A Lifetime

She taught travel writing in a small college. It wasn’t a bad job and she got to choose what she taught, but the students were there to fulfill a requirement and some hoped to pick up some pointers for their next trip to Paris or Prague. The course wasn’t going to leave them any wiser about going on excursions to exotic places, but they figured it was easier than taking a foreign language. That was a lot of work and what if they decided to go to Copenhagen or Oslo instead of Venice? All those hours cramming Italian into the brain would go for naught.

She was aware of the lack of interest in what people wrote about generations ago when they traveled. People and places were different back then. The modes of transportation were often uncomfortable and were always a lot slower. Some of them were even dangerous. Some of the students wondered why people in the past even bothered. They could have avoided the hassle. The local beach was probably just as good, or there were restaurants in the city. No need to go elsewhere looking for culture.

She knew it was hard to imagine a world that had once been unconnected by technology, by the internet, television, films, and anything else that could bring news and images to people. They mostly relied on books and lectures by people who had actually trekked over the Sahara or the Pyrenees. The experiences were described and there might be a few artifacts presented in lectures. Books often had blurry black and white photographs. 

There was nothing of interest in these things, the students thought. They knew only the multimedia life that had gradually morphed into artificial worlds that their avatars stumbled through, learning a little about the landscape and destroying opponents on the journey while earning points. If the avatar made it to the final goal alive, the goal had been accomplished.

The instructor was completely aware of this. She had used visual aids in class, but had felt silly showing the devices used by Quechua people to spin yarn while walking at extraordinary altitudes where oxygen was sparse and every step agony for tourists. She had done it anyway. It hadn’t been possible to portray the smells and infections in the public market of Santa Rosa de Copán in Honduras, but she had tried her best. The problem was, the bright shades of red, blue, and purple overshadowed the market’s true colors of poverty and disease.

It had helped some to use a novel or two for the purpose of getting the students to think about ways of traveling that were something other than spring trips to Daytona Beach or family vacations to Disneyland. Not that the novels had been easy to select; traveling isn’t just a five-day tour of several countries, and journeys were considered to mean a trip taken two hundred years ago or more. They didn’t come with illustrations - only a lot of pages with words. Still, it had been somewhat successful.

The class had read The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Some students had missed the colonial context of racism and cruelty, seeing only the adventure of uncharted territory. A few had been interested in discussing why people from Europe would ever want to engage in imperialism in such inhospitable terrain, why they would travel under those conditions. The instructor admitted she had been pleased at the response, even though a few students had been yawning or trying to sneak a text message to a friend.

The other novel was The Lost Steps by Cuban author Alejo Carpentier. It was about an expedition that journeyed up the Orinoco River and what happened as they arrived at the source. The journey was mind-boggling and was a true portrayal of historical periods that existed simultaneously in Latin America. The students had been rather intimidated by the erudite lexicon of the novelist and they hadn’t been very skilled in using a map to locate the Orinoco. They hadn’t a clue as to the size of the river until they were given the assignment to look it up. They also managed to find some sports people practiced there, as well as some hotels for decent rental prices.

She didn’t give up easily, and proceeded to discuss the differences between tourist and traveler. She asked if there were any true travelers left or if the closet thing would be a hiker? Had the smartphone and digital images made it impossible to travel now without putting the traveler - the ME - smack in the middle of amazing historical architecture? Without taking pretty much the same shots as every other visitor to the statue of Romeo in Verona?

She kept trying, because it somehow mattered, despite the sense of not having been very successful. She tried to approach the novels and the other props plus the assignments from the point of view of her students rather than as their professor, and that was when she understood.

The book was gone. Book was not there, in opposition to Gertrude Stein’s book was there in Tender Buttons. Book was definitely not there for the poor young people who only knew Daytona and Cancún, beaches, bars, and beds. But no books. How had that happened? When did our reading preferences shift from Dickens and Alice Walker to Business for Dummies and Facebook ads? How had we allowed the dumbing down to happen so quickly?

She realized what she was doing, which was basically theoretical babbling, and stopped. There was a lot to think about before making a decision. She would sleep on it. And did.

She dreamed about sitting on a lap listening to what came from a book with pretty pictures. She dreamed about reading her own first words. She dreamed about how she used to listen to adults talking on different occasions, nobody on the phone or messaging. About monthly book clubs in elementary school. About the Summer Book Worm Club at the town library. The biographies, histories, fantasies, and fiction of books than began to fill her lonely, limited life.

She dreamed that she was walking through all the doors of all those books adorned with words, with a few illustrations, but with no screen or hyperlinks. She was touching the surface of the pages, noting the fibers and the scent of ink. She was entering the pages now and was in Paris and Prague, Copenhagen, Oslo, Buenos Aires, Paraty. 

She would always be able to dream.