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www.ATIBOOK.irPersonal narrative 49they seemed. ‘We only went to enjoy ourselves BUT…’, the story implies. Yet perhapsthat wasn’t the reason at all. Maybe the strange encounters, the unfamiliar food andplumbing arrangements were the point, after all. We get away from it all, ‘it all’ meaningnot only drudgery and routine but also all that we count, and count on, as predictable. Notonly that: when we come back, our ordinary world has, in our absence, acquiredsomething of that tangible unfamiliarity belonging to elsewhere.The visits to towns and countrysides of our past, old home places, are more obviouspilgrimages. But even the pure pleasure-seeking instinct we go into a travel agent’s withmight conceal some less obvious appetite—for story perhaps and, if so, what kind?Romance, adventure, danger, risk? What kind of journey is it we are making? Why doesit stop at one place and not another? What are its turning-points? Are these the result ofcircumstances, cash running out, missed trains, or of more mysterious causes? Memoirsof travel become interesting, not just because what happens is being described in closeup,but when the motives of travelling are investigated. A pilgrimage? A quest?Initiation? What’s it really all about?What we are hinting at here is that journeys are metaphors. We often speak of otherexperiences as journeys—ones that have nothing to do with travel as such. Illnessesmight be one such example, as in two recent autobiographies: Out of Me by Fiona Shawand Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel. Some might think of long-term illness as achallenge, a struggle—you against it, so that your journey will be to overcome andtriumph, be restored to the person you were before. We might call this a restorativejourney. Your illness might be a quest (another type of journey) to discover what you canlearn about yourself, about your relationship with yourself and with others as you beginto accept that your condition might be unalterable. Is it something that isolates you orenables connections with other sufferers? Always there is the undeniable need to begetting somewhere—without this, travel and journeys (and perhaps illnesses) can seem tohave no point. But the endurance can be disruptive as well as highly pleasurable. In AWalk in the Woods, Bill Bryson, trekking over two thousand miles through Maine and theAppalachians, talks not just about mountains and hills but also heavens and hells:When, after ages and ages, you finally reach the tell-tale world of trulyhigh ground, where the chilled air smells of pine-sap and the vegetation isgnarled and tough and wind-bent, and push through to the mountain’sopen pinnacle, you are, alas, past caring. You sprawl face down on asloping pavement of gneiss, pressed to the rock by the weight of yourpack, and lie there for some minutes, reflecting, in a distant, out-of-bodyway that you have never before looked this closely at lichen…(Bryson, 1997:46)Later, ‘It was heaven. It’s splendid, no question, but the thought you cannot escape is thatyou have to walk this view.’ Later still: ‘It was hell.’ He knows what his readers mightanticipate—the summit view, glow of achievement, happy exhaustion—then tells us whatit was really like. Notice his use of ‘you’ in the passage, how it makes the experienceboth generalised and specific, as if he is dumping not just himself but us too—or anyonewith these kinds of aspirations—on to that slab of rock.