A travelogue is a mind on the page, venturing into a new location, informing the reader of one’s impressions. These impressions can be analytical, measured, sharp, and / or whimsical. The form allows the writer to encompass all those highs and lows of travel, as long as your observations are sharp and your writing is utterly sincere.
I recently read a travelogue and was mesmerized. Have you ever read something that made you stop and take a breath, knowing you would need to read this one slowly, relishing every sentence? What was it about this story? Was it the narrative itself, or something else?
For me, it’s the voice:
“Between these houses that have existed without me for years, for centuries, these streets were traveled by thousands of people who were not me, who are not me. But now I’m walking here. I go down Broadway; it’s really me. I’ walking in streets not yet traveled by me, streets where my life has not yet been carved, streets without any scent of the past. No one here is concerned with my presence; I’m still a ghost, and I slip through the city without disturbing anything. Yet from now on my life will embrace the contour of these streets, these houses. New York will belong to me; I will belong to it.”
What traveler hasn’t felt this way? But how precisely she’s put it.
That’s Simone de Beauvoir, writing in her travelogue America, Day by Day.
She visited New York City in 1947. You may or may not have heard of de Beauvoir, but if you have, you know her as a French writer and intellectual, author of The Second Sex, a very influential feminist text. But her travelogue is all experience, not theory.
Beauvoir identifies the warmth of the Americans she meets, the delightful informality, as well as their fear of intellectualism, the racism and the inherent vices of severe individualism. She examines the good and the bad, and she also examines herself. She writes about how she’s different in this new place, forced outside of her usual self to express herself in English, and to debate and witness things that shock her. It is how most of us feel when we travel somewhere new and foreign. Beauvoir has written about these feelings with accuracy and appeal.
From the prologue:
I spent four months in America—very little time. Furthermore, I traveled for pleasure and wherever I happened to be invited. There are vast areas of the New World I haven’t even glimpsed. As a private individual, I crossed this great industrial country without visiting its factories, without seeing its technical accomplishments, without making contact with the working class. Nor did I enter the elite circle where US politics and economics are hammered out. Yet alongside the fuller picture that more competent people have drawn, it does not seem useless to me to recount, day by day, how America revealed itself to one consciousness—mine.
Indeed. No matter our experiences in a new place, whether vast or small, it is certainly not useless to recount them as they are revealed to your consciousness. Beauvoir might have thought, at times, that her efforts were useless. But we’re all better for her having continued. Her story is a snapshot of NYC, and other cities in the US, in 1947 from an outsider’s perspective. We all need to read and write those outsider perspectives in order to know our own homes more fully and accurately.
Keep a steady diet of reading works that you love. Fill your brain with words and writing that’s aspirational. There’s a saying you may have heard of: “garbage in, garbage out.” Focus on work you love, and figuring out exactly why you love it so much. This will put you on a path to produce work you’re proud of, maybe even a travelogue.
