The purpose of literature is to transport us, to take us out of the humdrum of everyday life out into the unknown. Modern society often attempts to glorify the ordinary, however, it is my belief that man was not built for the ordinary, but the extraordinary. In prehistoric times hunters used to return to their camps and delight their comrades with tales of adventure in the great unknown, with these stories later becoming the foundation for many of histories greatest works. Odysseus’s mystified and daring travels have fascinated the imagination for generations. As have the tales of Herodotus, Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, and countless others.
 
Although much of the world has today been mapped, photographed, and explored, this does not preclude the possibility for contemporary adventure, although it has made it more nuanced. For the stories aforementioned are not only about physical travel, about spatially moving out into the unknown, they are also about the travelers evolving values and emotions. That is the heart of the story.
 
All life is a journey, and all great literature in essence describes a journey, either internal or external. These Journeys can take place anywhere, in the wilderness, in the city, in a middle-class suburb. The important thing is not where they occur, but the journey they reveal.  In a strict sense, much of what we have read this semester is not ‘literature’, but rather historical first hand accounts. They are not fanciful works of creative imagination - with the exception of The Odyssey and The Tempest, of course. However, they are better than most literature in so far as they do better at accomplishing the real goal of literature, capturing the journey. Cadeza de Vaca, in my mind is probably the best example of this, and serves as a rare case of a work demonstrative of both literary and historical merit.
 
I think it is often easy to pigeonhole historical works into the category of simply history, ignoring their literary merit. Many of the books we have read are so extraordinary in their historical accounts, Marco Polo and Cabeza de Vaca being key examples, that their literary merit is often brushed aside. Consigning these works simply to the history shelves, however, ignores the incredible stories of personal transformation they contain. In many of the works we have read it is not hard to see how the traveler’s views change. Marco Polo’s growing admiration for the Great Kublai Khan, Cabeza de Vaca’s growing love of the indigenous people of the Americas, and so forth. For this reason, it is my view that these works should be read more often as we have read them – as works of both incredible historical and literary merit. 

The Daoist philosopher Lao Tzu said that a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step. As we’ve seen in class, sometimes this first step can be the most difficult. The allure of an unfamiliar culture is often undeniable. We want to experience, to come into contact with this other, but as Westerners, how do we see beyond our cultural constructions of the other’s identity? After all, doesn’t the notion of a distinct concept of “The West” itself depend upon its differentiation from the rest of the world? We could sit up in our ivory towers and try to deconstruct identity endlessly. We could come to the conclusion that it’s better to remain pent up in our own cultures rather than risk disrespecting another’s ways by our presence. But I doubt that any of us want to live in such a cage. We can gain insight into approaching the other through the travel accounts that we have read.
 
In the account of Herodotus in Egypt, we observe one of the West’s first historians doing his best to represent a culture that is foreign to him. Herodotus is admirable in that he attempts to record things exactly as they appear to him rather than in relation to Greek culture. Of course sometimes he makes a value judgment, but he remains admirable for oftentimes admitting the Egyptian’s superiority in a certain field, such as the construction of their labyrinth. It is difficult not to assume that your culture is somehow the best and should be used as a benchmark for all other cultures. Herodotus does surprisingly well at breaking away from this mindset and attempting to see the environment for what it is.
 
In the travels of Ibn Battuta, we see a man whose journeys are motivated by a yearning for knowledge. As an attorney, he wished to trek across Northern Africa and the Middle East, learning from the nobles in each locale. It is clear that Ibn measures different cultures based on his reverence for Islamic law. He is scandalized by naked bathers in one city, in another he swears at a Jewish physician who is standing above Koran readers.
 
Columbus shows us the dangers of assuming that one’s own culture is superior to another’s. One of the main goals of his quest is to convert the Native Americans (or as he thought them to be, the Indians) to Christianity. Even though he knows nothing of their language, Columbus is convinced that the Native Americans are perfectly ripe for conversion. He assumes that they are without religion because he doesn’t observe anything in the Americas associated with Western religion. It isn’t sensible to blame Columbus for all of this nation’s wrongdoings against its native inhabitants, but at the same time the mindset of cultural superiority that we see in Columbus seems to be represent the colonialist outlook.
 
So our first step. It seems that before embarking on our journeys we must do some thorough dusting. We should try to sweep the cobwebs of our native culture that have been developing in our minds since birth. Of course, it seems that total clearness is impossible with anything short of a lobotomy, but we still must acknowledge the relativity of our own culture before we can get anywhere. If we fail to at least try, then we can travel the world but never manage to leave our cages.

I haven’t traveled much outside of the U.S., but my main ambition in life is to see as many places as I can. In the accounts we’ve read in class, the travelers leave their homes for completely new lands; either to known countries that haven’t been visited by many (if any) outsiders or to lands that are completely new territory. But in our globalized age, practically everywhere is inhabited and has been visited by foreigners. Besides venturing into space (which I would love to do), there’s hardly a place I can go that hasn’t been written about by someone who’s already been there. Without the lure of the complete unknown, what does traveling offer people today?
 
Of course, governments still colonize foreign lands, and modern merchants still travel for business purposes. But I think for the every-day traveler seeking adventure, travel is necessary if only for first-hand experience. It’s incredibly easy to watch videos or read books about a place and think you know it. But as we’ve seen in the course’s readings, these accounts are usually biased. People idealize or demonize, whether they intend to or not. The only way to know for sure what a place and its people are like is to go there yourself; this also lets a person react to a different culture based on his own disposition and preferences.
 
This raises two considerations. Firstly, while its clearly convenient and sometimes arguably necessary to research a place before traveling there, I think embarking with no preconceived notions can also have its advantages, as long as the traveler is careful. To me, the most compelling part of the classic travelogues was the excitement with which the men viewed foreign lands. My parents are the type that meticulously plan every vacation and weekend trip, so I felt like I had already taken the trip before we even left. But my favorite trip was an unplanned road trip I took with a friend, because even the most mundane towns we passed through were made exciting by the prospect of the unknown. Even though it’s easy to learn everything about a foreign place before booking an airline ticket, I think there’s something to be said for spontaneity, in that it allows the traveler to capture some of the explorer’s spirit of true travel pioneers. Secondly, I’ve realized how to – and how not to – approach foreign cultures in order to best enjoy them for what they are. Of course, people from a different culture will always be “others” to a traveler, and vice versa. But travelers like Cabeza de Vaca, Marco Polo, and Herodotus appreciated differences and tried to keep judgment to a minimum. I certainly won’t ever travel with the intent of colonizing the people I encounter, but the Western “conqueror” attitude could cause me or other Americans to patronize so-called underdeveloped cultures if we let it. As trite as it may sound, remembering that all people are equal seems to be the only way to truly understand and value a foreign culture for what it is.
 
These thoughts on how to approach travel are not new to me, but the classic readings from this course gave me new perspective on what it means to travel today. Though we now have the luxury of easily accessible resources to educate ourselves about foreign places, second-hand travel seems even less appealing to me. For one thing, the writer’s account, while possibly interesting and enlightening, could be biased to the point of fictionalization. But most importantly, reading about a place gives only a shadow of its culture – and the only real way to understand it and form an opinion on it is to travel there yourself.

The Tempest was a really great jumping off point for my final thoughts about the course in general, because I've been contemplating the nature of truth in travel writing a lot. In the texts we have read, written as they were before the advent of tourism, the truth undergoes almost inevitable distortion because of the secondhand nature of many of the accounts, such as in the case of Marco Polo, Herodotus, and Odysseus. Even when the adventurers are direct authors of the text in question, as with Cabeza de Vaca and Columbus, the presence of the royal audience for which the written work was intended is inescapable and must be taken into account. Despite this, Cabeza de Vaca struck me as by far the most honest travel writer within the canon that we read, perhaps because his personal story ties into a development of the land explored in and of itself. Cabeza de Vaca's appreciation of the New World as a place, rather than just a chance for glory, is evidenced by his desire to go back there immediately after being lost in its wildernesses for years. In contrast, Columbus' desire for royal patronage color his accounts far towards the positive. The same desire to impress an audience, though perhaps more innocuously, emerges within the texts of Herodotus and Marco Polo. Both of these texts assert some measure of superiority or at least normalcy to their own cultures and contrast their observations of otherness with their own societal values. Yet despite the condescension towards the inhabitants of foreign lands, as well as the ridiculous exaggerations, both accounts belie an innate curiosity as to the diversity of human culture, to say nothing of the world itself. In reading Herodotus' and Polo's descriptions of what they find strange or noteworthy, some aspects of the authors' own respective societies begins to emerge. Thus these travel classics serve as documents of both the culture being visited and the culture doing the visiting. While Ibn Battuta was similarly prone to stretching the truth, his intentions were to reinforce the teachings of Islam; indeed, Battuta's exposure to cultures outside of the Islamic region of the world was very limited. Nevertheless, his account is also chock full of details unique to one region or the other, as variable in their believability as the various accounts of Herodotus and Polo. This perhaps reveals an innate human desire to, when sharing stories of travel, infuse their own imagination within the narrative in an attempt to make the story as magical for the audience as the journey was for them.