Passage To Canada
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<table width="450" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td class="font2"> <table width="440" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td colspan="2"><p class="font2"><b>Destination Ithaka</b><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td><p align="justify" class="font2">By Alberto Manguel (page 1 of 4) <br><br></p></td> <td align="right"><a href="passages_alberto_bio.asp"><img src="images/main/bio_button.jpg" border="0"></a><br><br></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><p align="justify" class="font2"><a href="javascript:popWindow('passages_popup_alberto1.asp',510,463)"><img src="images/about/pass_alberto_image1.jpg" border="0" align="left" hspace="10"></a>The troglodytes who, along with the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, wandered into Russia across the Bering Strait; the ancient South Americans who (according to Thor Heyerdahl) arrived on the rocks of Easter Island and mysteriously erected the colossal faces of their abandoned gods; the Italian boy from Edmundo d'Amicis' Cuore travelling from the Apennins to the Andes in search of his long-lost mother; the Jews crossing the desert, following a column of dust by day and a column of fire by night; Aneas with his father on his back, blindly seeking to found the birthplace of the poet who would one day make him immortal; General Lavalle's soldiers, carrying the rotting corpse of their heroic leader from the mountainous North to the plains of Buenos Aires, during the Wars of Independence; Nemo carrying his anger twenty thousand leagues beneath the seven seas; Candide on his long peregrinations whose goal (he doesn't know this) is a garden; Monkey, Horse and Pig, walking westwards to India in search of the sacred books; Eric the Red, who discovered America too early for the constraints of history; the brother and sister who leave their house to find the elusive Blue Bird... All my childhood long I was haunted by migrations. My books were full of them.<br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" valign="top" height="110"><p align="justify" class="font2"><a href="javascript:popWindow('passages_popup_alberto2.asp',510,463)"><img src="images/about/pass_alberto_image2.jpg" border="0" align="right" hspace="10"></a>They fascinated me, these departures, partly because every excursion promised a flight from the confines of my days, and partly because the outcome of the adventure was somehow still in the future, where everything was possible. It seemed to me that no arrival was the true end of the story: Gulliver set off again after having returned from his travels and Alice, after waking, passed her dream on to her sister, whose dreamer she had become. Something in the very roundness of the world suggests that every journey is always to be continued. <br><br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2" valign="top"><p align="justify" class="font2"><a href="javascript:popWindow('passages_popup_alberto3.asp',510,480)"><img src="images/about/pass_alberto_image3.jpg" border="0" align="left" hspace="10" vspace="5"></a>Even though I grew up travelling, the wisdom around me told me that I should stand still in one place. "Kosmopolitt!" spat out my grandmother, to insult a distant cousin who never had sprung roots in any of the cities in which he had lived. What was that place where I first came to this earth? My passport said "Buenos Aires"; in my dreams I was not so certain. <br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><p align="justify" class="font2">My earliest memories are of a wild park of sandy dunes where bushes of pink and white flowers gave off a sickly smell, and where giant tortoises made their slow way to the hot sea beyond. My memories are memories of memories; repetition has sorted them out, chronologically, and dusted off the cobwebs. Now I remember an excursion to the salt mines of Sodom, where the walls looked like the inside of an icebox dripping frozen tears; a huge canvas depicting a sea-battle on the wall of a Venice palazzo that reeked of honeyed wax; the donkey-ride in the Luxembourg Gardens, while loud birds sang in the trees; a train stopping at a small German station and a gift of tiny wooden animals painted in fierce bright colours; a walk up a mountain path following the Stations of the Cross and being told the story of Christ as if it were another of my gory fairytales. Images of Buenos Aires are from much later, and lack the same intensity in colour, smell and sound; they begin when I was seven, and my family had returned to the city. But by then I was conscious of remembering.<br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><p align="justify" class="font2">In order to migrate to a certain place, you must leave another. This truism is not as simple as it seems. Nothing tells you at what precise point departure ends and arrival begins, what goodbyes are forever, what street signs you are seeing for the last time, what doors you have locked behind you and will never open again. Once your back is turned, the landscape shifts, objects change shape, people take on other voices and other faces. I remember the shock of realizing, when once I returned to Buenos Aires a few years after leaving in the late sixties, that the house to which we had moved when I was seven, in which I had grown while attending school for eleven years, where I had spent my entire adolescence and had celebrated my twentieth birthday, that house had been torn down and nothing, not a trace of it remained. I had been gone for only three or four years, barely long enough to wonder if I would ever return, and already everything was different, alien, meaningless, so that the question of coming back became irrelevant, since there was nothing familiar left to which to return.<br><br></p></td> </tr> <tr> <td><p align="justify"><a href="#top"><img src="images/main/top_button.jpg" border="0"></a></td> <td align="right"><a href="passages_alberto2.asp"><img src="images/main/next_button.jpg" border="0" align="right"></a></td> </tr> </table> </td> <td width="10"> </td> </tr> </table>
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