Not for ascetic travel
An English word blogger in “Little Red Book” suggested that “excursion” (excursion, excursion, excursion) should be recorded as “an ascetic journey” in Chinese homonym, and the comment area was full of laughter. But if you think about it carefully, before the invention of modern means of transportation, travel was by no means an adjustment and contrast to ordinary life, but it should really be called “asceticism”. In the past, it was not easy to read thousands of books, but traveling thousands of miles is even more difficult. Traveling is extremely hard and dangerous. You can get a glimpse of the origin of English words. For example, the word “travel” in “travel” originally had the meaning of hard work, and it is a variant of the word “travail” which means “hard work” or “excruciating pain”. In fact, both words are similar to the French “travailler” (work), and can be traced to the Latin “trepalium” (instrument of torture). When we say “farewell” (goodbye), we often mean “travel well”.
1 When
the world is chaotic and unclear, there is mystery beyond the horizon. Brave travelers knock on the door of a new world for people. For Europeans, the great discoveries brought about by the “Great Age of Discovery” are surprises and reshaping of the world view time and time again. In 1492, Columbus “discovered” the New World (this is of course a Eurocentric term, for Native Americans, it was their home), followed by Magellan, who was the first to orbit the entire globe, Then there was Captain Cook, who almost surveyed the world’s ocean routes. Although the traditional essence of the Chinese people is to settle down and relocate, before there was Xuanzang who traveled more than 50,000 miles in the Western Regions in the Tang Dynasty for 17 years and escaped death; Xu Xiake. Even today, when science is prosperous and transportation is convenient, the pioneers have not been surpassed by later generations.
From this point of view, contemporary people have missed many great adventures and discoveries. During the three years when I was inconvenient to go out, I read a lot of travel notes intermittently, chatting to relieve myself, and also revisited some books that were particularly impressive before. For example, in “The Western Regions of the Tang Dynasty”, it is a lonely figure with a stick, walking in the desert, snow-capped mountains, jungles, river valleys, wind and snow, beasts and bandits in order to find an ultimate answer. The Swedish Sven Hedin wrote “Travel in the Heart of Asia”, using a common and almost standard narrative tone in travel literature, with graphic descriptions, unfolding “exotic” scenery one after another. There is another merit in Western travel literature, which is to mix hearsay and anecdotal stories with “scientific vocabulary”. There is a chapter in Sven Hedin’s book “With the Kyrgyz”, which describes a young pilgrim and his The story of the famous donkey makes people laugh out loud.
On the contrary, Xu Xiake, who “walks between heaven and earth”, set out on the road with his own mood, and his brushwork of describing the scenery is magnificent. Xu Xiake lived from Wanli to Chongzhen in the Ming Dynasty and died in 1641. Anyone who knows a bit of history knows what time it was. The turmoil of the imperial court is not revealed in his works. He is immersed in the natural and beautiful mountains and green haze. Baizhang, I want to go back to the top, but Shangyan is also embedded with more than three feet in the air, so I can’t fly to the great thriller, during which there is also the story of the monk Jingwen who was with him, who died before his ambition was rewarded. , can’t restrain myself.
When travel literature travels to the self-media era we live in, it is no longer difficult to read thousands of books and travel thousands of miles. It is roughly done with tens of thousands of clicks and Baidu tens of thousands of times, but finally the style of travel notes has no threshold. Word. Most of the travel notes do not even have the amount of information to serve as a guide. The overwhelming number of tourists follow similar clues to check in everywhere, and then overwhelmingly post meaningless travel information on various media and social platforms, quickly and violently forming a huge vortex until it is swallowed by another, more violent vortex. In such a turbulent vortex full of mud and sand, if readers want to fish out something different, the only way to be safe is to read the travel works of famous writers, and see how they find another way, looking for roads and narrative methods that few people take. For example, Haruki Murakami, Peter Heisler, Hongzhi Zhan… As a pastime, I read Haruki Murakami’s “Drums in the Distance”, “How to Find the Vortex Cat”, “Rainy and Summer”, “If There Is a Time Machine”, “If We Were There” My Language Is Whiskey” after reading one by one, Murakami said that these books he wrote are basically “pure travel” readings, because he rarely goes to public attractions, often chooses lesser-known places, and enjoys them in a “death” way A different kind of fun to travel, and at the same time writing “pure travel” readings that are completely different from “Norwegian Forest” and “1Q84”.
2. During the time
trapped at home, I could only lie between words, and even revisited “Old Can’s Travel Notes”. In fact, this kind of work does not point to travel, on the contrary, it makes the process of reading become travel itself.
A new author was discovered by accident. The theme of one episode of the variety talk show “Round Table School” is “walking alone”. The host Dou Wentao and his old partners Xu Zidong and Zhou Yijun interviewed a young man named Liu Zichao, talking about his latest travel anthology “The Lost Satellite – A Journey Deep into the Central Asian Continent”. This is Liu Zichao’s nine-year travel record in several countries in Central Asia. It started with Kyrgyzstan, passed through Tajikistan, Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan and finally failed to make the trip-and finally ended with Kazakhstan.
As a young man who grew up in an ordinary family, Liu Zichao’s traveling around the world is almost in sync with the large-scale overseas travel of Chinese people. Due to language and cultural background barriers, many Chinese tourists don’t know what else to choose besides group tours. They can only let the tour guide’s small flag bring everyone together. Don’t know anything at all.” Fortunately, the author’s foreign language ability allows him to walk freely and more casually in this world. His first overseas trip was to India to write a feature for the first issue of a magazine. From this, he established his own basic definition of “travel”: “True travel is by no means to witness wonderful wonders, but also to witness dullness and suffering. Just knowing that there are still people living like this in the world is enough to broaden the heart.” , everything will eventually go with the wind, no matter great or small will return to dust.” In Latin, “travel” is an ascetic practice in order to reach a holy place. He is not a believer, his holy place is to use his own eyes to see all over the world, and then write it down with a pen. So far, he has traveled alone to most countries in Eurasia, including Africa and South America.
Western travel literature has a tradition that has lasted for hundreds of years, but our “look back” seems to have just begun. In this era of globalization, travel literature may no longer be able to undertake the task of enlightenment, but it still has its value in writing travel stories in a literary style and describing exotic lands in exquisite words. What Liu Zichao hopes to achieve is to avoid ignorant arrogance and cheap touch as much as possible, to observe the world in front of him with the tolerance of a bystander and the humility of a connoisseur, and to express those world experiences that have not been expressed in Chinese. He sees this as his “sacred place”—to revitalize “cheap” travel writing with literary means.
This is what my ideal travel literature looks like—few grand narratives, interesting and interesting stories, and rich and flexible text. So far, Liu Zichao has published three books: “Along the Way of the Monsoon”, “Arrival Before Midnight” and “The Lost Satellite”. I have read all three books published by Liu Zichao. As a traveler and as a writer of travel texts, he is very remarkable. He took the road less traveled, looked at the world unfolding during the journey with a straight eye, and recorded what he saw and heard as much as possible without judgment. The overall writing style is romantic yet rational, and the charm of language is more than exotic.
