Episode Details

What’s the difference between being a passive tourist and a wayfarer?

Follow the 17th-century footsteps of Matsuo Basho to interrogate the gap between curated tourist destinations  and the open-ended, ego-stripping realities of true travel. By contrasting the lush, internal landscapes of L.M. Montgomery with the skeletal prose of classical Japanese travel sketches, we ask: Can we ever truly encounter a sovereign landscape, or do our books merely wrap the earth in a comforting postcard illusion?

Along the way, we look at the haiku in its haibun form and use Martin Heidegger’s classic distinction between ‘Earth’ and ‘World.’ Can Basho’s haiku lessons rescue us from our egos. Maybe, but 400 years later, other writers have their own responses to him!

Episode 7.02 –

Grand Tours Pt 2: Bat on the Narrow Road

Readings & Resources:

• Bashō, Matsuo. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. Translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa.
• Montgomery, L. M. The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career. 1917.
• Montgomery, L. M. The Blue Castle. 1926.
• Downer, Lesley. On the Narrow Road to the Deep North: Journey into a Lost Japan, 1989
• Flanagan, Richard. The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Knopf, 2014.
• Goldberg, Natalie. Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku, 2020.
• Merton, Thomas. The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, 1973.

Glossary:

Wayfaring: A mode of travel in which the journey itself becomes the destination and concept of home, characterized by a constant, open-ended wandering rather than arriving at a fixed point. 

Haibun: A traditional Japanese literary form that intricately blends prose and haiku poetry so that the two distinct modes of writing interact and illuminate each other. 

Noncompletion: An ongoing, unresolved state of existing “between” spaces or ideas, embraced by the wayfarer as the permanent, true condition of a journey that has no final destination. 

Listener’s Guide Reflection Questions

1. When you observe a natural setting, how have books influenced your conception of it?
2. Consider the difference between a destination that promises modern amenities and an open-ended un-curated route with no final stop: how does the presence or absence of structural comforts affect your attitude?
3. In tracking your own neighborhood’s daily life, how might an ordinary object to become a site of specific poetic meaning rather than clutter?