I returned from Peru on Friday, rested and inordinately happy. This was an absolutely perfect vacation: which is not to say that given certain choices I wouldn’t have done things differently, but rather that as trips go this was an irreproachable instance. I saw many wonderful things, met many wonderful people. My eyes and mind were constantly being delighted. I had not a moment of stress (well, except for about 15 minutes on a train with some Americans who were shouting at each other about Terry Schiavo), and what few irritations arose turned into sometimes profound, sometimes awful, insights into my own nature, the course of history, and the strangeness of human life in all the forms it takes.

I undertook this trip almost as casually as I might have gone to the grocery store, and discovered that I was on a sort of pilgrimage, by which I mean the sort of journey in which everything signifies, in which being captured by brigands, buying a loaf of bread, and spotting a giant hummingbird are of equal importance to reaching the destination. The true destination of a pilgrimage is the transformation of the self, into something more true, and because it is impossible to know the shape of that true self, the pilgrim must allow everything to have meaning.

The mundane world remained for me to return to it, and all the problems I left behind had taken on new and if anything, more difficult, dimensions in my absence. I rejoined humanity in that I once again began to think in terms of what I wanted, what I hoped to accomplish, and how I would make myself happy. Time, which had stretched out like the placid waters of the Manu River on my journey, now closed its greedy fist around me and demanded progress. I no longer let the shapes of trees and mountains speak to me, I stopped watching my fellow humans curiously, and though my eyes still follow the flight of birds, it is little more than a reflex.

In the park on Saturday, sidelined with a bum knee, I asked Andro what it is that prevents us from adopting the mental state of a traveller at all times, what so attaches us to desires, when we know we can lay them down and take them up.

In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a most apropos companion on this trip, the protagonist Hans Castorp is forced to extend indefinitely his three-week vacation in the Swiss Alps when he comes down with tuberculosis. But as the narrator points out, if there had been anything “down there” to which Hans Castorp’s whole being had inclined itself, he would have disregarded the tuberculosis. If there were something that he had desired more than life – some thing he could not lay down or take up – he would not have stayed.

I haven’t finished the book, so I can’t tell you if Hans Castorp stays on the magic mountain indefinitely, which would amount to the assertion that one should be on pilgrimage permanently, or whether he finds his true self. But it seems to me that a human being must be both pilgrim and citizen.

Of course, the trick is in knowing when to be which.

(cdm | OnTime)