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 The Floating Eye and the Burning Arm:

Crucial Elements in Contemporary Place Writing

by Chad R. Miller

Introduction: The Floating Eye

A couple of summers ago my wife and I were driving around the north shore of Lake Superior in Ontario and listening to an audiobook. We were back home on a break before returning for our second year living in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. As the miles and hours passed, we both became frustrated listening to the book, which featured the travels of a female narrator around that same country, only some years earlier.

Finally I was able to express what was bothering me: “It’s like she’s a floating eye in the sky – she sees everything but nothing touches her.”

“Yeah,” my wife added, “you know it’s hotter than hell, but she never sweats. It’s like she’s not even really there.”

When the narrator playfully described mosquitoes “dancing” around her ankles, we gave each other incredulous looks. Were these not the same pests, carriers of dengue fever and malaria, that we did daily battle with in Mandalay, that we needed a whole arsenal of sprays, creams, and electric devices to keep at bay, and yet still tormented us?

What’s more, even though we knew the purported reason for the book, there was no convincing sense of why the narrator was actually there, what was really pushing her forward. Why didn’t she just go home when facing all those hurdles with the authorities while trying to move freely around the country?

Key Ingredients of Compelling Travel Writing

That disappointment got me thinking more about what was missing from the experience. What would have made us stick with the book until the end rather than turning off the stereo? What basic qualities make any piece of travel writing engaging and satisfying?

I started doing some research and found that idea and context are two of the most important elements in travel writing, and this can probably be extended to any creative nonfiction where place plays a primary role. Idea means the essential idea and qualities of a place and context indicates the reader’s knowledge about the narrator, the narrator’s relationship to the place and stake in being there. A third quality, psychic distance, can also play an important role in engaging the reader, making the writing compelling and providing a vital sense of what it is like to be in the place – as opposed to just knowing about it.

William Zinsser, in his nonfiction writing guide On Writing Well, says that “Your main task as a travel writer is to find the central idea of the place you’re dealing with.” He uses a couple of samples from John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country and comments: “What McPhee has done is to capture the idea of Juneau and Anchorage.”

Let me add some thoughts to further shape this notion. Idea, first of all, is necessarily subjective. The essential or central idea of a place isn’t only conveyed by including carefully selected background information that might be found in a Wikipedia article (although some of that might certainly be used). There are limitless possible perspectives regarding any place, including the writer’s direct experience; geographical, climatic, historical, cultural, political, and linguistic observations; or study of secondary sources such as historical texts, literature, previous travel accounts, photographs, and paintings. It’s by paring away possible facts and observations and getting to a personally resonant notion of the core, the essential, that the writer arrives at the idea. Imagine sculptors or woodworkers who shave away the majority of the block of raw material to discover, develop, and hone the shape and form that matter to them and, by extension, the audience. Hence the idea of the place can take many different forms, and can be one that cuts across a span of history or focuses tightly on the time of the narrator’s visit.

The second essential feature in this analysis is context. Robin Hemley, In his guidebook A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism, and Travel, claims that another quality “any travel writer worth the ticket must have if she wants to be more than a tourist, but an insider as well” is “an ability to convey context.” He goes on to identify “the basics” of context in the following way. “Who is telling this story and why is he here? And who are all these other people around him? I often find that this is the first thing that’s missing from many such pieces – if we don’t know who you are, why should we follow you?” This had been a big part of my struggle with the Burma book; I didn’t understand who the narrator really was and what was really motivating her, so eventually stopped following her.

Zinsser says, when using his own travel article about a visit to see a camel caravan in Timbuktu as an example, “Now, what do your readers want to know next? […] why did I go to Timbuktu? What was the purpose of my trip?” He also notes the importance of establishing “the writer’s personality and voice” in building context. “In travel writing you should never forget that you are the guide. It’s not enough just to take your readers on a trip; you must take them on your trip. Make them identify with you – with your hopes and apprehensions.”

Let me extend this definition of context a bit. The narrator is the reader’s surrogate. Without knowing the motivations, expectations, goals, attitudes and reactions of the narrator we have no anchor. Without these things we lose the experience of being in the place, of inhabiting it. We tend to get information and description, but we don’t have an effective way to filter or evaluate all this input. We need to know what the narrator’s stake is in being there. Context may be conveyed in ways intellectual or visceral, heavily weighted with personal importance or light and distanced, but if narrators don’t let us in on their expectations and reactions to the place, the reader will face a challenge when wanting to vicariously inhabit it and intuitively understand the direction the writing takes.

In the course of my reading and research, and thinking back to my eye in the sky, I realized there is another important factor to consider. Lacking an established term, I started calling this immediacy. My dictionary defines immediacy as “the quality of bringing one into direct and instant involvement with something, giving rise to a sense of urgency or excitement.” Later on I found that Philip Gerard, in an essay called Taking Yourself Out of the Story: Narrative Stance and the Upright Pronoun, calls this quality psychic distance. Gerard defines this as “how near or far the writer, and thus the reader, remains from the people and events in the story” and writes of “intermediate” levels of psychic distance and moments where the physic distance “closes.” I’ll borrow Gerard’s term, but to his people and events I’ll add physical environment, the elements of nature, and personal vulnerability.

In my view, psychic distance can be closed through extended rich sensory description and is often accomplished through the use of scenes. Narrators diminish distance through sensory and immersive techniques – readers get the sense of interacting with local people, negotiating local spaces, dealing with weather, tasting the local food, touching the local stone. We get down below abstractions and intellectual constructs, and often get past purely visual description to touch, smell, sound, and spatial sense. A sense of humanity, conflict, and the vulnerability of the narrator allow the reader to feel and participate in, not just understand, the place. Reduced psychic distance most often comes as a particular extension of context, but it can also come through in idea, and may even appear at the nexus of the two. 

Analysis of Contemporary Place Writing

In order to explore the development, use, and interplay of idea, context, and psychic distance, I looked closely at four books where place and travel are of strong importance. These are Geoff Dyer’s White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, Nicholas Howe’s Across an Inland Sea: Writing in Place from Buffalo to Berlin, Pico Iyer’s Sun After Dark: Flights Into the Foreign, and Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate all the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide.

Dyer is a novelist and travel writer who is interested in the overlap between nonfiction and fiction. White Sands is made up primarily of travel pieces of medium length that involve outdoor environments, many of them related to artists and site-based, outdoor art installations. He travels to Tahiti in the footsteps of the painter Gauguin, visits the sites of American environmental art like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, and Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers, while also seeking an outdoor experience at White Sands National Monument in New Mexico and making a trip to the far north of Norway in hopes of seeing The Northern Lights. 

Howe is an academic, a PhD-level medievalist, and works in longer chapters. He writes mainly about places where he has lived and taught, beginning with Buffalo, having grown up in one of its suburbs. The book also includes chapters that focus on Oklahoma, Berlin, Paris, and Columbus, Ohio, among others.

Iyer, a prominent contemporary travel writer, often works in shorter chapters and some pieces are centered on people or books, focusing, for instance, on the singer and poet Leonard Cohen, the Dalai Lama, and the writer W.G. Sebald. The travel pieces are mostly from the period spanning the years leading up to and just after the events of September 11, 2001, and take him to such far-flung locales as Phnom Penh, Addis Ababa, La Paz, Bombay, Bali, and southern Oman.

Lindqvist is also an academic, with a PhD in the history of literature. His primary concern seems to be building an argument about genocide through an inquiry into colonial historical records and literature, but there are many more important aspects in his book, including a strong strand of travel narrative. As he says in the preface: “This is a story, not a contribution to historical research. It is the story of one man traveling through the Saharan desert and, at the same time, traveling by computer through the history of the concept of extermination.”

These authors show a range of options for developing and weighing the key elements of idea, context, and psychic distance. Their choices are influenced by the form and scope of each piece, the purpose and theme of the smaller and larger works in question, and their presumed audience. Not surprisingly, I found that writing that contains a good balance of the key elements tends to be most compelling. Writing that tilts heavily toward idea may succeed in creating more depth and nuance regarding place, but risks distancing and disengaging the reader. Conversely, pieces driven too strongly by context tend to succeed in reader engagement while sacrificing depth and breadth of idea. Even in pieces that are heavily tilted toward one element or the other, there are ways of bringing more balance by adjusting psychic distance.

In analyzing the way these authors develop and use the key elements of idea, context, and psychic distance, I was tempted to examine each element independently. But upon closer consideration I found that was a challenging approach. It was difficult, and seemed unproductive, to look at any single element without noting how its interplay with the others affected the overall impact of a piece.

So in the analysis that follows, I’ll present some variations on the relative weight and interaction of idea and context. First I’ll look at some cases where context is heavily emphasized. Then I’ll examine some writing where idea is the strongest component and context is either missing, only implied, or present but ineffective. Finally I’ll explore some pieces where idea and context are more effectively balanced. Throughout I’ll also examine the role of psychic distance. Using this process I hope to discover and clarify some ways these authors combine crucial elements to craft compelling travel and place writing.

Emphasizing Personal Context

First let’s see at what happens when context is strongly developed and becomes a guiding force in the work. In this limited selection of books, it’s fair to say that most pieces are led by idea, and context fills in or balances that to various extents. Personal context is a more consistent element in Lindqvist and Dyer than Howe or Iyer.

In Dyer’s work it often propels the writing, and on occasion it can be so strong that it overwhelms the idea of the place. Psychic distance is brought down to a minimum. So what’s different about Dyer’s approach? The narrator is almost always at the center of things. There’s no “floating eye in the sky” — much of what we learn we find out right along with the narrator. When knowledge comes from secondary sources, it’s still filtered through the narrator’s voice, perspective and sensibilities.

Dyer uses a lot of humor and can be snarky, sarcastic, and even rude. But the reasons why we get such a strong sense of tone is that we are made keenly aware of the narrator’s expectations and reactions. Whatever the narrator feels, we feel it. He’s disappointed, annoyed, bored, tired, hot, irritated, awed, impressed, curious. When his heat rash is more central to his experience than the prospect of visiting another archeological site in Tahiti, we hear about it and we feel it. In fact, from the first sentences of the first piece, Where? What? Where?, this pattern is established:

In the course of changing planes at LAX, in the midst of the double long-haul from London to French Polynesia, where I was traveling to write about Gauguin and the lure of the exotic in the commemoration of the centenary of his death, I lost my most important source of information and reference: David Sweetman’s biography of the artist. The panic into which I was plunged by this ill-omened, irreparable, and inexplicable loss gradually subsided, giving way to a mood of humid resignation that threatened to dampen the entire trip.

Already the reader is cued to the primacy of context through the notion that the narrator’s mood might upstage whatever is to be learned or experienced. Also we get a strong sense of how much context will influence idea with the “lure of the exotic.” The extent to which this this “lure” is applicable, and to which Tahiti is actually exotic today, will be measured through the reactions and personal observations of the narrator:

It is always nice to be greeted with a necklace of sweet-smelling tropical flowers but, at the same time, there is often something soul-destroying about it. A lovely tradition of welcome had been so thoroughly commodified and packaged that even though the flowers were fresh and wild and lovely they might as well have been plastic. […]

I threw open the French windows, stepped out on to the balcony and took in the pristine view. The dream island of Moorea was backdropped against the half-awake sky. It was a magnificent view as long as you didn’t turn your head to the right and see the other balconies geometrically gawping […] even though the view was fantastic the ocean itself seemed manicured, as if it were actually part of an aquatic golf course to which hotel guests enjoyed exclusive access.

Dyer isn’t taking us on just any trip, he’s taking us on his trip. The strong tone and mood of the narrator create the primary thread throughout the piece, one which is easy for the reader to follow. As an effective but highly subjective guide, he’s always candid. Even when being snarky he’s refreshing in his unpretentiousness: “Increasingly the question on my mind in Hiva Oa was, ‘When can I leave?’ I had exhausted everything the island had to offer, was counting the days to my departure.”

In this piece, even the historical material Dyer provides is heavily marked by his tone and perspective, so that it almost fuses with his own firsthand skepticism about these old notions of the exotic and the tropical paradise where the natives are always happy in their detachment from the problems of the modernized world. And it’s interesting to note how completely personal interests overwrite a more objective observation of place. One of the more moving and authentic experiences of the trip for the narrator is spurred by looking at an empty soccer goal and recalling the photograph on the cover of an old Don Cherry Album. This is something that might be seen anywhere; it’s not specific to Tahiti and we can guess almost any other narrator would have passed by it without notice or comment.

While the Tahiti chapter actually has context and idea overlapping in interesting and successful ways, a later piece called Northern Dark is more extreme. The narrator and his wife travel to Tromsø and Svalbard in the depths of winter in hopes of seeing the Northern Lights. That doesn’t happen, and the entire piece ends up being a slapstick humor depiction of disappointment and misery in this cold, dark, expensive place. Psychic distance is erased. By the end the idea of the place is almost indistinguishable from the moment-to-moment suffering and quashed expectations of the couple. Surely there is more to know and feel about these places.

Emphasizing Idea of Place

In Pico Iyer’s Happy Hour in The Heart of Darkness, the narrator is in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 1999 and the sense of place he develops is specific to that time. Pol Pot has recently died, before being brought to justice, and a couple of the other main perpetrators of the Khmer Rouge atrocities have recently been captured but there is widespread doubt that they will be punished in proportion to their crimes. As the title already suggests, Iyer develops a compelling idea of Cambodia as a place of “black ironies” as it attempts to move forward out of the nightmare of its past to increase development and enter the era of globalization. Pol Pot’s interrogators, who tortured and killed victims, used “US munitions cans” as toilets. “The man who oversaw the execution of at least sixteen thousand of his countrymen had papers from American churches testifying to his “personal leadership” and ‘team-building skills.” He’d even claimed to have recently worked “for international relief organizations.” “The notorious torturer who had once written Kill them all over lists of nine-year-olds” was known to at least one recent aid official as “our best worker.” Despite having captured such high level criminals, “… almost everyone agrees that terms like ‘justice’ and democracy’ are virtual luxuries in a country as desperate as Cambodia.”

While this idea is clear and moving, there’s a relatively weak sense of what it’s actually like to be in Phnom Penh at the time. Alternating between second and third person, the text doesn’t tell us who the narrator is or why he’s here, although we can glean a limited sense of him through his selection of observations and word choices. Psychic distance increases when dealing with so many abstractions and leaving out sensory details that might affect the narrator in physical ways. This distance is only minimized infrequently with direct quotations and hints of scenes, such as this one:

Much of the money comes, of course, from overseas investors eager to make a killing out of need, and gambling that the economy can only improve. “This is the first time since I came here in 1992 when I can truly feel confident of making a profit,” says a Singaporean businessman, sipping pumpkin soup with gold leaf in it (in a hotel where even telephone receivers are scented with jasmine). The appetizer alone costs as much as a local judge (generally uneducated) earns in maybe six months.

These words of actual people in the place at the time provide the most palpable sense of immediacy, closing psychic distance a bit, but it’s not readily understood if these are parts of overheard conversations or ones the narrator is taking part in. The relationship of narrator to place is obscured.

These effects may partially result from Iyer’s choice to craft very short pieces. This essay and a similar one called A New Year, set in Ethiopia, are very brief, so the choices of what to include are more painstaking. The reader may sustain engagement with this more distanced approach over a short number of pages, but might feel steadily disconnected over a longer haul. We can also fill in a bit of context from other parts of the book, particularly in the opening piece, which works as a kind of introduction: “My aim […] was to carry the reader off, as I had been carried off, into a sense of strangeness, and into the extended sense of possibility that strangeness sometimes brings. […] their end point, always, is the deeper question of what we take to be real and how, as Camus puts it, we put the sunshine in the same frame as the suffering.”

Iyer is also dealing with themes related to alienation and dislocation in the era of neoliberalism and globalism, so the erasure of personal identity and stake, and the extension of psychic distance, might be a conscious strategy for developing these chosen themes.

In comparison, I needed to analyze more carefully to understand how Nicholas Howe approaches idea and context. It helped me to read his clear statement of preference, in the afterword of Across an Inland Sea, for limiting the inclusion of personal, direct experience. He states that thorough use of secondary sources is the best route for bringing out the essence of a place:

Personal accounts in this book appear only as they are necessary for tracing a larger geography of experience. These encounters with place come from my life but they are hardly unique to it. […] Much of what I tell about a place has been refracted through the experience of viewing images or reading fiction, history, travel accounts. They are the belated legacy of place. Seeing by means of books and pictures is not a surrogate form of experience, a faded form of some allegedly authentic experience. To think that such an unmediated encounter with place is possible verges on the naive or arrogant. It means, either way, losing the richness of stories and images that gather about a place, that may even be said to be the place.

This seems a valid argument for developing a more layered and contextualized sense of place. Howe often looks at places through a wider lens of history, examining changes across a significant span of time, so an intense, temporary immersion doesn’t suit his purposes very well. Also, since he writes mostly about places he’s lived in or visited multiple times, it’s less likely that he will have a stunning or palpable moment of discovery that he can then incorporate into his work.

Still, his ideas as stated above don’t take into account factors of reader engagement. There is a reason why many people find books of pure historical or cultural analysis to be dry and lacking the spark that keeps them turning pages. Readers often look to creative nonfiction for a more lively and robust literary experience. We seek the vicarious experience of being in a place in addition to learning about it. We want the palpable feeling that Dyer gives us along with the more refined thought that Howe seeks to develop. And for writers like Howe, even when spanning history or trying to examine a more familiar place, it should still be possible to incorporate lyrical description, scenes, emotions, and other techniques to limit psychic distance and put the reader more squarely in the place.

Howe’s pieces, true to his words above, do tend to focus on the development of idea through the use of many secondary sources while devoting limited attention to context. He crafts an impressive portrait of Buffalo as a once vital place of geographical, commercial, and even cultural importance that has faded away from its former grandeur, along with its working class immigrants, a place that no longer fits in with the changed American cultural landscape. “Cities on inland seas are places where life lingers on too long in the old ways,” he notes.

But the heavy use of secondary sources and increased psychic distance tend to make it more difficult to stay engaged and track along with the narrator’s thought process. As he builds up to intellectual constructs and abstracted arguments, readers may seek tangible scaffolding to help them make the climb: “Writing about Buffalo becomes a way to see the subject of place through the filter of family memory: it becomes a way to consider place as a measure of broken continuity as generations pass and die off, but also as the site itself changes. Places, if they are to counter the betrayals of time, should have a reassuring solidity to them.”

If Buffalo lacks this “reassuring solidity” important in fighting against the “betrayals of time” even as “life lingers on too long in the old ways,” these fuzzy concepts could be clarified and brought to life through description or anecdote. Without being illustrated in sensory ways, abstractions become muddled or even contradictory. In terms of context, there is a weakness in that there are many references to family stories and their importance, but very few of these are shared with the reader.

Even though Howe chooses to minimize context, he sometimes compensates by using secondary sources in dynamic and engaging ways. In fact, Howe’s description and analysis of the paintings of Buffalo by Charles Burchfield is put to great effect; in this case his description of the paintings is arguably more compelling and elucidative than much of what he offers from his own first-hand experience:

[…] scenes of tall, narrow houses and wind-tormented trees have for Buffalonians an almost photographic realism. With their eerie vibrations, his paintings seem hallucinogenic only to those who have never spent a winter in Buffalo. His houses shimmer weirdly along their edges; verticals we know to be plumb and foursquare waver; houses and streets are set at disconcerting angles that make for a feeling of dislocation. His trees are more gnarled than any you can find in nature, their branches form haloes of light that give a feeling of unease.   

Given his predilection for secondary sources, Howe is at his best when he’s able to use them in a way that closes psychic distance by giving readers seemingly direct, sensory experiences like this. It’s also important to note that context isn’t lacking in Howe’s pieces. In Buffalo and Beyond we learn quite a bit about his family and some bits of his own story. Yet even at moments that seem like natural openings for exploring personal context, the narrator typically backs away into historical analysis. One example is when he goes with his sister and their spouses to scatter his mother’s ashes in the Niagara River. The kernel of a scene is presented, but it doesn’t develop and we don’t get any insight into the emotions or bearing of anyone present. There is a bit of conjecture regarding the emotional life of the mother. But the main thrust of the paragraph is the change of the breakwater and its environs from the 1920s to the time of writing.

In Berlin we hear about his interactions with students and learn some important facts about them, such as the fact that they’re mostly “Ossies,” children of the old East Germany who were “on the edge of adulthood” when The Wall fell, and how this influenced classroom dynamics and discussions. But we don’t get scenes with the students or hear them in their own words, so again, there’s a a distance that makes the reader less able to inhabit this world. Howe’s idea of Berlin in the summer of 1997 as a place haunted by history but continually disrupted by destruction and construction is well developed. Some of the firsthand sensory detail and the occasional bursts of dialogue lend balance to the long stretches of second and third person description and historical references. But in the end Howe’s treatment of Berlin is what the reader already began to sense in Buffalo and will feel even more strongly in Paris.

Howe’s Paris is concerned mostly with bridges, buildings, boats, and views. Paragraph after long paragraph takes one of these as its focus. The sensory and immediate break through occasionally – “a gravel barge as foul smelling as any dumptruck” or a local “gestures obscenely at a tourist on our boat photographing him” – but not often enough to provide balance. This is a city viewed rather than inhabited. And the bits of context provided tend to be disconnected and difficult to merge with the main flow of the piece. Such is the case with the distanced mention of “an American woman who knew the city well” who we subsequently find out is or was the narrator’s wife (“In time, through the geography of my marriage to her …”) but who is never mentioned again.

So Paris is rendered somewhat like Berlin and a little like Buffalo. Absent the life of diverse local populations and conversations, parks, meals, galleries, moods, weather, sounds and smells, these cities begin to feel like large open air museums of history rather than living, pulsing, vibrant places. The reader might even wonder how much the travel, of being in the place, was necessary or important in crafting the idea, and how much could have been done simply through reading other accounts, looking at photographs, watching movies, and so on, sitting in an office somewhere on another continent.

Balanced Approaches

An interesting counterpoint to Howe can be found in Lindqvist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes.” Although it’s a completely different kind of book, there is a superficial similarity in its historical focus and heavy use of secondary sources. Large sections of the book are given to citation and analysis of period literature, and even though such material is typically rendered in engaging prose, it is still strikingly offset by shorter bits of travel narrative presented with stunning immediacy and evocative description. In some cases this works mainly toward developing the idea of a place, such as the following description of Agadez, which emphasizes the harshness of desert life and the pride of the people amongst the erosion of their traditional life:

They meet in the camel market. I sometimes go there when the dust has made it impossible to continue the day’s work. The strong evening wind sweeps people and animals into a fog of dust. In this haze, heavily veiled men stand looking at each other’s camels.

The camels protest against every change, with loud complaining screams. Their mouths are ash gray and evil smelling, their tongues as pointed as wedges. They hiss like dragons, strike like snakes, inflict hideous bites, and rise reluctantly on tall wobbling legs to stand there like some kind of outsized greyhounds with swollen stomachs and wasp waists at their loins, superciliously looking down on the world around them, their eyes filled with unspeakable contempt.

The same arrogance marks their masters. They often cannot even imagine abandoning their lifestyle. But nor can they live by selling their camels to each other. Nor can they live by transporting homemade desert salt from Bilma or Tueggidiam in caravans, when one single truck carries a larger load than a hundred camels.

Here the idea of Agadez is clearly developed with specific background information and insights related to the camel market and how the local economy and way of life is changing. But it’s Lindqvist’s engaging description that cuts psychic distance, bringing us into the scene with the physical elements of dust and wind and the appearance, sounds, and smells of the camels rendered through a vivid mixture of figurative language and direct observation. Idea is rounded out with a hint of context through his personal insights into the attitudes of both man and beast, using strong terms such as hideous, superciliously, contempt, and arrogance.

At other times the immediacy of the travel narrative works more in service of context by highlighting the mixed feelings and vulnerability of the narrator:

A man stands on a barrel and flings the luggage up to the driver, who stows it on the roof of the bus. After that the station supervisor gets into the bus and, standing inside where he is very difficult to hear, starts the third and determining roll call. It is not easy to predict how a name like mine will sound. I miss the name and thus lose my booked seat in the front of the bus. Only the seats at the back are left.

I can still change my mind. I can still jump off. Here at the far back I will never cope with the jolts. And once out in the desert there is no return. One has to go on, for eight hours, whatever happens. It is now, at this moment, and only now, that I still have a chance to get off.

Always the same alloy of panic and joy at the moment of departure. It is like losing your foothold in a great love affair. What will happen now? I have no idea. All I know is that I have just thrown myself out into it.

While we get a sense of how the transportation system works in this part of the Sahara, what comes through the strongest here is the narrator’s personal position as an outsider who faces a genuine physical challenge that he must weigh against an interior longing, an inexplicable allure of the desert. Bringing readers into this inner conflict puts us with him in this moment and makes us invested in what choice he’ll make. And by extension, we wonder what choice we would make.

But in most cases Lindqvist uses these rich sensory descriptions in scenes that fuse idea and context. His main purpose is making an argument about and against genocide, and one of his principal methods is by showing the humanity of the locals he interacts with. By bringing the reader into particular spaces — sandy, cramped hotel rooms, tents, and vehicles, or the seemingly limitless expanse of the open desert — he and we share the roughness of the road and participate in that humanity:

Then the passengers are packed in. There are three benches, one for women, one for black men, and one for Tuaregs. I am placed among the Tuaregs. Thirty-two people are squeezed in. It is not cramped as long as you can lick your lips. The two conductors push the bus to start it, run alongside, then throw themselves inside, and slam the door shut behind them.

It is a good 150 miles to Agadez. The ground consists of great floes of stone. The desert is flaking off like the dry skin on an arm. Then the first thin, pale steppe grass appears, salt to the tongue, accumulated in the depressions, blond, straw white, glowing like the down on your arm.

[…] In the middle of all this desolation, we sit pressed close together, body to body, breath to breath. Slim Tuareg youths in copper-purple veils, with long, dark eyelashes, enveloped in inviolable silence, embraced by the people of great laughter and beaming smiles, with their swelling backsides and noisy, colorful women.

Are these the savages Darwin had thought we civilized white men should exterminate? That is hard to imagine when you are sitting in the same minibus.

Whether fueling idea, context, or both, it’s the minimal psychic distance in Lindqvist’s scenes and extended descriptions that keeps readers engaged and lets us inhabit the towns, outposts, and oases in the Sahara along with him.

In White Sands, Geoff Dyer also presents different ways of providing balance in various pieces. Space in Time is an interesting example. The humor and the snark is gone now, replaced by an open and earnest investigation of a particular outdoor space. It begins with a fairly evocative description of some unnamed place with a cabin and a windmill “in the middle of a vast nowhere.” He gives us the wind and a sky beyond clear and blue. The narrator continues:

Scrub extended into the distance, and in that distance there were mountains, but even the things that were near were distant. The sagebrush was greyish green, as if emerging from a period of drought or hibernation. Near the cabin but still quite distant, almost invisible, were sticks stuck randomly in the ground — quite a lot of them, some in the far distance as opposed to the near distance but none in the very far distance, where we could not have seen them even if they had been there.

Already an idea is being developed of a place with a special sense of space, and from the descriptions many readers will guess it’s somewhere in the American west, although that’s never stated. The description of the setting, the land, the sky, and the cabin goes on for six pages or so before we are told exactly where we are or given any explicit information about the narrator and his companions. But idea and context both develop through the careful attention, observation, and inquisitive engagement of the narrator with the place. The sticks are actually poles, as we discover along with him. We discover the nature of these poles — their reflectivity, material, height, spacing, arrangement — layer by layer, detail by detail, along with the narrator. In this case it’s his utter fascination and patient investigation of the space that provides context. We don’t know who exactly he is (other than what we can transpose from previous chapters in the book) but we know what type of person he is — fastidious, curious, open, inquisitive, someone especially attuned to the dynamics of light and space, an artist or art lover, perhaps — and the immediacy of the description and analysis keeps psychic distance at a minimum.

Further developing the piece with an attention to context, it’s the people’s perception of the poles that keeps changing rather than the poles themselves: “When we emerged again, after breakfast, the poles were less prominent, on the way to becoming almost invisible, as they had been when we arrived. That was our first revelation: that while the grid was completely static it unfolded over time as well as in space. A narrative was at work.” These three sentences could be used to describe Dyer’s wonderfully immersive treatment of this place. He takes something static and creates a narrative of observation, even when no events of real importance are taking place, when nothing much is really happening.

When he finally reveals that this place is Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field, an environmental art installation completed in 1977, Dyer makes a clever craft turn. In the second half of the essay he begins using secondary sources and historical facts to build up various experiential, factual, and intellectual layers onto his already solid foundation of idea. For instance, he references Heidegger’s Building Dwelling Thinking and The origin of the Work of Art to further clarify the “intended purpose and effect” of the place. I’d say that Dyer comes close to using the complete range of possible psychic distance in this essay to develop a very complete and compelling idea of place.

Pico Iyer also brings more balance to many of the chapters of Sun After Dark. It’s easy to see distinctions between the pieces I cited earlier and one called A Journey into Night, for instance. Here we find a familiar tone and types of observations, as established in those earlier chapters, in a narrator’s trip to La Paz. But in this case the shift to first person four pages in brings a new dimension that seemed missing in the others:

I had strange dreams in La Paz every night, and awoke at three in the morning, convinced that I knew everything that was wrong with my life and my work (I would scribble down excited notes in the heat of inspiration, and a little later, looking back on them see nothing but hallucination). Often I would vomit on an empty stomach in those early days, or throw myself onto my bed in a fit of sleeplessness. A knock would come at my door, and I would stagger over to see a chamberman — Bolivia has men who clean hotel rooms, instead of women — standing silently in front of me with a tray of marzipans shaped to look like watermelon slices. Another knock would come and I would find a man at my door with a canister of oxygen to breathe.

In this paragraph alone we can see how even as the idea of the place is being developed in its high altitude strangeness, the insight into the narrator’s thoughts and the way he shares his vulnerability brings us as readers into a closer relationship to the place.

A few paragraphs later he provides a quite explicit statement of motivation that goes along way toward framing the whole experience and the portrayal of the city just after 9/11: “I had come to La Paz at the end of 2001 to get away from a world that was preoccupied with the war between the future and the past.” Next he contrasts the rulers of Afghanistan who “wanted to drag it back into an old world of veils and universal proscriptions” with Americans “calling for a race into the future, the manmade, the new.” After that Iyer folds in additional information from secondary sources:

La Paz, however, seemed to sit outside all such ideas, and not only because it had few radical Moslems in residence, and not much investment in the future. For centuries the particular allure of the city named for peace had been that it sat apart from the world, in its own dimension. Queen Victoria, in fact, had pronounced that Bolivia did not exist […] During the 1980s, when all the world watched Washington and Moscow pronouncing “mutually assured destruction” on one another, La Paz was said to be the safest place to hide in the event of a nuclear crisis.

It’s quite effective how Iyer here builds upon the crucial contextual insights above by using research from secondary sources to further solidify his central notion of La Paz as a safe place removed from the rest of the known and conflict-ridden world.

In this section I’ve shown different ways that these authors have balanced and created interplay between the important elements in travel and place writing. There are certainly innumerable strategies for achieving this and writers will know there is no formula. But by giving these factors ample consideration they’ll be more likely to elevate their craft and achieve their goals.

Conclusion: The Burning Arm

Factors such as theme, purpose, and intended audience surely affect authors’ approaches to the development and use of idea, context, and psychic distance. That said, there is a decidedly tangible feeling and experience when reading something that comes directly from the author’s experience of a place. As shown in the work of Dyer and Lindqvist already, it’s hard to imagine the writing not emanating from that particular narrator’s presence in that particular place at that particular time. Everyone knows the desert is hot. But when Lindqvist shares the visceral, firsthand experience of that heat, he lets our bodies, not just our minds, experience it. This kind of immediacy isn’t achieved, we sense, from the narrator’s consultation of texts, photographs, or climate statistics. He was really there and we feel like we are there with him in Zinder:

Your veins swell and snake along under your skin, pumping, throbbing, ready to burst. Hands and feet swell, the soles of your feet sting, fingers resemble small clubs, your skin is not large enough. Your face swells up, becomes porous and opens. Sweat spurts out through the pores, suddenly, just as when a heavy raindrop strikes your skin.

I can feel burning heat on the inside of my lower arm and notice it is brushing my stomach. I have burned myself on my own body.

On the other hand, some of Howe’s and Iyer’s pieces feel as though they could have been written anywhere, at any time, quite detached from the core experience of the actual visit. Some of this may be related to authors’ processes. Do they travel in cramped minibuses like Lindqvist or tend to use privately hired drivers, like Iyer? How long do they stay in a particular place and how carefully do they inspect and observe it? How much do they write during the time of the trip itself? What kind of notes do they take? How much do they rely on photographs, keepsakes, and other records? To what extent do they depend on memory? How many days, months, or years after the trip do they write their first draft? The answers to these questions may play a part in how much distance the reader senses between a vivid sense of place and the idea of place being developed. Writers may need to develop conscious strategies to minimize distance when the logistics of their processes tend to create too much separation between the travel experience and the act of composing.

It’s also important to note the cumulative effect of context. As we move through a large body of place writing, the writer’s personality, interests, goals, and temperament only get clearer as we go. Dyer’s interest in jazz and art comes back again and again, along with his humor, self-deprecation and play-sparring relationship with his wife. By the end we know him almost like a friend. Howe’s academic stance, sometimes feisty contrarianism, and penchant for intellectual constructs arrived at through figurative language are also fairly constant. Lindqvist’s sense of vulnerability and mortality, along with his passion for the direct experience of the harshness of desert travel, gets stronger as we move through the pages. Iyer’s narrator remains in the shadows in Phnom Penh and Addis Ababa, but if we revisit those places and pages after reading through to the end of the book we can easily pick him out and recognize him in the darkness. What I’m suggesting is that there is more leeway in building context, but it’s best to keep the reader engaged while that process unfolds, in the ways I’ve already identified.

In the end, while acknowledging that authors’ aims and readers’ tastes vary, there is really no denying the power of writing that brings us into close contact with place, to its sensory elements, its people and events. There is no need to heavily saturate a given piece with this type of approach, but by shifting between the personal and the bird’s eye view, by zooming in and out, by altering psychic distance, the writing tends to become more dynamic. It ebbs and flows. It moves between sensations, emotions, observations, abstractions, and ideas. As Dyer might say, a narrative is at work.

Lindqvist shows how to develop a complete and complex idea that’s mostly about history while also giving us the sting of the contemporary, thereby bringing history to life. Dyer shows how to bring depth by building onto an immediate idea of a place through additional background information and secondary sources. All of the writers here show various ways to interweave idea, context, and psychic distance.

But to this reader, a text that feeds me only facts and observations from a floating eye in the sky, no matter how well researched, selected, or expressed these are, leaves a work of place writing feeling weak or incomplete. I need those bursts of immediacy, rendered through scenes or extended, evocative description, or through the emotions and vulnerability of the narrator, to get the sense of full satisfaction. In short, at the risk of stating the obvious, I need to feel that I’ve been in a real, living place that has a pulse and a whole set of vital signs — a place that is more or less than an accumulated set of facts and ideas. I need to feel as though I’ve traveled somewhere.