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Lost and FoundForget the map and you might just find yourself. By Mark Kingwell PHOTO: PABLO ZULETA ZAHR Forget the map and you might just find yourself. I flew to New York for the weekend on a 7 a.m. flight. I got up in the dark, took off into the cold twilight and was walking in Central Park by 8:45. Red-tailed hawks were circling in the cloudless sky and diving from Fifth Avenue perches after prey fleeing for cover in Frederick Law Olmsted’s midtown masterpiece. I was so deracinated, the touchstones of my daily life so broken and deranged, that I could not quite believe I had started the day in my familiar home. Travel is a drug, and not just because it can be addictive. More because it alters consciousness, dilates the mind and maybe even rewires the cerebral cortex. At least since the beginning of the modern age, when Montaigne praised the liberalizing effects of travel, people have known that going somewhere different from home was the best way to challenge your habitual ways of thinking. You can visit New York, heaped and layered as it is with literary and cinematic associations and coloured by your previous visits, and still find new feelings, shifted perspectives. So streamlined are the new forces of globalized sameness – the stores, the airports, the hotels – that I wonder if sometimes we’re fed a placebo. Still, with growing awareness of carbon footprints, we’re finding ways to lessen those footprints and become more conscientious. That conjunction is a blessing: Because we now have to consider more carefully why we go anywhere, we can ask the deeper question of what we want from travel in the first place. Somewhere beyond the contrived, comfortable cityscapes, we’ll encounter a potentially more profound version of ourselves. “Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal,” Walter Benjamin said. “It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling.” This is a school for questions, not answers. It does not counsel novelty for its own sake, still less the addict’s restless jumpiness; instead it offers a profound appreciation for the gift of consciousness, its ever-varied edges always stretched and rewoven. Real travel means we must surrender expectations and submit to chance, to challenge our desires, not merely satisfy existing ones. Too often structured by foreseen attractions and destinations, leaving home ought to be, above all, Montaigne’s wild democratic gesture, that plunge into otherness. Becoming strange to ourselves is the gateway to seeing how dependent on strangers we are for our own identities. “Let’s get crossed off everybody’s list,” Chet Baker sang. “Let’s get lost.” Why not take that literally? Getting lost to yourself might be the best way to find out who you are. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net The newest book from philosopher Mark Kingwell is Concrete Reveries: Consciousness and the City. Chile-born, Germany-based artist Pablo Zuleta Zahr used images from two 10-hour videos of people in Santiago walking past his camera. Zuleta Zahr, who studied architecture, digitally filtered people in the videos based on the colour of their clothing and then combined them to create a kind of architectural collage, a human landscape. “You can’t predict what you’ll see,” he says. “No one is left out, no one is manipulated and no one appears twice.”
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