That was a somewhat idealized example. Nobody, not even you or I, could hope
to relive a fraction of the experiences we read about.
But well – if Bryson excites you, hike most anywhere else for that matter, or
visit most any naval museum (there are excellent ones run by the Indian navy in
Goa and Kochi). That might be a grand substitute for spending your holiday in
say Ooty or Shimla just because everybody else does it.
Budgets are constraints, but so is imagination! If “on the road” and “get your
kicks on route 66” make you hop onto a bus or drive your vehicle down to some
random place you have never seen, for the fun of it just because it lies
somewhere over the horizon .. ingesting interesting substances entirely
optional and possibly not even recommended, our roads are crazy enough without
them.
On 26/08/16, 5:51 PM, "silklist on behalf of WordPsmith"
<silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus....@lists.hserus.net on behalf of
wordpsm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Aug 26, 2016, at 17:16, Suresh Ramasubramanian <sur...@hserus.net>
wrote:
>
> I am not running down reading at all. But Eruv was probably a more
trivial example.
>
> You and I have read about Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki, Ra expeditions and Bill
Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods” about the Appalachian trail. And possibly
Patrick O’Brian’s novels about the royal navy in the Napoleonic wars.
>
> The essential thing about brilliant travel literature is that it makes me
want to go there, and hike (as much as I can, mind) through some part of the
trail. And Heyerdahl and O’Brian make me want to go out to sea in something
more than the Hong Kong Star Ferry (the sum total of my actual nautical
experience).
>
> That is what good travel literature is – and all good literature. It
opens up multiple pathways to experiences and thoughts that one would never be
exposed to, if not for reading them.
>
> But once you’ve read them, a visit to say the Boston Navy Yard to see the
USS Constitution, or a visit to the Appalachians, becomes much more meaningful
and valuable to you. You actually find yourself seeking out places to travel
to based on what you have read .. or everybody’s holidays would be Thomas Cook
package tours stuck eating paneer butter masala and naan and then getting onto
a tour bus for sentosa island.
>
Elitism of the highest order. How many people can really hike the
Appalachian Trail after reading Bill Bryson? 20 percent of the book's readers,
maybe? So for the remaining 80 percent, the reading experience becomes inferior
because it hasn't opened multiple pathways to actual travel? That the book
stirs the imagination and the mind isn't enough?
We must remember that the people on package tours to Sentosa are often the
first travelers overseas in the history of their families. We may all consider
ourselves global citizens, but our ancestors who went abroad for the first time
were also relatively unsophisticated travelers, by this metric. Not everyone
has the luxury of reading a travel book and deciding to emulate the writer of
that book.
> On 26/08/16, 5:06 PM, "silklist on behalf of Samanth Subramanian"
<silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus....@lists.hserus.net on behalf of
wordpsm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>>> On Aug 26, 2016, at 16:52, Suresh Ramasubramanian <sur...@hserus.net>
wrote:
>>>
>>> On 26/08/16, 5:00 PM, "silklist on behalf of WordPsmith"
<silklist-bounces+suresh=hserus....@lists.hserus.net on behalf of
wordpsm...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Intrigued by the phrase "second-hand nature of knowledge."
>>> Can any knowledge be grouped into first- and second-hand?
>>
>> Oh I don’t know. Experiential knowledge does tend to be a cut above the
“I’ve read about it” variety.
>>
>> For example that question about the “Eruv” enclosures erected on streets
in orthodox jewish neighbourhoods so that observant jews can step outside their
homes during the Sabbath and still technically remain indoors.
>>
>> What difference do you see between our mutual friend Vikram Joshi
pointing out that he lived in such a neighbourhood and saw those for himself
versus someone else who just read about it somewhere?
>>
>> Not much when you’re looking at the +15 on the pounce in a quiz.
Possibly a lot more when that fact becomes one part of the total knowledge that
makes you / shapes you as a person.
>>
>> A cruder non quizzing (or Brahman Naman) example that might draw a
clearer distinction would be the hormonal teenager’s “before and after” – the
before being when his only date is Mrs.Palm and her five daughters, helped
along by an impressive collection of porn, and the after being when he begins
to actually make friends with and date, let alone take that relationship any
further.
>>
>> I am sure both the before and after incarnations of that teenager are
familiar with the “insert tab A into slot B” mechanics of sex – but do they
have the same knowledge?
>
> Our lives would be pretty poor lives if we all just relied upon
experiential knowledge for the sum total of our knowledge of the world.
Whatever happened to reading as a way to improve our exposure to the world,
improve the world's exposure to us? Why would we devalue, in this manner,
travel literature, or histories, or narrative non fiction, or any books by
foreign writers -- all of which provide us only with so-called "second-hand
knowledge" and not with the experience of these things (which are either
difficult or, in the case of histories, impossible to experience)?
>
> You can be shaped by the eruv like billy-o. But to suggest that the
cultural significance of that practice should only matter to people who have
lived in those neighbourhoods doesn't make sense.
>
>
>
>> --srs
>
>
>
>
>
