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Traveller’s Alphabet of Essential Places
By David Dale

A TRAVELLER’S ALPHABET OF ESSENTIAL PLACES

THERE comes a moment in the life of every traveller when a terrible realisation strikes: there are only so many journeys left. The youthful notion that a lifetime is more than enough to see a whole world is replaced by the sense that your income and your holiday entitlements are going to keep you at home for most of every year.

And that could mean you’re looking forward to only 20 more voyages of discovery before you become too creaky to climb on a plane, boat or train. From this point on, you must make every journey count. So you start to reflect on why you go travelling at all. If your answer is “for the scenery”, you’d better click on another page right now, because that is not my answer. I reckon we travel to understand the world, and ultimately ourselves.

The unexamined journey is not worth making. If reality imposes a limit on the time we can spend travelling, then we should be heading only for the places that will stimulate our imaginations.

For me, that means where the world’s biggest ideas were born — where somebody decided that the earth revolves around the sun, or that humans are descended from jellyfish, or that office blocks can be beautiful, or that communism works best when served with good food. These are the places that make your spine tingle as you stand in them, because you know something happened here that transformed the planet.

The Hindus use the word darshana for the mysterious ecstasy generated in the presence of a holy place. Modern western travellers may experience darshana under more secular conditions. The first time I felt it was in the flat of Sigmund Freud, in Vienna, when I realised that this room produced the most influential theory of the 20th century — that human behaviour is largely driven by the unconscious mind. The second time I felt darshana was inside El Transito synagogue, in Toledo, Spain, when I realised that 600 years ago, Muslims, Arabs and Christians gathered in this space to share their scientific discoveries in a triumph of human collaboration that has never been repeated.

I decided that from then on, I would travel in search of darshana, getting my ecstasy fixes in the places that generated this century’s dominant imagery.

And if I could enjoy a couple of great meals, relaxing swims and even the odd view in the process, so much the better. You are reading a progress report on a lifetime project.

The Hindus have another word, pradakshina, for the ritual of walking around a holy place and meditating on what it means. Using a broad definition of the word holy, I hope this book will help readers to engage in that ritual. I toyed with the idea of calling the book Pradakshina, but I didn’t want to risk confusion with Shirley Maclaine’s next autobiography.

So I decided to name it for its content – the places that are essential for anyone who is excited by the world of ideas, the places that every thoughtful stay-at-home needs to know about and every passionate traveller needs to visit. The destinations appear in alphabetical order, but it’s not necessary to read the book that way. Many themes weave through the chapters, linking places, people, myths and theories in ways I hadn’t even realised until I was well advanced in the writing.

Sigmund Freud probably shared a table with Adolf Hitler in a Viennese cafe. Freud was obsessed with Tutankhamun’s father. Charles Darwin wrote to Karl Marx. Vincent van Gogh painted the hills from which Nostradamus studied the stars. Albert Einstein wrote the theory of relativity in Prague and Zurich, but the manuscript ended up in Jerusalem. Woody Allen stayed in Cesar Ritz’s mansion in Paris. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Blade Runner’s apartment in Los Angeles. So you could treat this book as a collection of journeys through a landscape of ideas, and navigate in accordance with your particular interests. Here are some themes you could follow:

The political journey. This might begin in chapter 4 with the Tolpuddle Martyrs, who discover trade unionism and are sent to Australia for their trouble. Also in chapter 4, Karl Marx invents communism, but doesn’t live to see its energising effect on Union Square, New York (21), or its success in Bologna (2), or its collapse in Prague (16). Meanwhile nationalism inspires the Nazi takeover of Vienna (5), and the push for California to secede from the United States (24). And in chapter 26, Switzerland emerges as a model of political perfection.

The religious pilgrimage. This might begin in chapter 22 when Tutankhamun’s father decides that the world is run by one god rather than many. His monotheism doesn’t stick, but a thousand years later the Jews take the ball and run with it through chapter 10, where they are joined by the Christians and the Muslims. The Jews and Muslims come up against the Spanish

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