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July 2006 - Article 2
 What is the difference between a tourist and a traveler? Perhaps one is in it just for the diversion, while the other one seeks transformation. In "Natural Opium", Diane Johnson discusses how travel changes her, eventually transforming her into a seasoned traveler. Using several essays to describe various jaunts around the world, Johnson asks herself what it means to travel, why she desires to travel, and why someone who has been everywhere still feels a longing to be on the road, air, or just away, again. Johnson, herself a social commentator, uses her skills as an essayist and novelist to describe personal odysseys, both externally and internally, with travel as the vehicle. Anyone who wonders what compels people to go to faraway places and how it benefits them to be wrenched from the security of everyday life would find their questions answered in this book. Beginning travelers may take comfort by learning that even the most experienced traveler feels uneasiness embarking upon the journey. They can be assured that you don't have to feel completely secure in your skin to get on the plane and go. Johnson explains her own feelings as she embarks upon her travels, describing how the interactions and encounters with others affected her and changed her. In particular, she conveys what it is like for an American woman to travel abroad, and how she is perceived as an American, and a woman. She describes what it is like to deal with the total unknown and learn from it. The book is comprised of ten disparate essays, each one focusing on a different destination and focus of travel. Every essay begins and ends with a lesson that the author has taken with her. Each lesson is a surprise that wasn't planned in the itinerary, like an unplanned side tour. But, perhaps that is part of the adventure of travel, to confront a lesson that maybe the traveler didn't even know needed learning. In that respect, what the book shows is that perhaps the most wondrous journey is that of the exploration of self. Travel becomes a vehicle whereby you can learn more about yourself, and your place in the world that surrounds and accompanies you on your travels. And, as the book seems to imply, maybe that is the real reason for travel. Even though home has its attendant hassles, it still has the ring of the familiar, and with it, the temptation to become complacent. But in leaving the known and having yourself as the only thing familiar, the lessons one can bury in everyday life come to light in the shadow of your own company. With "real life" suspended, you come home to self. This is the message of the book that I came away with, learning that life's lessons are more focused when there is nothing between you and the road but yourself. The lessons that Johnson learns are a source of inspiration for the inner traveler. |