Walking Up And Writing Down In This World
Tesson Among the Nomads
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Every thing of interest that crosses the wanderer’s path during the day he gathers on the page in the evening. The promise of a nighttime encounter with a blank page is what incites him during the day to take stock of everything around him. For the walker on a long journey, writing is the most intense moment of calm, the culmination of everything that happened during the day. Muscles unwind over the page. The spirit takes refuge in a pleasant excavation of memory. Writing at night the voyager continues his journey on another surface, prolonging his advance across the lines of a page. Just as he accumulated miles step by step, he retraces his trail line by line, eyes following the path of the pen like the wake of a boat, in one and the same solitude crossing the terrain of the day’s adventure and writing it down at night. The ritual is always the same when night comes: take shelter in a yurt, an isba or a bamboo cabin, in short, wherever the door is open. Ask for a candle.
Opening his rice-paper journal (economy of weight) covered with closely-written letters (economy of space), employing the briefest phrases (economy of style), he takes his time writing while his silent hosts look on (economy of words), contemplating this fixation in real time with the day’s events and upheavals on a clean white page. On the subject of economy of style, he always remembers the restraint of the silk merchants, Portugues sailors or arab explorers when they reported trials and tribulations to their princes. Five or six months of travel and struggle through the most remote valleys in the Cashmire were described by Portugues Jesuits in the following manner: “From the Indus valley to N’gari, Tibet, across an unknown region: nothing of importance to report to His Majesty.”
Covering my journals with black ink has always fascinated my hosts who belong to nomads without a written tradition: many will never see so many words hurled onto the page in a single session again. During my first voyages, writing in the evening was a chore I forced upon myself because I knew that depending on stray notes was giving too much confidence to my memory. What began as forced labor became a discipline, then a pleasure and finally an urgent need.
Sylvain Tesson, excerpt from Petit traité sur l’immensité du monde (Éditions des Équateurs, 2005), pages 66-67. Translation by Riffs.
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Sylvain Tesson
Sylvain Tesson’s first expedition was to Iceland in 1991, followed by a trip around the world on bike in ’93. The press calls him « a wanderer, a vagabond, a voyager without attachments for whom nothing matters except the road ahead.” Among his latest are A Summer With Homer and On The Wandering Paths.
Richard Ballarian
Born in ’28 in Rochester, New York, he grew up down the street from the Kodak factory and soon had a darkroom under the stairway in the family house. In the ‘70s Ballarian relocated to Paris, where he found steady work in the fashion world. The photos here date from his ‘motion studies’ in the late 90s and early 2000s.
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After a too-long absence due to health issues and a pervasive, creeping despair (am I really going to spend my life staring at a screen with a fractured skull that feels like it’s about to explode? I couldn’t hack it), Riffs returns on a few days free before undergoing the next round of tests. Free subscriptions are available, with the deluxe version at very reasonable rates.
Many thanks and hold steady, there may be more.
Aloha, Rolf Potts uses the word flaneur quite a lot in Vagabonding and has some very interesting interviews with Tim Ferriss, 4 Hour Work Week author, podcast.