A era after the trailblazing cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict insisted that “there isn’t any cause to suppose that anyone tradition has seized upon an everlasting sanity and can stand in historical past as a solitary resolution of the human downside,” heralding as an alternative “the good variety of social options” that completely different cultures have devised for a similar widespread human issues — love and loss of life, magnificence and terror, the every day puzzle of being — Dervla Murphy (November 28, 1931–Might 22, 2022) got down to see them for herself by going midway around the globe on a bicycle, with little greater than a passport, map, two pens, and Blake’s poems in her sole saddlebag. (In the event you don’t but know of this outstanding lady — that’s, should you haven’t but fallen hopelessly in love along with her — read this first.)
Alongside the journey, the document of which endures in her virtually unbearably great guide Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (public library), she fell in love with Afghanistan — “it’s a pity brainwashing techniques had been used to dissuade me” — and with the astounding pure fantastic thing about this land of blue and yellow, and with the unusual bodily magnificence and soul-warmth of its folks. Fascinated by the extraordinarily low stage of technological growth in a society so able to pleasure, she marveled on the native customized of carrying watches as ornaments with out truly start capable of inform the time — a peculiar homily on the current as the one crucible of aliveness, animated by a way that “yesterday is over, at the moment is one thing to be loved with out fuss.”
Conscious {that a} cynic who has not skilled such cultures would readily accuse her of “a tiresome outburst of romanticism,” she considers the deeper paradoxes such contrasts expose. In a passage evocative of Denise Levertov’s elegant poem “Sojourns in the Parallel World,” she writes:
The extra I see of unmechanised locations and other people the extra satisfied I grow to be that machines have achieved incalculable harm by unbalancing the connection between Man and Nature. The mere proven fact that we predict and discuss as we do about Nature is symptomatic. For us to discuss with Nature as a separate entity — one thing we admire or keep away from or research or paint — reveals how far we’ve eliminated ourselves from it.
With an eye fixed to the tragic hijacking of pure science — that wonder-smitten human impulse to befriend probably the most elemental strata of actuality — for functions of energy, financial development, and private acquire, she provides:
I suppose all our scientific advances are an exquisite enhance for the superior mind of the human race however what these advances are doing to us appears to me fairly actually tragic. In spite of everything, solely a handful of individuals are involved within the pleasure and stimulation of discovering and growing, whereas hundreds of thousands lead feebler and extra artificial lives due to the achievements of that handful.
An unlikely antidote to the double-edged sword of what we name “progress” — a sword that goes on razing us of a few of our tenderest humanity and most vibrant capability for aliveness — is to be present in journey, within the willingness for full-bodied engagement with the variousness of the world, which calls for of us each our highest humanity and our animal nature:
Individuals now use lower than half their potential forces as a result of “Progress” has disadvantaged them of the inducement to dwell totally. All this has been dropped at the floor of my thoughts by the final angle to my conception of travelling, which I as soon as took with no consideration as regular behaviour however which strikes most individuals as wild eccentricity, merely as a result of it includes a specific amount of what’s now thought to be hardship however was to all our ancestors a characteristic of on a regular basis life — utilizing bodily power to get from level A to level B. I don’t know what the tip results of all this “progress” might be — one thing fairly dire, I ought to suppose. We stay a part of Nature, nonetheless startling our scientific advances, and the extra efficiently we overlook or ignore this truth, the much less we might be pleased with being males*.
Complement with Dylan Thomas’s brief, gorgeous poem “Being But Men” and the good nature author Loren Eiseley on reclaiming our sense of the miraculous in a mechanical age, then revisit the beloved Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s fan letter to Rachel Carson about knowledge within the age of expertise and Nick Cave on transcendence in the age of algorithms.
