500 word Article Entry for Inter-Rail Writing Comp
DREAMERS, ARTISTS AND TRAVELLERS: “TO MOVE IS TO LIVE”
Travel as a concept means many things to many people. Mention that you are going “away” in a casual aside and people will leap upon your comment, their imaginations instantly conjuring up images of red wine and poetry in Paris, bare feet and blue seas in the Caribbean or sun-burn and sex in Majorca, depending on their particular cultural bent. This I think, is the beauty of it – that travel is considered, by nearly everyone, to be a fabulous interlude in hectic work lives, an antithesis to business as usual. Certainly it is this, but it can also be more, much more.
James Radcliff is a scruffy free-wheeler nursing a cup of coffee and a hangover in a café in the new glass-and-metal shopping complexes that make up modern Sheffield. He curses as he burns his tongue on a scalding “Americano” and testifies how “bloody typical” it is. Apparently it’s not only his tongue that gets regularly burnt, these days – “ I’ve had enough of Britain. No rides and cheapskates everywhere. There’s no-one up for giving an honest road man a break, anymore.” After listening to him wax lyrical for a while about the difficulties of hitchhiking in 21st century Britain, I wonder, aloud, just why someone having such an apparently miserable time would choose to stay on the road. His response is instant, profound and forceful – “To move all the time is to live, man, I just wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s the freedom of it, going wherever the thumb points and the traffic’s moving, I could never give it up, not yet anyway.”
This is not an uncommon response from road people of any generation, although it is rare, post-hippy, to still hear these sentiments in such a pure, eloquent form. For many, travel is about more than getting away from it all, more than just a synonym for holiday; it is both a means to an end, and an end in itself. Movement assumes primary importance in an individual’s life, to the extent that staying in one place can seem like cheating yourself, and can create that strange feeling of being “outside”; outside the loop of life and, consequently, of who you really consider yourself to be.
Dreamers, artists, travellers and others of that lonely ilk are often accused of ignoring reality – washing up, after all, always needs to be done. But I disagree; it is not a deliberate running away from “real life” that causes travel and the traveller’s instinct, but in actuality a desperate searching for and toward it. Travel is a search for that feeling that what one is experiencing is on a higher plane, that it is somehow more real, or at least considered to be so. It is part of a searing desire to graduate beyond mediocrity, to experience (in the purest sense) on a more profound level.
Travel as a concept means many things to many people. Mention that you are going “away” in a casual aside and people will leap upon your comment, their imaginations instantly conjuring up images of red wine and poetry in Paris, bare feet and blue seas in the Caribbean or sun-burn and sex in Majorca, depending on their particular cultural bent. This I think, is the beauty of it – that travel is considered, by nearly everyone, to be a fabulous interlude in hectic work lives, an antithesis to business as usual. Certainly it is this, but it can also be more, much more.
James Radcliff is a scruffy free-wheeler nursing a cup of coffee and a hangover in a café in the new glass-and-metal shopping complexes that make up modern Sheffield. He curses as he burns his tongue on a scalding “Americano” and testifies how “bloody typical” it is. Apparently it’s not only his tongue that gets regularly burnt, these days – “ I’ve had enough of Britain. No rides and cheapskates everywhere. There’s no-one up for giving an honest road man a break, anymore.” After listening to him wax lyrical for a while about the difficulties of hitchhiking in 21st century Britain, I wonder, aloud, just why someone having such an apparently miserable time would choose to stay on the road. His response is instant, profound and forceful – “To move all the time is to live, man, I just wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s the freedom of it, going wherever the thumb points and the traffic’s moving, I could never give it up, not yet anyway.”
This is not an uncommon response from road people of any generation, although it is rare, post-hippy, to still hear these sentiments in such a pure, eloquent form. For many, travel is about more than getting away from it all, more than just a synonym for holiday; it is both a means to an end, and an end in itself. Movement assumes primary importance in an individual’s life, to the extent that staying in one place can seem like cheating yourself, and can create that strange feeling of being “outside”; outside the loop of life and, consequently, of who you really consider yourself to be.
Dreamers, artists, travellers and others of that lonely ilk are often accused of ignoring reality – washing up, after all, always needs to be done. But I disagree; it is not a deliberate running away from “real life” that causes travel and the traveller’s instinct, but in actuality a desperate searching for and toward it. Travel is a search for that feeling that what one is experiencing is on a higher plane, that it is somehow more real, or at least considered to be so. It is part of a searing desire to graduate beyond mediocrity, to experience (in the purest sense) on a more profound level.
posted by My Back Pages at 5:36 pm
<< Home