The past and France; the last foreign countries…

‘We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.’1

It is often said that ‘the past is a forgein country’, at the same time we live in a globalized ‘flat’ world where everyone travels and nowhere seems truly foreign.

Le dépaysement

French with a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’. Derived from the word ‘pays’, meaning country (different from the unitary nation state). Dépaysement is the feeling you experience in a foreign place. ‘Culture shock’ doesn't cover the experience, the german ‘unheimlich’ catches the negative aspect which might translate as ‘eeriness’. No coincidence the Société pour la Protection du Paysage Français (founded in 1901), was so close to it’s German twin the Deutsche Bund für Heimatschutz (founded in 1904).

Dépaysement is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing; it can be shocking, exciting, intimidating, puzzling, electrifying or simply diverting. Former president Charles de Gaulle half jokingly complained (1962): ‘How can you govern a country which has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?’ (an understatement as France actually has closer to 1,000 different types of cheese). The French have long traveled between their regions expecting/looking for dépaysement, through the different landscapes, traditions and cultures (wines, delicacies, cuisines, dialects). Under attack for so long by the centralized unitary state, and more recently, the forces of globalization.

Chauvier (2011) observed that his ‘students are disoriented, even blocked, when a teacher does not present to them the observed scene, but what goes on behind the scenes. It became difficult to whet their appetite for the fabrication of observation rather than the object observed.’ So: ‘Durant deux heures, je vais donner aux étudiants ce qu’ils sont venus chercher: du dépaysement.’2 Denis Tillinac (1983), in one of his ‘20 years later novels’, had his alter-ego travel back to England in search for his old summer-love. Upon entering a modern day student bistro he discovers; ‘Puis je me suis senti mal à l’aise, car le dépaysement était double: espace et temps.’3

Bailly traveled around France to find what made it French. He relates his travels in his book: Le dépaysement, Voyages en France (2011). Not surprisingly perhaps, he finds the differences within France as large as those with outside. He observes; ‘basically France would first of all be a habit adopted by those we call the French: a body of behavior, a corpus of references and recurring patterns inscribed in a language which expresses and renews them, but nothing more, nothing that would be like an essence configuring a destiny.’4 A homeland is a language, and nothing else.

Dépaysement révélateur

I traced a reference to Georges Gusdorf’s 1948 book: La Découverte de Soi. In the section; ‘Le sens du voyage’ he explores the concept of the dépaysement révélateur as the meaning of travel. ‘If we give it the value of a dépaysement révélateur, travel becomes one of the techniques of self-knowledge. A method of difference.’ He refers to an old saying that ‘the shortest path to yourself takes you around the world’. But the method has clear limitations, as he observed: ‘... the effectiveness of travel is not self-evident. Travel only represents an opportunity, it is up to the traveler to make the most of it.’ And that: ‘Even before departure, the die is cast.’

Limits are set by your personality. ‘He who limits his attention to the easy picturesque and only seeks new sensations to color the monotony of the days, he will learn nothing from the new lands’. He goes on to quote Henry de Montherlant who wrote: ‘Travel, which accustoms people to grasping things quickly and on the surface, and being content with them, is suitable for the superficial. This is why we travel so much today. (…) Besides, notice this sign: empty minds always like to travel.’ And warms: ‘Everyone has their own limits; the purchase of a railway ticket is not enough to indefinitely extend the extent of the interior domain.’5

Alain de Botton (2002) seems to agree, he observes that; ‘Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train.’ And how; ‘ Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, … our curiosity encompassing more and more of the world until, at some point, we may reach that elusive stage where we are bored by nothing.’ But that; ‘A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.’6

Reading and travel

‘With me, traveling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. From time to time, it is true, I make a desperate resolution to mend my ways. I sketch out programs of useful, serious reading; I try to turn my rambling voyages into systematic tours through the history of art and civilization. But without much success. After a little I relapse into my old bad ways. Deplorable weakness! I try to comfort myself with the hope that even my vices may be of some profit to me.’

A long quote from Aldous Huxley’s 1922 book: Along the road. He further specifies that;

‘… traveling is not a vice of the body (which it mortifies) but of the mind. Your traveler-for-traveling’s-sake is like your desultory reader - a man addicted to mental self-indulgence. Like all other vicious men, the reader and the traveler have a whole armory of justifications with which to defend themselves. Reading and traveling, they say, broaden the mind, stimulate imagination (…), it may be quite true that, for certain people, desultory reading and aimless traveling are richly educative, it is not for that reason that most true readers and travelers born indulge their tastes. We read and travel, not that we may broaden and enrich our minds, but that we may pleasantly forget they exist.’

A little further he suggests that; ‘Old guide-books, so out of date as to be historical documents, make excellent traveling-companions. (…) It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space ; you travel through time and thought as well. (…) these old books of travel for they make one realize the entirely accidental character of all our tastes and our fundamental intellectual beliefs.’7 I have taken this idea to heart and have experienced many a triple dépaysement révélateur: in space, time and thought (memory).

Landscape and memory

Simon Schama’s seminal work: Landscape & Memory (1995)8 remains a source of inspiration. He wrote it at a time when the ‘seriousness of our ecological predicament’ became undeniable. The entire history of settled society, from ancient China, India, Mesopotamia, the Maya’s to our modern ‘western’ one was a brutal manipulation of nature, farming had become ‘ecological warfare’. Some voices advocated for new (creation) myths; re-mystification to turn around centuries of de-mystification.

Schama made clear he did not to deny the predicament we found ourselves in, he wondered whether ‘a new set of myths are what the doctor should order as a cure for our ills.’ His book was ‘a way of looking: of rediscovering what we already have, but which somehow eludes our recognition and our appreciation. Instead of being yet another explanation of what we have lost, it is an exploration of what we may yet find.’

‘Instead of assuming the mutually exclusive character of Western culture and nature, I want to suggest the strength of the links that have bound them together. That strength is often hidden beneath layers of the commonplace. … an excavation below our conventional sight-level to recover the veins of myth and memory that lie beneath the surface.’ ‘A curious excavator of traditions stumbles over something protruding above the surface … he scratches away … discovers bits and pieces that elude coherent reconstruction … digging down through layers of memories and representations toward the primary bedrock.’

Some kind of songlines almost, like those of the Aboriginals of Australia (most famous examples thanks largely to Chatman's book titled The Songlines9) where landscape and narrative merge. ‘The Songlines are navigation instruments for crossing the desert, while the landscape is at the same time a memory aid on the basis of which the stories are remembered, in other words, the story is a map, the landscape a narrative’ writes Solnit10.

In a different book she makes a reference to less known songlines. After observing that: ‘The landscape in which identity is supposed to be grounded is not solid stuff; it's made out of memory and desire, rather than rock and soil, as are the songs.’ She tells how the nomadic Chemehuevi navigated wide expanses of their arid terrain with songs too: ‘The songs gave the names of places in geographical order, and the place names were descriptive, evocative, so that a person who'd never been to a place might recognize it from the song. … Men inherited songs from their father or grandfather, and the song gave them hunting rights to the terrain it described.’ (…) ‘A song was the length of the night and a map of the world, and the arid terrain around Las Vegas was the Storied Land of the great myths.’11

A Landscape of Perspective

‘A Temple to Perspective whose structure would represent the age of the earth, with each centimeter of height equating to 1 million years. Measuring 46 meters in all, the tower would feature, at its base, a tiny band of gold a mere millimeter thick, standing for mankind’s time on earth.’

Is what De Botton (2012) imagined; ‘… dark save for a single shaft of light … sound of water dripping from a great height into a deep pool, … a not unpleasant sense of our own insignificance. … to be made to feel small by something mighty, accomplished and intelligent is to have wisdom presented to us … We can survey ourselves as if from a distance, no longer offended by the wounds inflicted on our self-esteem, … generous towards the universe and open-minded about its course.’12

The black Périgord, the Vézère valley and the surrounding landscapes with it’s caves, forests, castles is a close as you get to an open-air Temple to Perspective. We looked for a place to retreat, reflect and refresh. After traveling and living in various parts of the world, we (Joost and Sze) spent over a year to overhaul a 185 years Bourgeoise house into La Min-sú de Terrasson (石木民宿) with our own hands.

We think a week is the minimum to quiet down and visit this extensive area (a stay of 2 weeks would be ideal). We do not rent by the hour, not even by the day, our guesthouse/min-sú is a destination to kick-back, slow-down, return to the self, not a space to just pass-through.

Through this blog we hope to share some of our experiences, as beads on a necklace, even with those remaining armchair travelers.