Queridos amigos! O blog não saiu como o planejado e, durante os sessenta e seis dias que estivemos viajando, não tivemos como contar nossas experiências em 'tempo real'. Agora já estamos de volta ao Brasil, mas mesmo assim pensamos ser válido mostrar este texto a vocês. Ele caiu em minhas mãos (Ana) no primeiro dia de viagem, durante o voo Guarulhos - Amsterdam. Foi publicado na revista Holland Herald de dezembro de 2010 e e é de autoria de Pico Iyer. Há quase três meses, ainda na Europa, havíamos concordado que ele seria uma ótima forma de começarmos a postar no nosso blog. Talvez o interessante de compartilhá-lo agora seja o sentido que ele foi adquirindo durante os mais de 4.000km de estrada na Índia e perante a sensação de retorno à Europa pós-primeira-visita-à-Ásia.
AT HOME ON THE ROAD
Pico Iyer
" When this year began, I was sitting in my mother’s home in California, sleepwalking through my days with the ease of familiarity. The view through her windows could not be more ravishing - high green hills on one side, the pretty, white-walled town of Santa Barbara immediately below, the Pacific Ocean in the distance.
But it was a view i’ve been watching, and barely noticing, since I was eight years old.
Restless, I decided on a whim to use my savings to go to Australia - a place I hadn’t seen for more than 20 years. I got into a plane, two days after New Year’s, stopped for a night in my adopted home in Japan, got onto a plane that flew through the night, then another, and landed in the silent emptiness of a tiny desert town with a ‘Emergency Eye-Wash Station’ beside its terminal.
I stepped out into the early morning and was slapped awake by the great expanses of red earth. I might have been in the American West again, except that here the land was even older and more alive, and corkwood trees and ghost gums surrounded us. I walked into my hotel, and the smiling man at the front desk who checked me in might have been a brother of mine (he had recently arrived, he told me, from Mumbai). The elegant restaurant in the hotel served only Thai, Malaysian and Indian food. There were people from the Sudan in this desolate desert town of cowboys and Aboriginals and, soon I heard, from Singapore, South Africa and Lebanon.
Then my old college friend Nicolas showed up - half-Czech, half-Australian, though raised in France and Switzerland - and brought another curious piece of my world into the hot day.
We got into the ‘ute’ he’d rented, and soon we were driving into the unearthly quiet of the outback, his Aboriginal wife explaining to us 'Dreamtime’ stories and the ‘spot between the ironwoods where the dingo ate the caterpillar’. I had rarely been in a place more alien, but my friend of 30 years before was a piece of home. The landscape looked like my American base, translated to southern skies. Back at the hotel I logged onto a computer, and I was talking to a friend from elementary school, now living in Haiti.
Alice was a bewitching, ever-shifting mix of the uttterly alien and the utterly known.
PERHAPS ALL TRAVEL IS LIKE THIS: WE GO SOMEWHERE STRANGE TO SEE HOW MUCH IT RESEMBLES THE STRANGENESS WE KNOW. We better appreciate home, and see what is peculiar to it, by travelling to somewhere other. Indeed, we enrich our homes by the foreign experiences and places we bring back to them.
But it’s only been in my lifetime that I can step out of my mother’s house and find myself on the far side of the globe in what seems like a day. And only in my lifetime that I can fly back from the otherness of the Australian interior to my two-room apartment in Japan, and find surfer styles as pronounced in Kyoto as Japanese signs are in parts of Australia’s Gold Coast. Soon I can no longer begin to say what is home and what 'abroad'.
But it’s easy to forget how much we can see that our grandparents could not have imagined. If I’d saved up enough money and time, I could have gone that day not to Alice, but to Bolivia or Jerusalem or Easter Island or Ethiopia. Our sense of home is getting fruitfully complicated by a sense of all other places we could be visiting.
And our sense of home is getting further complicated because, quite wonderfully, people from Bolivia and Ethiopia and Jerusalem are flooding into our home towns. We quickly find that people who not long ago seemed as remote as other planets are now our neighbours, our classmates, our friends. Every time we step into another culture - or other culture seeps into us - that simplest of questions (‘Where do you come from?’) becomes ever more complicated and interesting.
HOME IS ESSENTIALY AN IDEA WE CARRY ROUND WITH US, REDEFINING AT EVERY INSTANT. It has less and less to do with a piece of soil, and more and more to do with what might be called a piece of soul. Home, these days, is less a matter of where you sleep, than of where you stand.
In my case, home is the Graham Greene novel I usually pack inside my carry-on. It is the Van Morrison song I carry in my head. It is the picture of my sweetheart I have with me everywhere, the memory of my oldest friends, the values and assumptions by which I guide my life, even the English language. Most of all it may be the memories of Alice Springs or Cuba or Tibet that I carry with me to my homes in England or California or Japan.
I’d always thought that home was something I supported, more than the other way round, when, one day, this acquired a literal truth. I was sitting in my parents’ home in California, where we kept all the things from our wanderings, when I saw a distant line of orange in the hills. I went downstairs to call the fire department and when I came up again, it was to see 20-metre high flames around our picture windows. I jumped into a car to escape, but there was nowhere for me to go. For three long hours I watched the wildfire pick apart my home and reduce everything I grew up with - my childhood toys, my favourite books and photos - to ash. The next day, if someone had asked me what ’home’ was, I couldn’t point any physical construction; home would have to be something invisible, which was always inside me.
These days, friends often say, there’s hardly any point in leaving home. Everywhere you go, you will find the same McDonald’s, Starbucks and Shakira videos. All the world is a suburb of the same pop-cultural metropolis, and globalism has made places less distinct.
That has never been my experience. When I go to a McDonald’s down the street from me in Japan, it is to find Tsukimi (or ‘Moon-Viewing’) Burgers on the menu, and demure young women in Armani and Dior sipping ‘Corn Potage Soup’; the cashiers cradle my palm gently as they hand my change. Then I go to a McDonald’s in my parents’ India, near Connaught Circus in Delhi, and much of the menu is vegetarian, the smell of cardamon tea is everywhere, and everything is raucous, crowded and intense as in the streets around us. Then, sometimes, I find myself in La Paz, Bolivia, and there a McDonald’s along the Prado is such a status symbol that an armed guard stands outsider the entrance, a Seiko watch sits in a display case inside and the prices are much higher than in the chic French cafe next door.
All the world may be drawing on the same pool of global symbols and goods these days, but each country translates them into its own context and culture and so makes them in some way new. If, 100 years ago, Britain and American were said to be two countries separated by a common language, now the whole world is 200 cultures divided by a commom frame of reference.
And yet, my friends go on, these days you can access the wonders of the world without leaving your living room. You can see parts of Western Tibet or the Antartic on your iPhone that would be very hard to see in life, and you can talk face-to-face to a college friend sitting on a Thai island thanks to Skype.
So why not savour others cultures in the greater comfort of your home? When my grandparents were growing up, they could not dream of meeting someone from Guatemala or Nigeria, let alone of sitting in their kitchens and travelling through Siberia on a screen.
YET TRAVEL IS EVER MORE IMPORTANT PRECISELY BECAUSE IT CHANGES AND CHALLENGES OUR SENSE OF HOME.
One week this summer, my Japanese wife and I left my mother’s home to visit Oxford, England; I wanted to show Hiroko the place where I’d been born and my primary school, the streets I played along, the buildings where I’d studied. Britain itself looks wonderfully like a foreign country now that’s flooded with people from Jamaica, Pakistan and Europe, making for better food, fresher music, more exotic couples and a greater sense of vibrancy. Three days after leaving London, I had to visit Shanghai, for my work, and found myself, like a country bumpkin, driving along blue-lit elevated freeways, and among 7,000 skyscrapers - each, it seemed, with its own dazzling light display. In the days I had free, I walked around a traditional water-village near Suzhou and got up at dawn to wonder through the gardens and among the lakes of Hangzhou.
When I got back to the home I’ve chosen in Japan, it was with newly sharpened childhood memories from Oxford, the long blue horizons of California and the 23rd-century light shows of Shanghai to bring into our tiny flat. I could see how much the old Japanese capital around me had taken from ancient China, and how much modern China copied the subway systems and museum tickets of new Japan. I could understand why my Japanese friends long for the open spaces of California, and why my Californian friends covet the order and stillness of Japan. I could even register how much Japan resembles England, in its scale and ways, though for me with exotic characters. THE CHALLENGE - AND IT IS THE BEAUTY - OF THE NEW MILLENIUM IS THAT OUR SENSE OF HOME, OUR SENSE OF ABROAD, ARE MORE AND MORE IN PERMANENT ROTATION. For some of us, if we’re lucky, the whole world can begin to feel like home."
