Whittled Fantasies
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Pascal wrote that all of our troubles came from not staying quietly in our room. As you may have guessed, Pascal wasn’t big on sightseeing.Two centuries later, Baudelaire, a Pascalian to the tips of his nerves, wrote, in his long poem “The Voyage,”that all we gain from traveling is a “bitter knowledge,” what he rather gloatingly described as “the dreary spectacle of undying sin.”Baudelaire did travel a bit in his youth and should have known better. I don’t know about Pascal, but I get into enough trouble just staying in my room.
One question implicit in Pascal’s dour little pensee isn’t so easy to answer. Is it better to imagine the world or to see it firsthand? Certainly imagination imparts a tinge of the fabulous to unknown cities and landscapes, a tinge that tends to fade when we actually go there.Yet isn’t it preferable in the end to have seen the real thing, however diminished it may turn out to be compared with our imaginings?
This is a question of travel, perhaps the only important one. Elizabeth Bishop raises it in quizzical and pointed fashion in her poem “Questions of Travel,” from her 1965 collection of the same title, in which she asks, “Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?” And she presses the issue:
What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?
These lines come to mind when I’m traveling but never before; then the trip, so long anticipated, still holds out its mirage of promises. Beforehand, no destination appears too remote or too forbidding; afterward, looking back, even the grandest places seem shrunken and sadly diminished. (Baudelaire noted and lamented this quirk of reminiscence when he wrote, in the same poem I just quoted: “To the eyes of memory how small the world appears!”)
Not everybody would agree. The great 13th-century Sufi mystic Ibn al-‘Arabi, who made his way from Spain to Central Asia with side trips to Damascus and Mecca, declared that travel impels selfknowledge; in an untranslatable play on words, he wrote, “The trip strips the traveler.” Every voyage undertaken, however outward bound, is an expedition into our own interiors. For the medieval mind, the human being is by definition “homo viator” (“traveling man”). Our very lives are journeys; no matter how narrow a room we lock ourselves into, still we are traveling.
Elizabeth Bishop was herself much on the go.Shuttled between Massachusetts and Nova Scotia as a child, after her mother went hopelessly mad, she lived for various spells in New York and Key West before a long sojourn in Brazil, which was probably the closest she ever got to having a real home. In “One Art,” one of her last poems, she writes:
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them but it wasn’t a disaster.
What we lose in travel is the place imagined. And in “Questions of Travel,” Bishop puzzles this over.The poem, included in “The Complete Poems: 1927-1979” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 287 pages, $15), is quite remarkable in an unremarkable way. Her friend and admirer James Merrill once quipped that Bishop was remarkable for carrying off an “impersonation of an ordinary woman”; this poem employs the same stratagem. It is a poem made up of questions and answers cunningly stitched together by repetitions, all rendered in a voice that could be that of a thoughtful tourist.
It begins with the kind of mild exasperation a jaded sightseer might feel: “There are too many waterfalls here; / the crowded streams / hurry too rapidly down to the sea …” Out of these faintly petulant observations a landscape arises, rather to our surprise.The bored tone of the speaker abolishes any picture-postcard effect. And the repetitions – of words and phrases and images – cascade, like the very waterfalls they evoke:
But if the streams and clouds keep travelling, travelling, the mountains look like the hulls of capsized ships, slime-hung and barnacled.
As the poem unfolds in further questions, further images snatched from the road, a strange but homely music begins. The repeated phrases act as refrains. (What other poet could repeat the word “inexplicable” in two successive lines and get away with it?) The language remains simple but begins to thicken interestingly, as when the speaker asks:
Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too? And have we room for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?
A “folded sunset” may be a snapshot tucked into a safari jacket, but don’t we fold sunsets into the vest pockets of remembrance, too? Here Bishop closes the stanza with a classical iambic pentameter line, beautiful in itself but also signaling a profound shift of tone. For now she turns the questions in on themselves.
Bishop builds the concluding pagelong stanza on replies linked by the phrase “But surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen” (or heard or stopped or pondered or studied). Now the repetitions have percussive effect, like the handmade clogs the traveler hears with their “sad, two-noted, wooden tune.” It would have been wrong not to have heard this or the solo of “the fat brown bird / who sings above the broken gasoline pump.”These are not extraordinary vistas. There are no Taj Mahals or Bridges of Sighs in her lines.They’re the small commonplace sights and events we could never have imagined from home but which, once we have witnessed them, we don’t mean ever to relinquish. They are, in her exquisite phrase, “the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.”
Isn’t this a bit medieval? Isn’t this trip with its “too many waterfalls”our life itself? Wouldn’t it have been “a pity” not to have experienced it, even that “grease-stained filling-station floor”? At the end of the poem, Pascal is called into question himself: “Or could Pascal have been not entirely right / about just sitting quietly in one’s room? “Bishop doesn’t say. The questions, like travel itself, are their own reason for being.