Essayists describe ‘Unforgettable Journeys’
“The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys,”
Edited by Klara Glowczewska (Penguin Paperback Original, $16, 384 pages)
Travel heightens one’s senses. It minimizes the mundane and elevates what would be everyday encounters at home to items of significance, to be preserved forever, vividly, in memory.
A chat with a stranger, a meal, a walk through town, all stand out when journeying in faraway lands, because they are isolated from everything familiar and can’t disappear amid the other hazy memories that get muddled together over time.
Perhaps that’s why so many travel writers in “The Conde Nast Traveler Book of Unforgettable Journeys” have gotten in touch with yet another set of senses: otherworldly feelings of the divine and supernatural.
The essayists in the collection, edited by Conde Nast Traveler Editor-in-Chief Klara Glowczewska, see figures of history prancing through modern-day, kitschy Athens.
They envision the shadows of ancient civilizations and they taste a sense of God even as they proclaim a lack of spirituality themselves.
“I am no Christian, but Christianity made sense to me in Ethiopia,” says Pico Iyer in the essay “Heaven’s Gate.”
At Petra, in Jordan, “every turn of the path inspires an urge to pray,” Edmund White writes in “Jinn City.”
Every essay in the collection is gripping and colorful in its own way. There’s a journey in here for all kinds of traveler: the outdoor adventurers, the animal-lovers, the shoppers, the pilgrims and the history buffs.
Some of the most striking include James Truman’s essay from Iran, “Gods, Kings, Mystics, and Mullahs,” and Gregor Von Rezzori’s piece about Romania, “The Red Danube.”
Rezzori deftly and humorously describes the feeling of being in a place at once familiar and foreign, something to which more and more people can relate as the world gets flatter. He was born in Romania, but it constantly surprises him in a return journey.
“I felt as if I myself belonged to a past as remote as that of the waves of barbarians that had come out of the vast open spaces of the East and swept westward along the Danube,” he writes.
The tales hail from across the globe, from the swampy Florida Everglades (from Russell Banks) to quaint Iceland (another Iyer).
There’s no representation from Central or South America, an inexplicable empty patch in the book that detracts from its otherwise comprehensive coverage.
A supplemental update, with travel tips and suggested reading lists, follows each essay – some dating back a few decades – to bring the reader down to earth after accompanying Simon Winchester, for example, on his harrowing trip up the volcanic Mount Mayon in the Philippines.
The journeys featured here might be unforgettable, but they don’t have to be unattainable.