Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey. Zilcosky

In the beginning of this independent study when finding books to read to fulfill my research part of the contract, I found Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey, edited by Zilcosky. This is a book of essays on the ideas of what writing travel is exactly, but I thought it might help me understand a way for me to write my own stuff. I have read different parts of the book but spent most of my time thinking about different segments and quotes from the very first chapter by John Zilcosky. He spends most of the time talking about the differences between what storytelling and story writing is and what travel writing is. He talks about the various essays in the book and about various big names in history and their ideas of what travel is. I just want to touch on certain parts that grab at me.
    On page four, Zilcosky quotes Walter Benjamin on the idea that books and reading can appear as travel substitutes. "the book allowed one to journey while remaining solitary and static in the comfort of one's own home"(4) was a line that ignited a spark. Yes! That is why I read. I read to travel without going anywhere at all. Books are exciting. They allow you to escape when you have no where to go or can go. They provide a fulfillment of creativity in our ability to imagine what is written. They give us our hopes and dreams and ideas through the subject or characters described. Zilcosky even stated that the great Immanuel Kant found that one was "always already traveled" (5) through their own homes. Kant never even left Prussia, but he read several travel books, according to Zilcosky (5).
     Zilcosky points out that during the 16th century writing became a more necessary part for foreign voyages (5). Rich sponsors of the ships sent out, to find new resources or areas for expansion, were increasingly demanding accounts of their wanderings and whereabouts (5). Those accounts would eventually bring in other investors and furthermore, settlers. When people began reading about foreign places, they would set out to visit or move there and in turn, would write their own accounts of their travels, "we inevitably experience foreign lands in terms of the books we read, and these lands eventually become the texts we write about" (6).
    Zilcosky talked about how a traveler has to be in a still, isolated environment in order to write of his travels. To write while moving was near impossible in the past due to the limitations of ink and paper and even steady transportation. Who writes at the exact moment they are experiencing travel? You go to what you want to see, and then you write of it later, after you have seen it and have moved on. So when you read about a place, you are not really there in that moment of the memory, or even what you are reading is what actually took place, because the writer had to have already gone from the place in order to write of his travel. It was a moment in time that he is remembering, reflecting back on to capture through his writings. Maybe what I am wanting to do is translate that as well to a photograph. It is a moment captured in time that will never exist or happen again. Travel is "in motion, crossing frontiers, ultimately uncontainable" (10). Zilcosky states in this chapter that even when a traveler gets to where he wanted to go, he is still not really there. He writes of a traveled moment that never existed.
    So do I think a photograph could have a truer capture of that traveled moment than writing? Perhaps, because I think it is the exact image of what I saw at the time I decided to shoot it. Does altering the brightness or shadows and colors in Photoshop give its moment a falsed telling? Maybe, because that was not really what was there. But a photograph can be argued to not really capture what is there in the first place. A camera records an image using light ( photography= painting with light) and mirrors and shutters; either film or encodings. It denotes a subject, such as a flower or person. It eludes to something, but it is never the actual object. In order for me to give you the actual object, I would have to physically hand you the actual object. But I am not majoring in philosophy or theory or ideas. I am just trying to tell my own story through going to other places. That itself is another subject Zilcosky touches on. The idea of finding yourself through going somewhere else. If you take yourself out of the equation of where you are and put yourself in another one elsewhere, you hope to find a different answer, something new ( I feel like I am almost quoting another saying but cannot find it in my notes, I will look into that). I do know that Zilcosky writes " the self becomes itself only in another place" (6) and "where the self attempts to find itself through displacement" (7).  I feel that I am trying to find more about myself by escaping where I am to discover it. A new setting could bring forth something I am missing, or hiding, or have yet to become. I might be looking for something new for me, maybe even what I should be doing after I graduate, but all I know is that I love the idea of going elsewhere and seeing as much of the world, or at least the very country I reside on, as I can before I leave this place. I want to explore where I can go and what I can do there. Maybe I might as well explore here too.