the death of journey
If you’ve seen the BBC’s Planet Earth series you’ll have heard of Lechuguilla Cave. Planet Earth contains stunning footage of this cave. The cavers had to camp underground to get the footage. The footage is stunning to watch from my armchair, but can you imagine how stunning it would be to see after going through 2 years of getting permission to go there, and then travelling and camping inside a cave for days?
Now imagine that a tour operator dynamites a fast access tunnel, installs highway access, car parks, a visitor centre, elevators and ships in tourists to see it at $20 a pop.
Is the cave still as beautiful as it was before?
Similar: there’s a song in the film Tekkon Kinkreet called White’s Dream. I think it’s simply fantastic. The film is beautiful, so much so I got the sound track. Then I fell in love with the song White’s Dream. Then I realized that the song peaks at around 4:50 and it’s just AMAZING right there.
So I tried listening to that fantastic section on it’s own. And it wasn’t as amazing. It turns out the amazingness is only AMAZING when I listen right from the beginning of the song, and pay attention. The amazingness isn’t purely a function of that snippet of audio, it’s a function of that snippet of audio as the summit of a journey that the rest of the song takes me through, and that the film took me through when I watched it.
Many of us ‘know’, in our intellectual minds, that the ‘journey’ is as worthy, if not more so, than the ‘getting there’, but to feel this in your bones is a new level of understanding. (And it also raises the question: without a journey, is it really possible to get anywhere anyway!?)
Would you install elevators into the wonderous caverns of Lechuguilla?
And what relation do aircraft bear to those elevators?
Journey isn’t dead, but our society contains so many tools for us to kill it if we so choose. Is that what we choose? Do we choose consciously or unconsciously?
