoyed wearing red and looked her best in it. That she was a beautiful American girl, liberal, high-spirited, full of natural liveliness.
 
One day, in Rome, she met an Italian gentleman of good character and stature, and the two would stay out late, raising eyebrows on the established American expatriates. It was quite a scandal and an embarrassment on the American community in Italy when the gentleman invited her to stay at his cottage in the countryside, in the southern part of Italy, by the most beautiful scenic beach.
 
It was literally the heaven on earth. In this paradise, Daisy would swim in the cool, walk along the sandy beach, have fresh seafood, and talk with her friend. Fully exposed to the grandeur of nature, I could see the real Daisy, even more brilliant and beautiful and pure, away from all the critical, judging eyes.
 
I also found consolation in nature, a sense of being home I have never known before, in the bright sunshine, in the white sand, and in the clear cool water.  My time there was the most beautiful and rejuvenating. All time had stopped and I couldn’t care less about anything other than myself being fully absorbed by light. Out in nature and in the presence of the most perfect beauty, I was so inspired every moment to write. My pen just moved and wrote the most genius stories ever as I took the beauty in Daisy and Mother Nature as my model.
 
Daisy aspired to be a writer. She would write non-stop but without much success. Her close friend and mentor encouraged her to take time and get experience, just like her hero Kerouac did. Seeking adventure and any sort of experience, she had set out to travel.
 
On the fourth day in the earthly paradise, however, the most bizarre and unfathomable happened. Daisy had vanished. Her disappearance was on the newspaper and the police got involved after her Italian friend called the cops. Daisy, my beautiful Sputnik Sweetheart, had managed to cross over to the other world, I figured. Although she wouldn’t know my existence like I knew hers (our eyes only met once throughout the entire journey), she had been my travelling companion all along.

As I packed my belongings, with a renewed sense of life I never knew for all my life, it came to me. It wasn’t Daisy who had vanished into the other side. I had stepped into the real world, where real life is. I stopped tailing Daisy of immense beauty and passion, a young girl who taught me the greatest lesson.
 
 
Exclusive Interview with the International Bestseller:
 
Q: How does the story relate to your primary interest and expertise in travel studies? Could you name some literary allusions?
 
A: This story is the first of my works in which I painstakingly intended on using various allusions and themes from various travel fictions, some of which are my favorite novels. The narrator is very much like Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a writer who lived in his hometown for years, working hard for honor and dignity, never known fun or pleasure or passion before he sets out abroad, and sort of stalks a beautiful youth. In Mann’s story, Aschenbach is raptured by the beauty of  a younger boy to signify the loss of innocence and desire for youth; in my work, it’s not just about innocence and youth but also the vitality and passion of life that has been missing in the protagonist’s life. The girl is like Daisy in Daisy Miller, being a liberal American girl in Europe whose behavior is judged by those abroad, also like the jazz pianist in Kerouac’s On the Road who epitomizes IT when she plays the violin with much fervor and intensity, as well as Sumire in Sputnik Sweeterheart, who wants to be a writer and vanishes into the other world while trying to gain experience for writing material. Daisy being “on holiday,” fulfilling tourist duties is an allusion to The Comfort of Strangers, and the camera is a hint at its theme of voyeurism. The outdoors scene in nature is reference to Hemingway as the protagonist is rejuvenated and finds comfort in nature, as well as reference to Murakami, Kerouac, and Bowles; that the countryside is in the southern part of Italy is not just a passing detail as well. The fact that the narrator is writing about Daisy with so much attention and love is parallel to how K writes about Sumire.
 
Q: What were your intentions in writing this story?
A: My intention was to create a story of ideas that is full of, even convoluted with, literary allusions. This novel was purely written for myself; it was sort of a personal challenge and a fun project to bring as many of my favorite travel fictions together. There were so many other things I wanted to include but could not, such as the whole language barrier, encountering with locals and being deceived by them, or dealing with trauma, to name just a couple.
 
Q: As a reader, I could find quite a similarities between you and the narrator, both being established, international best-seller. Did you choose first-person narrative because it has an autobiographical element?
A: I can see how some readers might want to see it as it being my personal anecdote. However, it is purely fictional. I did write this story as I was travelling on my own in Europe, however. I suppose there is a similarity between me and the main character, in that both of us are writers, but other than that it’s all work of art.
 
Q: What were you thinking about when writing the story? What motivated or inspired you for such an original story?
A: While I was in Europe for about half-a-year or so, I read a number of my favorite travel fictions and the idea came to me—that it’d be quite a project to produce a story in which all these different ideas are mashed into one novel and create a conversation of different travel themes ahd philosophical ideas…
 
Q: What do you hope the reader gets away with?
A: I hope the reader enjoys the book, first of all. I don’t particularly have a “syllabus,” if you will, that I wanted all the readers to get. It was just an interesting project of ideas and it would be a great honor on my part if many people enjoyed it. Ho-ho-ho.
 

Knowing that this would be another travel fiction, I naturally looked for where that travel part would begin. When Kerouac was mentioned as Sumire’s “literary Idol of the Month” I thought maybe the novel’s about Sumire going crisscrossing Japan or elsewhere like Kerouac did himself or spend some “lonely months in a cabin on top of a high mountain, working as a fire lookout” for time and experience, which she decides she needs to write.
 
Both Sumire and the narrator go travelling on a whim, unplanned and their trips are “arranged” by Miu, with whom the three characters form a love triangle.  Sumire is asked to tag along her employer Miu’s business trip around Europe as her personal secretary: “[Miu] just blurted this out one morning, took [Sumire] by complete surprise” (71). Likewise, the narrator, too, embarks on a journey to Greece, a country he never thought of going before, on an unexpected, urgent call from Miu at 2:00am on a particular day.
 
Their travel story is quite unusual. There is no planning involved for Sumire and the narrator. Sumire simply accompanies Miu sightseeing in Milan, visiting a few wineries in Tuscany, staying a couple days in Rome, shopping in Paris, and ending up in a Greek island for a complete vacation. The narrator, just having been called by Miu that something has happened to Sumire, simply buys the ticket to Greece and travels right away, only finding out about the place as he goes from guidebooks and such. Sumire vanishes like the cat in her memory on the fourth day at the beach cottage, an incident that brings the narrator to travel miles away from home, just a week before school starts. 

The novel takes an interesting format that resembles the dictionary and language is a main part of the plot. The sentences go from being broken in the beginning to being more “proper” throughout the novel, as the protagonist becomes more fluent throughout her time in London. She takes learning English seriously, reading her pocket dictionary and asking questions to her lover and her teacher. Around the middle section, the chapters become longer and sentences much more complex as she grains more vocabulary and gradually takes over the language. As she becomes more comfortable with the language, she becomes more comfortable with the culture. A peasant girl from China makes sense of her own old life and the new Western culture as she learns English in Europe.
 
Her purpose of her being in London in the first place is to achieve an ambitious goal of herself and her parents to master English and come back home for a better job. She studies hard, carrying her little Chinese dictionary everywhere and asking myriad questions to her lover and her English teacher. Her purpose is not to travel or to learn the Western culture. Rather than trying to make sense of the Western culture through learning the language, she focuses on learning the language and naturally finds conflicts and tries to make sense of the vastly different culture, while comparing it to her own back home.
 
Z is not a traveler. She stays with an English man twenty years older in Hackney, the most raw and ugly area of the city. She mostly stays home and becomes attached to her lover and even when she is sent on a month-long travel around Europe, she longs to go back to London to her lover. On the month-long trip around Europe by herself, she is not interested in learning the different cultures and being a tourist. She even considers the travel “not a holiday” but “like homework” given from her lover (179). She simply sees the different landscapes of Europe through lenses of her birthplace and hometown, of her own Chinese culture. In Paris, she thinks of the Chinese hero who swam across the English Channel as well as “Chairman Mao [who] used to swim across Yang Zi River” (162). She compares Berlin with Beijing: “This is a city with something really heavy and serious in its soul. This is a city which had big wars in the history. And, I feel, this is a city made for mans, and politics, and disciplines. Like Beijing” (172). In Venice, when she hears that a party takes place in Lido, she automatically associates it with “the very expensive hotel in Beijing and Shanghai” called Lido Holiday Inn Hotel, and taking the boats she “feel[s] like living in the old time of south China, that people have to take boat to get to other places” (182). Travelling, she “feel[s] really naked” and remarks that she “care[s] about nothing of this city. [she] ha[s] no love or hate whatsoever towards this city” (174).Understanding another culture is difficult: “Chinese always say West culture is a blue culture, Chinese culture is yellow culture. This because West from the sea, and China comes from the yellow sand. I don’t understand the sea” (183). Although some mastery of English language and knowledge of her own Chinese culture help her understand the foreign Western culture, she still does not completely understand it. 
 
Z remarks while travelling that the cultures are different and languages are different but that “everywhere people live in the same way” (166). Throughout her stay abroad, away from home, she explores different concepts such as home, family, individuality, solitude, food, and sexuality of two different cultures—old, familiar one of her own Chinese culture and new, strange one of the West. She also reflects on her own culture as she compares Chinese culture with that of Europe’s; by learning another language and another culture, she learns more of herself and her own culture: “The day when I arrived to the West, I suddenly realized I am a Chinese” (148).

Paul Theoroux’s “The Gateway of India” is a travel story that illustrates how travel can be transformative. The protagonist changes from being down, recently divorced, and an uncaring American moneyman to a happier and more spiritual person.

In the beginning,  Dwight Huntsinger is an American businessman whose life changes on his business trip to India. On his first trip he does not touch any Indian food because he does not think of it as food but poison. He’s been recently divorced and is not in the best state of his personal life when he is forced to go through “a week of Indian hell—a secular hallucinatory underworld of actual grinning demons and foul unbreathable air.” Dwight, absolutely disgusted, frightened, and appalled, basically hates India even though he stays at the best and the most luxurious hotel and spends most of his time inside. In this misery and suffering, however, is money and wealth. Once he returns home, he is assigned to go back to India, “not a place to enjoy but one to endure, like going down a dark hole to find jewels.”

On this second trip, he encounters a polite and submissive woman, her children, and an old man, who he later suspects them as having been acting as a team to exploit money from wealthy Americans like himself. Just like Dwight goes to India, a place where you can make anything, to make money, the people of India work to make money from these foreigners who come to their country to exploit.  The experience he has in this isolated Indian place that the auntie of the street children he saves makes him feel debauched and aroused; “he felt he belonged here and could not remember how long he’d been in Mumbai or when he was supposed to leave, and didn’t care.” With women described as “submissive and polite, bowing to him, he [feels] powerful and at the same time annoyed with himself for even caring.” Far away from home, he says thing s he would not have said back home without thinking. Meeting Indru, his life changes even more so, manipulatively arranging to go back to India. When he returns to Boston office, he is regarded “as a real traveler and risk taker” and people give “him credit for enduring the discomfort, talk[] only of illness and misery, and sa[y] he was a kind of hero[,] congratulat[ing] him on the deals he’d done.”

From having been fearful and hateful of India, Dwight changes and grows to love the country; from seeing India as a representation of everything negative, “chaos and night,” he decides to stay at the end while his friend Shah leaves to America…

 
This novella was a terrifying story. Other books we read in class all had some gloomy, morbid aspects but this one struck me as the most disturbing. By the time I finished, the first thing that came to mind other than all the twisted emotions that engrossed me was that I ought to be much more careful of strangers and not to trust people abroad no matter how cordial they appear to be. Robert, although not a native, is an aristocratic-born resident of this foreign city who kindly offers our protagonist tourists, Mary and Colin, a way to some “good food,” to his bar where locals hang out. I thought Robert would function as a wonderful bridge to the authentic experiences for the two tourists who carry maps everywhere, look for the “ideal restaurants,” often eating earlier than dinner time or returning back to the one they dined before, and use the magic phrase “we’re on a holiday” whenever they’re in an imperfect state of their tourist experiences, such as when the heat is unusually oppressive, when they are lost, having forgotten their maps, or when Colin decides to skip shaving before going out to a café. I thought the story would be about how Mary and Colin are transformed from tourists to real travelers due to Robert’s generous help or something. My innocent guess turned out to be wrong of course. By the time Robert’s Canadian wife Caroline enters the scene, the mystery gradually builds up, creating suspense that got me flipping page after another, only to get struck by a shocking end.
 
“On holiday,” together in this foreign city, Colin and Mary enjoy the comfort of strangers. In their hotel life, the maid, unknown to them and encountered only once, is a stranger who comes to their empty hotel room to clean up their mess: “Unused to hotel life, they were inhibited by this intimacy with a stranger they rarely saw” (12). The maid is a stranger to them who touches, rearranges, and organizes their personal belongings such as dirty clothes and shoes; Mary and Colin, “rapidly, however, [comes] to depend on her and [grow] lazy with their possessions” (12). At “a restaurant that suited them[,] the two waiters who served them” are accounted as “friendly but pleasingly distant” (96). Outside in the streets, they find themselves in crowds of strangers. Each morning “with their money, sunglasses and maps, [they] join[] the crowds who swarmed across the canal bridges and down every narrow street.” As tourists, they have no associations and ties, only knowing themselves, they “dutifully fulfill[] the many tasks of tourism the anciety city imposed,” visiting churches, museums, palaces, and shopping streets for souvenirs.  In fact, meeting Robert and going to his bar is the first time they talk with locals; they “experience the pleasure, unique to tourists, of finding themselves in a place without tourists, of making a discovery, finding somewhere real [and are] gratified to be talking at last to an authentic citizen” (29). Even when they get lost despite their maps, they consult the sun rather than asking people around. Likewise, Colin and Mary are find comfort in this foreign city of strangers.
 
However, blinded by the comfort of strangers, perhaps too much comfort, they come to a tragic end. Just like how they trust the maid with their privacy and feel secure among the strangers on the streets, Mary and Colin also innocently trust Robert, another stranger, and his seeming generosity. However, by the end, Robert and his wife are not to have been trusted at all. Robert had been taking photographs of Colin from their first arrival and making psychotic plans with his submissive wife.  
 
After the strange visit at Robert and Caroline’s, Mary and Colin are drawn much together. Although they are not transformed from tourists to travelers as I innocently guessed at first, their relationship changes after their brief stay at Robert and Caroline’s. In the beginning, they are found sleeping in “separate beds” and “not on speaking terms.” After their visit to Robert and Caroline’s, however, they are in love, talk a lot, and discuss politics of sex and formulate theories about memory and childhood. They do not mention their strange visit at Robert’s until Mary remembers the photograph of Colin she saw at Robert’s. While they have been wandering around, engaging in tourist experiences, keeping to themselves in the comfort of strangers, Robert had been taking photos of Colin. At the end, when trapped in Robert and Caroline’s evil plans, Colin says he’ll comply to whatever Robert wants him to do as long as he gets Mary to the hospital. While the visit to Robert and Caroline’s reignites Mary and Colin’s love and draws the two closer, it is also Robert and Caroline’s where their love is broken with Colin’s death and Mary’s trauma.
 
In this foreign city, Colin and Mary have only been going to well known tourist areas, full of strangers—other tourists with cameras or locals. Because they know no one in the city other than themselves, the crowds of people are mere strangers who they do not associate with and pay not a lot of attention to. In the comfort of strangers, Mary and Colin fail to notice any mishaps, Robert stalking and taking pictures of beautiful Colin and designing evil plans to murder him. 

 Just like the protagonist Aschenbach is the “union of dry, conscientious officialdom and ardent, obscure impulse,” the novella has a theme that lies on the tension between Apollonian and Dionysian views.
 
Aschenbach was “pushed on every side to achievement” and “never knew sweet idleness”; his life consisted of hard work and dedication, not based on joy but on pain and suffering. In fact, the “formula of his life and fame[, ] the key to his work” has been about poverty, destitution, pain, suffering and vain. Although he has earned fame that he believes to be the ultimate goal of any artist, has won the aristocracy title, and has maids and men who serve him, Aschenbach is not happy at all.
 
One evening after encountering an unpleasant, hostile gaze from a random, creepy red-haired man, Aschenbach is struck by a sudden longing to travel and leaves his home town for a journey. Abroad, in fresh scenes without any associations, he sees a disturbing old man pretending to be youth, an immoral “fake” gondolier, a beautiful boy, the Russian family, all of which awakens the Dionysian side in him.
 
Tadzio he remarks as the “god like beauty of the human being” gives him new inspirations for his art. Where as Aschenbach drew his work from one single line of inspiration all his life, after he is struck by the perfection of the beauty of this young Polish boy, he is inspired and his “intellectual world [is] challenged for its opinion on a great and burning question of art and taste.” Writing in Tadzio’s presence, Auchenbach serves the lines of the boy’s figure as his inspiration and finds work so much pleasurable. 

Reading Death of Venice, I was reminded that t's not just the different sceneries, cuisine, atmosphere, and architecture that can inspire travelers but the people you see or meet while abroad. Aschenbach's example shows that it doesn't even need to be the locals or natives of where you visit but just anyone. Sources of inspiration, perhaps, is present everywhere  and it is not the matter of going somewhere foreign that rejuvenates your heart but a sense of being a stranger that makes it easier for people to see the world from a different light and be inspired or awestruck by beauty of life.

Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, both take place in a post-war society with the shifted value system that affects the young generation. The protagonists of the novels, Jake and Sal Paradise, are, in D.C.D. Pocock’s words “characters seeking liberation, both geographical and spiritual, through change of place.” Away from the disillusionment and chaos, they wander around a number of different places. While Jake is an American expatriate in Europe and most of his travels take place abroad n France and Spain, Sal is a middle-class American who mostly wanders around domestically in the West and Mexico. However, it is interesting to note that out of the numerous different places, countryside is the most pivotal place in both in its relation to the overall theme and the purpose of the stories. The descriptions of the experiences, human relationships, and the physical setting of the countryside highlight the differences between the countryside and their home place, New York, a symbol of the social sickness and an obsessive way of life both characters escape in search for a new centre.
 
In Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Jake and Bill’s fishing trip to the Spanish Basques is located in the centre of novel structurally. The five-day, short yet, sweet, vacation the protagonist has in this quiet, serene countryside is important in relation to understanding the novel. Located outside of France and even far away from America, the Basques is geographically isolated and this distance removes the protagonist Jake from the complexities of his friendships and drama regarding sex. Jake is only with his good friend Bill, and together they enjoy outdoors and a friendly old-fashioned competition between men. The people described in the countryside are of complete different nature. The local people in this setting are peasants who “drink very politely” and need to “go[] up into the hills” (110), as opposed to the wealthy friends of Jake who spend much time in bars and cafes and create tension among themselves with phoniness. The accommodation is of contrasting nature as well. The inn they stay at is not comfortable and different from what they’re used to at home: “it had a stone floor, low ceiling, and was oak-paneled. The shutters were all up and it was so cold you could see your breath” (115). Despite the hostile climate and the humble circumstance, Jake feels “good to be warm and in bed” (116). The countryside is described as a beautiful place where the characters connect with nature and get back to the basics. The place is portrayed to have a brilliant cloudless sky, clear stream, earth full of worms, goats grazing around, green fields rolling, and wild strawberries growing on the side. The pastoral representation of this place contrast with the rest of the places in the novel: “The trees were big, and the foliage was thick but it was not gloomy. There was no undergrowth, only the smooth grass, very green and fresh, and the big gray trees well spaced as though it were a park” (121). This tranquil and relaxed atmosphere functions as a great place to discuss and reflect on one of the major themes of the novel, on the meaning and way of life. The characters have been aimlessly pursuing pleasures such as drinking due to the loss of morality, values, innocence, and faith that resulted in the Great War. While fishing and relaxing in the great nature and in warm camaraderie, Bill points to Jake,  “You’re an expatriate. Why don’t you live in New York? … You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working” (120). The countryside which represents the very opposite of the chaotic world bombarded with lost meaning of life and shattered value system, provides the two with isolation from the drama and place to rejuvenate and reflect. Bill even says he would not have been able to confess his genuine feelings to Jake if they were not in the countryside: “You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. I’d mean I was a faggot” (121), a quote underlying the stark differences between the city they come from and the countryside they vacation in. Perfect weather, beautiful nature, and favorable retreat from the hectic world, the two friends swim, play games, and have a jolly good time “here in the great-out-doors” (127). It is in this countryside, a foil of society Jake belongs to, where the possible solution to the question of the meaning of life is presented: “How should we know? We should not question. Our stay on earth is not for long. Let us rejoice and believe and give thanks…let us rejoice in our blessings” (126).
 
Just as countryside is the critical place in Hemingway, the cotton fields is one of the important places that function in delivering the message in Kerouac’s On the Road. Most of Sal’s travels take place in America; the Mexican cotton fields is one exception. Far away from New York, Sal is also removed from his group of friends and his white middle-class society he originally escapes from. Instead, he is with Terry, a Mexican girl; although they both know intuitively that their relationship may not bloom into a complete flower, their relationship is ideal and healthy. The life and the environment are also different in an uncomfortable way for Sal. Terry’s family lives in shacks “situated on the old road that ran between the vineyards” (98). Likewise, the local people in Sabinal are poor, living in shacks and tents, in sharp contrast to where Sal originally comes from. Terry’s brother and everyone lives by the manana philosophy that believes “tomorrow we make a lot of money; tonight we don’t worry” (93). There is no phoniness or judging among the members of the community, but only genuinely welcoming, warm inclusiveness. They gather around together and spend a lot of time singing and playing guitars. Just like the warm and easygoing atmosphere and the mood of the place, the countryside is portrayed as beautiful: “The beautiful green countryside of October in California reeled by madly” (92). In the beginning, Sal is initially attracted to Dean, the holy madman, because he lives “in the moment.” Feeling out of place in his white-middle class, scholarly yet pessimist group of friends, Sal sets on the road, drinking, partying, and wandering from place to place. Yet when he comes to a place where people “in the moment,” he realizes the need to work, realizing that “making money with the manure truck would never materialize,” and voluntarily seeks “for cotton picking work” (95). However, at the same time, it is in the cotton fields where he finds IT and the connected feeling of a secure centre he has been searching for. In the cotton fields, Sal meets people who love to work and have amazing patience and joy. Sal enjoys the outdoors and feels a great connection to nature, in the soil. Although the work is tough, he strongly feels bliss: “My back began to ache. But it was beautiful kneeling and hiding in that earth…I thought I had found my life’s work ” (96). He claims in the fields, “[he] forgot all about the East and all about Dean and Carlo and the bloody road…I was a man of the earth, precisely as I had dreamed I would be” (97).
 
The Spanish and Mexican country is an important place within the two novels because it contrasts with the city life where the moral values have been shattered and the meaning of life and innocence and optimism have been lost. The protagonists who travel in search of a new centre both come close to the ideal state, the traditional values and beliefs of easygoing, friendly life, in the countryside. However, while the country experiences help them reflect and experience “living in the moment” philosophy, they both do not stay and end up going back home. 

What would you be doing if you only had just today to live?? For me, I would call everyone I love and care for and have a one big happy party. For the assignment, I focused on the party scenes they have in New York. Sal and his gang arrive in New York and attend numerous parties that take place during the New Year’s weekend that “lasted three days and three nights.” Just like how they travel from one place to another, they “swerve[] in the snowy New York streets from party to party.”
 
There isn’t a lot of descriptions on the physicality place. The first party mentioned takes place “at a basement apartment in the West Nineties” and is “enormous…with at least a hundred people,” from all walks of life. Every corner is packed with wild, screaming people, and there is something going on every couch and every bed in the crowded apartment: “Everything in life, all the faces of life, were piling into the same dark room.” The place is sweaty, chaotic, and full of excitement and the beat.
Then “at five o’clock in the morning [they] all rush[] through the backyard of a tenement and climb[] in through a window of an apartment” for another huge party and “at dawn [they are] back at Tom Saybrook’s” for more beer drinking and picture drawing.
 
Just as D.C.D. Pocock claims in his essay “people then are place, but place is also people,” the new characters (Ian MacArthur, Rollo Greb, George Shearing) who epitomize IT and everything Sal and Dean are rooted for are introduced along with the minimum description of party places. Sal and his friends go to a party at Ian MacArthur’s place and rather than a detailed descriptions of the place, the character Ian MacArthur is introduced. “A wonderful sweet fellow,” he is just like Dean who delightedly says “Yes!” to everything. Then at another “roaring party” that takes place at “a nice house [of Rollo Greb’s] aunt [with] two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls,”  Rollo is introduced. Rollo is an educated, scholarly man who comes and lives in the white upper society Sal comes from. Yet “he [doesn’t] give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets…” He is also what Dean wholeheartedly aspires to be, the epitome of blissful state that the entire novel is about.  
 
Although the places where New Year’s rowdy celebrations take place in New York are not given much physical descriptions, it is still significant because the whole partying scene is about the bliss in life that Dean and Sal are obsessed with. The people and the place mentioned are about the IT, living in the moment, immortality, timelessness. This “party after party” is just another form of IT, along with working on the soil, sex-love, driving at hundred miles per hour, music, conversations on nothing that take all night long, and travelling and excitement that takes place on the road. (part two-4)
 
 

 “ ‘You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?’ We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question”

Reading On the Road spoke to me on a personal level. What would my answer be to the question above? The novel had a lot to do with what I’ve been contemplating about myself—on how I wanted to live. I am mainly torn between the two paths. On one side, I could just go through life as how I believed I was expected to, being a good, responsible citizen, working in a profession that I enjoy etc. On the other path, a path perhaps more obscure and mysterious but much more exciting, I could live from moment to moment, in the Eternal Now, going with the flow, sort of like the characters in the novel. Surprisingly, I could relate to the Beat Movement like the mass of youth influenced by the Beat Generation, a term coined by the author Jack Kerouac himself, “members of the generation that came of age after WWII, who, supposedly as a result of disillusionment stemming from the Cold War, espouse mystical detachment and relaxation of social and sexual tensions.”

 Sal Paradise claims he goes off on the road because as a young writer, he wants life experiences, see a new horizon, and receive that pearl. He simply takes off with “[his] canvas bag in which a few fundamental things were packed,” with no concrete plans in mind. In the beginning he had “the stupid hearthside idea it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.” (I wonder what life would be like if there indeed was one great red line that we were supposed to follow)Taking buses and hitchhiking, he heads to the west. I felt Sal was traveling in a diversionary mode because he is away for the centre and goes on the road primarily to escape from life that he is lost in and free from identity, commitment, and responsibility. Not in touch with the American centre, he travels in spontaneity and impulse, seeking new, wild, authentic experiences.  

Is Sal Paradise trying to get to a certain destination or just be on the road? Is his message that the road to the destination, not solely the destination itself, is important???

Cohen’s essay explores the different modes of tourism between the two mainstream views, one as a pursuit of pure leisure and the other and the other, a quest for meaning and authenticity.
 
The Moresbys do not fall into the first two groups; they are neither recreational tourists, who travel “in pursuit of ‘mere pleasure,’ nor diversionary tourists, who, alienated from the centre of society, travel only to “escape from the boredom and meaninglessness of routine.” They don’t entirely enjoy their trip, like recreational tourists would, and do not regard their journey as a form of entertainment through which they relieve stress and pressures gained in daily life. Likewise, they do not belong in the  diversionary mode since they have no “routine “to escape from in the first place; independently wealthy and submerged in the sense of timelessness, they possess no ties to any scheduled work and show no interest in professional advancements. Also, while Port and Kit bring all their culture with them, carrying luggage, staying in fancy hotels, and rarely mingling with the locals, they do not “move[] in a centre-less space” but look for one.
 
The couple seem to fall into the second category of the five modes—experiential, experimental, and existential—but most fittingly in the experiential mode. Port fits the characterization of a experiential tourist; he is “a modern man who, alienated from the spiritual centre of his own society, actively, though perhaps inarticulately, searches for a new meaning.” Moreover, MacCannel’s claim that “Pretensions and tackiness generate the belief that somewhere, only not right here, not right now, perhaps just over there someplace, in another country, in another life-style, in another social class, perhaps, there is genuine society” describes the situation of the Moresbys perfectly.In this depressing post-war era of hopelessness and cynicism, they travel as far away from New York to find their “centre,” a symbol for “ultimate meanings.” Only encountering meaninglessness, they continue to wander deeper and deeper into the desert, in a “quest[] for authentic experiences,” and while they look, they completely “remain[] aware of their ‘otherness’.”
 
Out of the five classifications of tourism defined in Cohen’s essay, the experiential mode seems to be the closest fit for Port in Sheltering Sky.

Time is said to be the main difference between travelers and tourists. While tourists have limited time they have for staying, often in hurry with tight schedules that try to cram all the major attractions of the destination, travelers have all the time they want and “go when [they] feel like going and stay where [they] feel like staying” (61). When Eric Lyle has made some “mad itinerary,” Port claims he has no plans and moves in flexibility when it comes to time.
 
Having been travelling for quite a while, the Moresbys seem to have lost the sense of time. The novel begins with Port in his bed, unaware of his surroundings. He looks at his watch but only as a habit; in fact, looking at time only makes him more perplexed.
 
Wandering around aimlessly, the couple is accustomed to irregularity and leisure. When they talk, it’s portrayed without much energy or spark like I’d expect people traveling across the exotic places would: “They conversed quietly, and in the manner of people who have all the time in the world for everything” (13). Toward the end of the Book I, it says one mistake they made was their treatment of time: “Because neither she nor Port had lived a life of any kind of regularity, they both had made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen” (133).
 
I wonder if losing a sense of time is really a mistake when you travel and live in the moment. When you are totally in synch with time or with whatever you are doing that is totally a bliss, wouldn’t you be unaware of time? Perhaps it’s “the fatal error’’ for the Moresbys. Regardless, the “travelers” of the novel seem to travel in seeming eternity and leisure.

Jake is neither a tourist nor any other visitor. He is an expatriate, well-traveled and cultured. Jake knows Paris well and unlike the fellow American tourists, Jake is not preyed by the street vendors: he “avoid[s] walking into the thread” of the boxer toys. In different parts of Europe, he is seen reading the newspapers of France, Spain, and New York.
 
Jake enjoys Paris, contrary to other characters; Robert Cohn is “sick of Paris”(19) and believes leaving France to South America will better his life, Mencken detests France (49), even Bill claims Vienna, a “strange city” he did not enjoy much, is rather like Paris(80). In line with the view of Paris, Jake is different from other expatriates and American tourists—at least in France and Spain—because he knows how to appreciate foreign cultures, nature, and the art of travelling.
 
In Spain, he is set apart from others as he is accepted by the Spanish aficionados, in acknowledgment of Jake’s earnest love for the sport of bullfighting. The Spanish right away does not believe when Jake tells them that his friend “[Bill] came all the way from New York to see the San Fermines” (136). The Hemingway hero is included by the Spaniards because of his true passion for bullfighting, a great part of the Spanish culture. He appreciates the sport not as a passerby tourist or an expatriate ruined by “fake European standards” spending money and time around mindlessly. In addition, Jake understands the cultures of different nations. When he returns after the fiesta, he remarks on the difference between France and Spain. In France, money can easily help you well-liked while in Spain, things are more abstract and obscure.
 
In addition to his open heart in appreciating the culture of a foreign place, Jake differs from others also because he is capable of appreciating the nature, the scenery, and the entire duration of travelling. On the train to fishing trip, Jake looks out the window while other American tourists complain or do other things(93); throughout the trip, Jake watches the countryside out the window (97, 113). He’s different from Robert Cohn who thinks escaping one’s place to another will fulfill his life in someway. Jake advises Robert to enjoy every moment of life and agrees with Bill’s remark on living each moment to its fullest.
 
One of the messages I got personally from the book was to live each moment to the fullest. Jake believes “nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters,” (18) who face death every day, and he agrees with Bill when he claims “Our stay is not for long. Let us rejoice and believe and give thanks” (126). Although Jake says  “[a]ll countries look just like the moving pictures” (18), he enjoys the trip to Spain more than any other character in the novel. Another was that there is plenty of satisfaction that can be found right here, right now; Jake tells his troubled friend, “Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that” (19).

Among the “extremely numerous” American travelers in the “upstart neighbours […] of luxury and of maturity” in Vevey are our protagonist Daisy Miller, her mother Mrs. Miller, and her nine-year-old brother Randolph(3). The new riches from America travel, supported by their father back home in Schenectady, across Europe where customs are vastly different from those back home.
 
The manner in which they “travel” offers various insights into the way we view travelling. All three are evidently not travelling for the sake of travelling. Mrs. Miller “suffers dreadfully from dyspepsia” and mostly stays in the hotel room while young Randolph only longs to return home. Daisy may be the only one “not a bit disappointed,” “declar[ing] that the hotels were very good, when once you got used to their ways, and that Europe was perfectly sweet” (11). Daisy is at least superficially engaged in tourist activities and claims  she “want[s] to go [see Chateau de Chillon] dreadfully [and] wouldn’t go away from here without having seen that old castle” (13). The obnoxious young brother “doesn’t think much of old castles [and is]not interested in ancient monuments” (13). Mrs. Miller also states she “should think [they]’d want to wait til [they] got to Italy [and] see [only] the principal ones” (24). The Millers are portrayed not as genuine travelers, but just some wealthy luxuriously killing time abroad.
 
In Daisy Miller is a sense of irony that it is not the subject- the “travelers” getting cultural shocks abroad, but the object –the natives and American-Europeans –who get much shock, through the American travelers. As they “go around” different destinations as the subject of travelling, they also become the object as the natives and locals constantly observe, study, and scrutinize them through their own spectacles. Winterbourne, an American who spent most of his life abroad in Europe, for instance, perhaps gets more of what one may experience while travelling through studying and spending time with the pretty American girl Daisy: “To the young man himself their little excursion was so much of an escapade – an adventure – that, even allowing for her habitual sense of freedom, he had some expectation of seeing her regard it in the same way” (27).
 
Daisy Miller refuses to respect the vastly differing customs and moral codes of Europe while abroad and end up becoming the talk of the society. The episode when Daisy goes out to meet a man without a chaperone when “afternoon was drawing to a close” (37) points out the differences between what is proper in one culture as opposed to another. The hostess of the Millers in Italy, Mrs. Walker, advises the young Miller should return home on the carriage to save her reputation since walking around with men at night “is not the custom here” (42).  Daisy, slightly offended, claims she doesn’t “want to do anything improper” (38) and that  “[she doesn’t] see why [she] should change [her] habits for them” (49).
 
Winterbourne tries to explain to her new friend that “[w]hen you deal with natives you must go by the custom of the place” (50). Like such, the book raises a question about whether travelers should be excused from not following the ways of where they are visiting or whether they should always follow and respect the foreign cultures for the duration of their stay. As a rich tourist, Daisy Miller refuses to give up her habits and the American ways that are inappropriate in the country she is visiting and ends up getting a bad reputation abroad. However, the protagonist is bound to return home, across the ocean, so may feel there is no need to heed to the European ways even if she “is to be talked about” (43).
 
Daisy Miller raises the questions of how a traveler is to behave in places with vastly different values through the tensions between the unsophisticated, ignorant American flirt and the high-class, snobbish locals in Europe. When I travel abroad, I am careful not to offend the culture in any way and try to learn as much about it to have a full immersion experience. After having written this blog, though, I wonder maybe while the Millers should have respected the moral codes little more, the people observing and judging the American travelers should have tried to keep a more open mind.
 

Only three days?

I was initially a bit disappointed when I found I would only get three days to taste and explore Montreal. I wanted to go early August when the festivals would be bring together thousands of Montrealers and tourists from all over the world to the second largest francophone city after Paris.
My parents both had business trips scheduled and they were firm about not allowing me to go for ten days by myself. Mom, especially, insisted that it was too dangerous for a girl to go to a foreign place by herself even if she was old to drink in the destination city or knew how to speak one of its official languages.  My brother would accompany me, which meant I had to wait for his summer school to end later in the month. The slight disappointment I felt initially just disappeared into the air at the thought of leaving my home, my usual dull summer days in the suburbs just north of Boston. I would have a blast no matter what in Montreal and be surrounded with a sense of freedom and adventure.

The night before departure after packing, I surfed the Internet for “must-go-see” attractions and made a rough itinerary for the three days.  There were so many things to do and see! Notre Dame Basilica, the Old Montreal, the Botanical Gardens, Jean-Talon Market, Museum of Fine Arts, Pointe-a-Calliere Museum, Mount Royal… etc…

We arrived on a late afternoon and after we checked-in, we strolled around to the Old Montreal and did a walking tour of Vieux Montreal. My favorite was Notre Dame Basilica, the beauty and grandeur of its interior which mesmerized  me entirely the moment I stepped in.
On the second day, we got on a red double-decker bus for a sightseeing of Montreal. The tour guide, a typical native, beautifully switched between English and French while giving us interesting historical and cultural facts about the building we passed by. When we were roaming around the narrow European cobblestoned streets of Old Montreal, I realized most people out in the street going in and out of the European buildings were tourists. I was informed that only 1% of the locals lived in Old Montreal, around 4%in downtown, and 95% outside of the city. If we wanted to see a real Montreal local, we would have to attack the lunch hours on a business day.

Usually when I visit a city I have not been before, on top of doing all the tourist activities- visiting monumental sites and shopping for souvenirs- I try to feel what it is like to be a local. It helped when I had a native friend who would take me to the places where the locals would go and teach me some simple phrases in the language. Since I didn’t know anyone native on this trip, I was satisfied just to try some “real” Montreal food.

The short and sweet stay in Montreal was full of excitement, adventure, and learning. I was just jolly and happy for the entire time I was there, just for being in a different city.