Guest Post: An Australian Living The Sevillana Lifestyle
(This Featured Travel Essay is by Gina Bowman, an Australian currently living the Sevillana Lifestyle.)
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Paul Bowles was an American writer (The Sheltering Sky) but it’s the stories of his travels that I love to read. He was a fascinating man with an equally fascinating life, traveling throughout Europe while still a teenager, and living for more than 50 years in Morocco.
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While reading a collection of his travel writings, I came across an essay that begins and ends in Sevilla, my current home. He muses on why so many Americans traveled to Europe in the early part of the 20th century. What were they searching for and why did they find it in Europe?
His conclusion was a search for culture. Not just a long queue of museums, cathedrals and religious festivals that must be visited, but ‘something more all-embracing’. He believed that ‘culture is essentially a matter of using the past to give meaning to the present. A man’s culture is the sum of his memories… of everything that he has thought and felt’.
He held the notion of a lost cultural, collective ‘childhood’. Due to America’s comparatively short life, he believed its cultural roots are anchored in Europe and we come here to locate ourselves in time and space, find our place within history’s timeline and to know what we mean to both ourselves and to the world. In short: we are searching for meaning in our lives.
Now, you may agree or not but as an Australian, from a country of similar youth, this is an interesting proposition. Are we still doing it 60 odd years later? Probably, 60 years is a drop in the ocean of European civilization.
Why did Kathy and I, part of the visa-approved ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (as we’re collectively coined here), chose Europe? Are we searching for ‘culture’ and heritage or does it just feel right? Since my first visit in my early 20’s Spain captured my heart, mind, and stomach and I’ve returned many times since to revisit those experiences and satiate this trio.
Of Europe, Paul Bowles had a particular love of Spain and this memoir ends with him wandering through the streets of Sevilla thinking that ‘each hour he has spent with open eyes and mind will have carried him a little further along the path to understanding the world, and that, after all, is the truest measure of culture we have been able to find’.
Viva España!
Paul Bowles expresses these ideas with far more skill and insight than I can. Here’s more on him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bowles & http://www.paulbowles.org/
The quotes in this story are from Paul Bowles, Windows on the Past, Holiday, January 1955 in the book Travels, Collected Writings, 1950-93.
