Jonathan Raben on Traveling Alone

Glad I finally got around to reading Shapiro's collection of interviews with travel literati. The one with Jonathan Raben is a gem. For my year abroad, I became quite practiced at explaining why I was traveling alone, but apparently not as good as this British expat:

Traveling with a companion, with a wife, with a girlfriend, always seems to me like birds in a glass dome, those Victorian glass things with stuffed birds inside. You are too much of a self-contained world for the rest of the world to be able to penetrate. You've got to go kind of naked into the world and make yourself vulnerable to it, in a way that you're never going to be sufficiently vulnerable if you're traveling with your nearest and dearest on your arm. You're never going to see anything; you're never going to meet anybody; you're never going to hear anything. Nothing is going to happen to you.

Whereas travleing alone, everything happens. And also traveling alone puts you in this position where you will do almost anything to make contact with other people. My experience of travleing with somebody else is that you just hang around with them. Half the point of traveling alone is that you get so lonely you need to talk to other people. And so you find yourself hanging around late at night in bars talking with strangers, which you 'd never want to do. It would seem an insane thing to be doing.

He's on the mark. I wager the magnitude of a traveler's experience is indirectly related to his comfort. While I have met couples who were having the times of their lives abroad, there are certain activities, usually the most intimate or awkward of exchanges - the ones you'll cherish! - that close off to couples, and especially groups.

To be fair, I would hesitate to say this is the golden rule of travel, since I don't believe the enjoyment of travel comes from a unilateral path of decreasing comfort. What couples gain in emotional bond would, to some people, outweigh the joys of solo travel.

And if you'll forgive me a metaphor, one other highlight:

I think the thing about the journey is it's a very nice scale model of a life. But it's a life that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And the person who makes the journey metaphorically survives his own death to write about a life posthumously.

Don't forget one for the trivia board:

"Fiction" comes not from this imaginary verb fictia ameaning I make it up as I go along. It comes from the actual Latin verb fictia meaning, I give shape to.

Finding some peace then, I suppose I am, in these thoughts I haven't spilled in a long while.